Agyeya

Agyeya — the pen name of Sachchidananda Hirananda Vatsyayan — was the most influential pioneer of modernism in Hindi literature: poet, novelist, short-story writer, critic, editor, translator and traveller. In 1943 he edited Tār Saptak (“The Seven Notes”), an anthology of seven young poets (including Muktibodh, Prabhakar Machwe, Bharat Bhushan Agrawal and himself) that launched Prayogvād (“experimentalism”) and, later, Nayī Kavitā (“New Poetry”), breaking with both the romanticism of Chhāyāvād and the social realism of the Progressive Writers' Movement. His novel Śekhar: Ek Jīvanī (“Shekhar: A Life”, 1940–44) brought psychological fiction to Hindi; Nadī ke Dvīp (“Islands in the Stream”, 1951) explored love and individual freedom. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award (1964) and the Jnanpith Award (1978).

Life

Vatsyayan was born on 7 March 1911 in an archaeological camp at Kushinagar (Uttar Pradesh), the site of the Buddha’s death, where his father, Hirananda Shastri, a renowned archaeologist and epigraphist, was excavating. He grew up in Lucknow, Kashmir, Bihar and Madras, learning Sanskrit, Persian, English and Tamil, and studied science at Forman Christian College, Lahore. There he joined the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army, the revolutionary group of Bhagat Singh and Chandrashekhar Azad, and was arrested in 1930 while making bombs; he spent four years in British prisons, in Lahore, Delhi and Amritsar, and two more under house arrest. In prison he wrote the first drafts of Śekhar and stories that Premchand published, under the name “Agyeya” (“the unknowable”) that Premchand gave him because the author’s identity had to stay secret.

After release he worked as a journalist and editor (Sainik, Viśāl Bhārat), and during the Second World War, believing fascism the greater evil, joined the British Indian Army and served on the Assam–Burma front (1943–46). After independence he worked for All India Radio, taught in universities in India and abroad (Berkeley, Heidelberg), founded and edited the Hindi weekly Dinmān (1965) and the English magazine Vāk, and later edited Navbhārat Times. He travelled widely and wrote travelogues (Arey Yāyāvar Rahegā Yād?). He died in Delhi on 4 April 1987.

Works

Śekhar: Ek Jīvanī (two volumes, 1940 and 1944; a third never completed) narrates the life of Shekhar, a sensitive, rebellious young man, from childhood to his imprisonment as a revolutionary, written as the night-long reflection of a man awaiting execution. With its psychological depth, its frank treatment of sexuality and of Shekhar’s relationship with his cousin Shashi, and its study of a self in revolt against family, religion and society, it was the first great Hindi novel of the individual consciousness and caused controversy.

Nadī ke Dvīp (1951) explores the love of Bhuvan, a scientist, and Rekha, a married woman, and their search for authentic relationships; its title image — individuals as islands in the river of society, distinct yet formed by its flow — expresses Agyeya’s central idea. Apne Apne Ajnabī (“To Each His Stranger”, 1961), set in a snowbound hut in Europe, is an existential novella about two women facing death.

His poetry — Bhagnadūt, Itya-lam, Hari Ghās par Kṣaṇ Bhar (“A Moment on the Green Grass”, 1949), Bāvrā Aherī (“The Mad Hunter”, 1954), Āṅgan ke Pār Dvār (“The Door Across the Courtyard”, 1961, Sahitya Akademi Award) and Kitnī Nāvõ mẽ Kitnī Bār (“In How Many Boats, How Many Times”, 1967, Jnanpith Award) — is spare, intellectual, image-centred, often meditative and influenced by Eliot, the Imagists and Japanese haiku, as well as by the Upaniṣads and Buddhism. “Yah dīp akelā” (“This lamp, alone”) — “yah dīp akelā sneh bharā / hai garv bharā madmātā, par / isko bhī paṅkti ko de do” (“This lamp, alone, full of love and pride… give it too to the row”) — expresses the individual’s dignity and the need to offer it to the community.

Ideas

Agyeya championed the individual — his inner life, freedom and responsibility — against both romantic vagueness and ideological collectivism. He argued that new experience demands new forms, images and language, that the poet must be a “seeker of new paths” (rāhõ ke anveṣī), and that freedom without responsibility is empty. He was attacked by Marxist critics as a bourgeois individualist and admired by others as the father of Hindi modernism.

In conversation

• “Nadī ke dvīp” — “islands in the river”: individuals both separate and joined.
• Tār Saptak — the anthology that began Hindi modernism.
• “Yah dīp akelā” — the lone lamp that should join the row.