| Chapter : | Editor’s Introduction |
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colonial government as an English schoolteacher. He was also a culturally liberal man who pursued an education in both Urdu and English. Being an agnostic, he was drawn to the Arya Samaj and its reformist views about religion and nationalism, but his involvement with the organization was brief. His own beliefs and reformist sentiments about Hindu society moved beyond those of the Arya Samaj. For example, he believed that the traditional Hindu marriage was a dying institution, and as such he did not object when his eldest daughter, Mahadevi, refused to fulfill her marital obligations.
Mahadevi’s mother, however, came from a traditional Hindu family, and her influence on her daughter cannot be understated. As Mahadevi herself recounts in an essay titled “Mere Bachpan Ke Din” (My Childhood Days), it was her mother’s influence that eventually led Mahadevi to choose Sanskrit and Hindi over Persian and Urdu, against what her father had desired.4 In the 1920s, Mahadevi moved to Allahabad to begin her education in English at Crosthwaite College, and she has been associated with that city ever since.
At the young age of eleven, Mahadevi was married off to Svarupnarayan Varma, a boy from a well-to-do family of landowners from Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh.5 As was customary in child marriages, the final departure of the bride to her husband’s home (gauna) was delayed until both the bride and the groom had come of age and had completed their education. When the time finally came for Mahadevi to join her husband in Lucknow, she plainly refused, and he, surprisingly, relented. Mahadevi was thus allowed to remain in Allahabad to pursue her education and literary career.
Meanwhile, in Allahabad, Hindi was struggling to gain literary and poetic acceptance and to break away from the hegemony of Braj Bhasha. The first generation of poets in modern standard Hindi, commonly known as the Dvivedi poets, had already begun to establish themselves in the city. A fledgling Hindi Department was founded at the University of Allahabad, and the city was on its way to becoming the “other” literary centre of Hindi literature, second only to Banaras at the time.
The second generation of modern Hindi poets, then, came up in response to the poetry of the Dvivedi Age. They flourished between 1918