Mahadevi Varma: Political Essays on Women, Culture, and Nation B ...

“theme of viraha—the agony of separation from the divine Beloved”.¹¹ Her third, fourth, and fifth collections, titled Niraja (Water Lily, 1935), Sandhya-git (Evening Song, 1936), and Dip-shikha (The Lamp-Flame, 1942), trace the contours of her self-maturation as a woman and chart her movement away from the emotional self towards a more universalistic Vedantic framework, at least in their language, if not in the actual subjectivities that they explore.

Mahadevi did not renounce the world and isolate herself in her poetry. She remained politically active throughout her life, beginning with her ventures into the field of literary publishing in 1932, when she became the editor of Chand, a women’s journal. Three years earlier, in 1929, she had taken to wearing only khadi (homespun cloth) as inspired by M. K. Gandhi. She had also accepted the post of the principal of the Prayag Mahila Vidhyapith (Allahabad Girls School) in 1932 and the attendant professional responsibility. As such, she remained critically engaged in both the social and literary spheres in Allahabad. Concomitant with her involvement in the sociopolitical life of Allahabad and its surrounding villages, Mahadevi also published several critical essays on the status of women in society, on the relationship between literature and language, on Chhayavad poetry, and on numerous other themes. Selected editorial and critical essays, chosen for both their feminist narratives as well as their literary merit, have been translated for inclusion in this book.

Subjective and Experimental Places and Spaces

India during the 1920s and 1930s was marked by social tensions, notably between the rising anti-British sentiment fuelled by the Khilafat movement and the Gandhian nonviolent movement, on the one hand,¹² and the internal communal struggles (between the various religious factions within the country), on the other hand. Women’s voices during this period, in the official annals of history, seem not to enter the discourse on the nation. But recent feminist historiography suggests that rather than being passive receptacles of “Indian womanhood”, middle-class women actively constructed these prescriptive notions of femininity because it