In this introduction
Hindi literature is the literature of the language spoken today by more than half a billion people across north India. It grew out of the regional tongues — Braj, Awadhi, Maithili, Rajasthani, Bhojpuri — that descended from Sanskrit and the Prakrits, and only in the nineteenth century settled on Khaṛī Bolī, the speech of the Delhi region, as its modern standard. Its history is usually told in four ages, a scheme laid down by the critic Ācārya Rāmcandra Śukla in 1929: the Ādikāl (early period, roughly 1000–1350), of heroic ballads and Nāth and Siddha poetry; the Bhaktikāl (devotional period, 1350–1650), the golden age of the saint-poets; the Rītikāl (period of mannered court poetry, 1650–1850); and the Ādhunik kāl (modern period, from 1850).
How this room is organised
Below you will find the writers in order of their birth, their books and poems, and the movements that shaped them. Every page tells the story of a work fully, in English, so you can understand it before reading the original. The Hindi toggle at the top of a page appears where a Hindi edition exists.
The bhakti poets
The devotional movement that swept India from the Tamil south gave Hindi its first great literature. In the fifteenth century the weaver Kabīr of Banaras mocked the rituals of Hindus and Muslims alike in blunt, unforgettable couplets (dohe) about the formless God within. Sūrdās, the blind poet of Braj, sang of the child Kṛṣṇa’s mischief and the gopīs’ longing. Mīrābāī, the Rajput princess who left her palace for Kṛṣṇa, wrote songs of defiant love. And Tulsīdās retold the Rāmāyaṇa in Awadhi as the Rāmcaritmānas, the most loved book in north India. See The Bhakti Movement.
The modern age
Modern Hindi prose was born in the nineteenth century, when Bhāratendu Hariśchandra (1850–85) of Banaras wrote plays, essays and poems that made Khaṛī Bolī a literary language and turned it toward social reform and national feeling. In the twentieth century Premchand created the realistic Hindi novel and short story, writing about peasants, debt, caste and the oppression of women; his Godān is the great novel of the Indian village.
Between the wars came Chhāyāvād — “shadowism”, Hindi’s romantic movement — whose four pillars were Jaishankar Prasad (author of the epic Kāmāyanī), Suryakant Tripathi "Nirala", Sumitrānandan Pant and Mahadevi Varma. Ramdhari Singh "Dinkar" became the poet of national pride and revolt; Harivansh Rai Bachchan‘s Madhushālā made a tavern into a philosophy and swept the country. The Progressive Writers' Movement (1936) bound Hindi and Urdu writers to social realism.
After independence came experiment: Agyeya led the Prayogvād and Nayī Kavitā movements; the Nayī Kahānī (“new story”) writers turned to the urban middle class and its loneliness; Partition found its witness in Bhisham Sahni; and Shrilal Shukla‘s Rāg Darbārī became the great satire of independent India.
Hindi and Urdu
Hindi and Urdu share the same grammar and everyday vocabulary — linguists call the spoken language Hindustani. They divided in the nineteenth century, largely along religious and political lines: Hindi written in Devanagari and drawing its higher vocabulary from Sanskrit; Urdu in a Persian-Arabic script and drawing on Persian and Arabic. Many writers — Amīr Khusrau, Premchand, the Progressives — belong to both. See Urdu Literature for the other half of the story.
Map of Influence
who answered whom, inside this roomWriters
19
Amīr Khusrau
The 13th–14th century poet, musician and Sufi of Delhi — disciple of Nizāmuddīn Auliyā, master of Persian verse, pioneer of Hindavi (early Hindi-Urdu), and by tradition the inventor of qawwālī, the khayāl and the sitar.
Kabīr
The 15th-century weaver-poet of Vārāṇasī who mocked both Hindu and Muslim orthodoxy, taught devotion to a formless God found within, and left the most quoted couplets (dohās) in the Hindi language.
Sūrdās
The 16th-century blind poet of Braj whose songs of Kṛṣṇa’s childhood mischief and the gopīs’ longing — the Sūrsāgar, “Ocean of Sūr” — are the heart of Kṛṣṇa devotion in Hindi.
Mīrābāī
The 16th-century Rajput princess who declared herself the bride of Kṛṣṇa, defied her royal in-laws, survived (the legends say) cups of poison and a basket with a snake, and left her palace to sing — the most beloved woman poet of North India.
Tulsīdās
The 16th-century poet of Vārāṇasī who retold the Rāmāyaṇa in Avadhī as the Rāmcaritmānas — the most widely read and recited book in North India — and wrote the Hanumān Chālīsā, sung daily by millions.
Premchand
The greatest writer of modern Hindi and Urdu fiction — novelist of the Indian village, of peasants crushed by debt, caste and colonial rule — whose Godān and stories like “The Shroud” founded social realism in Indian literature.
Jaishankar Prasad
Poet, dramatist, novelist and philosopher of Banaras, the first of the four pillars of Chhāyāvād — author of the epic Kāmāyanī, the lyric sequence Āṁsū, and historical plays like Skandagupta and Chandragupta that recreated India’s ancient glory.
Suryakant Tripathi "Nirala"
The rebel genius of Hindi poetry — one of the four pillars of Chhāyāvād — who freed Hindi verse from metre, wrote “Juhī kī Kalī”, “Toṛtī Patthar”, the elegy Saroj Smṛti and the epic “Rām kī Śakti Pūjā”, lived in defiant poverty, and died in Allahabad, half-mad and wholly revered.
Sumitranandan Pant
The poet of nature among the four pillars of Chhāyāvād — a child of the Kumaon Himalaya whose Pallav and Guñjan sang of clouds, mountains and beauty — who later turned to Marxist, then Aurobindonian visions of a new humanity, and was the first Hindi poet to win the Jnanpith Award.
Harivansh Rai Bachchan
The Hindi poet whose Madhushālā (“The House of Wine”, 1935) — a tavern, a wine-bearer and a cup as an allegory of life — became the most popular poem in modern Hindi; also a translator of Shakespeare and the Rubaiyat, a Cambridge scholar of Yeats, and a great autobiographer.
Mahadevi Varma
The “modern Mīrā” — the fourth pillar of Chhāyāvād, poet of mystical longing for an unseen beloved in Nīhār, Rashmi, Nīrajā, Sāndhyagīt and Dīpśikhā; pioneering feminist essayist of Śṛṅkhalā kī Kaṛiyāṁ; memoirist of the poor and of animals; principal of a women’s college in Allahabad for decades.
Ramdhari Singh "Dinkar"
The Rāṣṭrakavi — national poet — of Hindi: the voice of heroism, revolt and fiery patriotism in Hunkār and Rashmirathī, thinker of war and peace in Kurukshetra, poet of love in Urvashī, and historian of Indian culture in Sanskṛti ke Cār Adhyāy.
Agyeya
Revolutionary, prisoner, soldier, editor and the pioneer of modernism in Hindi — founder of the Tār Saptak anthologies that launched Prayogvād and Nayī Kavitā, author of the psychological novel Śekhar: Ek Jīvanī and of Nadī ke Dvīp, and a poet of the solitary, self-aware individual.
Saadat Hasan Manto
The fearless master of the Urdu short story — chronicler of Partition’s madness in “Toba Tek Singh”, “Khol Do” and “Ṭhanḍā Gosht”, of prostitutes, pimps and the city’s outcasts in Bombay — tried six times for obscenity, dead of drink at forty-two, now hailed as the greatest story-writer of South Asia.
Bhisham Sahni
The Hindi writer of Partition and of the middle class — author of Tamas (“Darkness”, 1974), the great novel of the communal riots of 1947, and of the story “Chīf kī Dāvat”, the plays Kabirā Khaṛā Bāzār Mẽ and Hānūś, and the memoir of his brother, the actor Balraj Sahni.
Phanishwar Nath "Renu"
The Hindi novelist of Bihar’s Purnea countryside who created the “regional novel” (āñcalik upanyās) with Mailā Āñcal (1954) — a whole village of Maryganj told in its own dialects, songs and rumours — and wrote “Mare Gaye Gulfām”, filmed as Teesri Kasam.
Sahir Ludhianvi
The Urdu poet of protest and heartbreak who became the greatest lyricist of Hindi cinema — author of Talkhiyā̃ (“Bitterness”) and of film songs like “Ye mahlõ ye takhtõ”, “Kabhī kabhī mere dil mẽ” and “Allah tero nām” — who brought progressive poetry to hundreds of millions.
Mohan Rakesh
The playwright who created modern Hindi theatre — Āṣāṛh kā Ek Din, Laharõ ke Rājhaṁs, Ādhe Adhūre — and a leader of the Nayī Kahānī, writing of artists, lovers and families broken between ambition and longing.
Shrilal Shukla
The civil servant who became Hindi’s greatest satirist — author of Rāg Darbārī (1968), the merciless, hilarious novel of corruption in a north Indian village after independence — and of Makān, Bisrāmpur kā Sant and many satirical essays.
Works
4
Rāmcaritmānas
Tulsīdās’s 16th-century retelling of the Rāmāyaṇa in Avadhī Hindi — 12,800 lines of devotional epic that made Rāma the God of North India, recited daily, staged every year as Rāmlīlā, and loved more than any other book in Hindi.
Godān
Premchand’s last and greatest novel (1936) — the life and death of Hori, a poor peasant who longs only to own a cow, crushed by debt, caste, landlords and priests — the epic of the Indian village under colonial rule.
Kāmāyanī
Jaishankar Prasad’s epic (1936): after the great Flood, Manu, the last of the gods, is loved by Shraddhā (faith) and later seduced by Iḍā (intellect), builds a kingdom of reason that ends in rebellion and ruin, and is led by Shraddhā to the Himalayas and the bliss of harmony — the allegory of the human mind and the greatest poem of modern Hindi.
Rāg Darbārī
Shrilal Shukla’s satirical novel (1968): a city-educated young man spends some months in the village of Shivpalganj, where his uncle Vaidyaji, a tonic-selling Ayurvedic doctor, controls the college, the cooperative and the village council — a hilarious and merciless portrait of power, corruption and the hollowing of democracy in independent India.
Ideas
1
Periods & Movements
3Chhāyāvād
The romantic movement of Hindi poetry (c. 1918–1936) — Jaishankar Prasad, Suryakant Tripathi “Nirala”, Sumitranandan Pant and Mahadevi Varma — which turned from didactic verse to the inner self, nature, love, mysticism and a new music of language, and made modern Hindi a language of lyric poetry.
Progressive Writers' Movement
The movement of Urdu, Hindi and other Indian writers founded in 1936 (presided over at its first meeting by Premchand) which demanded a literature of social realism against colonialism, feudalism, poverty and religious obscurantism — and produced Faiz, Manto, Ismat Chughtai, Krishan Chander, Sahir and Kaifi Azmi.
Nayī Kahānī
The “New Story” movement in Hindi fiction of the 1950s and 1960s — Mohan Rakesh, Kamleshwar, Rajendra Yadav, Nirmal Verma, Mannu Bhandari, Bhisham Sahni, Krishna Sobti — which turned from Premchand’s village and idealism to the lonely, uprooted urban middle class of independent India and its broken relationships.