Contents · 4 sections · 3 min
Bachchan in Four Ideas
the essentialsHālāvād
The “poetry of wine” — the tavern as an image of life’s joy, its transience and its unity of all people.
The tavern unites
“Mandir masjid bair karāte, mel karātī madhushālā” — temples and mosques divide; the tavern brings people together.
Each finds his own way
“Rāh pakaṛ tū ek calā cal, pā jāegā madhushālā” — keep walking one path and you will find the tavern.
Life as confession
His four-volume autobiography is one of the frankest and finest in Hindi.
Harivansh Rai Bachchan wrote the most popular poem in modern Hindi: Madhushālā (“The House of Wine”, 1935), a sequence of 135 quatrains (rubāiyāṁ), each ending with the word madhushālā, in which the tavern, the wine (hālā), the wine-bearer (sākī), the cup (pyālā) and the drinker become images of life, love, death, faith and the unity of humankind. Recited at poetry gatherings to enormous crowds in the 1930s, it made him the most famous Hindi poet of his generation and founded a short-lived school called Hālāvād (“wine-ism”). He went on to write more personal poetry of grief and solitude, became a scholar of English literature at Allahabad and Cambridge, translated Shakespeare and Omar Khayyam into Hindi, worked for the Ministry of External Affairs, and wrote a four-volume autobiography regarded as one of the finest in Hindi.
Life
Bachchan was born on 27 November 1907 in a Kāyastha family near Allahabad (in Babupatti village, Pratapgarh district, by family origin) and grew up in Allahabad. He studied at Allahabad University and Banaras Hindu University, joined the freedom movement briefly, and in 1926 married Shyama, who died of tuberculosis in 1936 after a long illness — a loss that darkened his poetry for years (Niśā Nimantraṇ, Ekānt Saṅgīt). In 1941 he married Teji Suri, a Punjabi Sikh; their son is the film actor Amitabh Bachchan. He taught English at Allahabad University (1941–52), then went to St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, where in 1954 he completed a doctorate on W. B. Yeats and occultism — after which he dropped the name Srivastava and used “Bachchan”. He worked in the Ministry of External Affairs as a Hindi specialist (1955–65), was nominated to the Rajya Sabha (1966), and received the Sahitya Akademi Award (1968) and the Padma Bhushan (1976). He died in Mumbai on 18 January 2003, aged ninety-five.
Madhushālā
Madhushālā was inspired by Edward FitzGerald’s English version of the Rubāiyāt of Omar Khayyām, which Bachchan translated into Hindi (Khayyām kī Madhushālā), and by the Persian and Urdu tradition of wine poetry — but its spirit is his own. It begins:
Mṛdu bhāvõ ke aṅgūrõ kī āj banā lāyā hālā, Priyatam, apne hī hāthõ se āj pilāūṁgā pyālā, Pahle bhog lagā lūṁ terā, phir prasād jag pāegā; Sabse pahle terā svāgat kartī merī madhushālā.
From the grapes of tender feelings I have made wine today; Beloved, with my own hands today I’ll give you the cup to drink; First I’ll offer it to you, then the world will receive the blessed share — First of all, my tavern welcomes you.
The tavern is life: everyone seeks it by a different road, and “Rāh pakaṛ tū ek calā cal, pā jāegā madhushālā” — “Hold to one road and keep walking; you will reach the tavern.” It is a place of human unity against religious division: “Musalmān aur Hindū hai do, ek, magar, unkā pyālā… Bair baṛhāte masjid mandir, mel karātī madhushālā” — “Muslim and Hindu are two, but their cup is one… Mosque and temple spread enmity; the tavern brings people together.” It is also a meditation on death and transience: the poet asks that at his death, instead of Ganges water, wine be placed on his tongue, and that the mourners chant not “Rām nām satya hai” but “Madhushālā”.
Conservative critics attacked the poem as a glorification of drink; Gandhi, it is said, read it and found nothing objectionable. Its wine is a symbol — of joy, intoxication with life, love and the divine — in the Sufi and Persian tradition, and Bachchan himself never drank. It was followed by Madhubālā (1936) and Madhukalash (1937).
Other work
After Shyama’s death his poetry turned inward and elegiac (Niśā Nimantraṇ, 1938; Ekānt Saṅgīt, 1939); later collections include Satrangini, Milan Yāminī and Do Chaṭṭāneṃ (Sahitya Akademi Award, 1968). His poem “Agnipath” (“The Path of Fire”) — “Tū na thakegā kabhī, tū na thamegā kabhī, tū na muṛegā kabhī — kar śapath, kar śapath, kar śapath! Agnipath! Agnipath! Agnipath!” — became famous through his son’s films. His translations of Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet and King Lear into Hindi verse, and of the Gītā (Janagītā), are respected.
His autobiography in four volumes — Kyā Bhūlūṁ Kyā Yād Karūṁ (“What Shall I Forget, What Shall I Remember”, 1969), Nīṛ kā Nirmāṇ Phir (1970), Basere se Dūr (1977) and Daśdvār se Sopān Tak (1985) — is remarkable for its candour about his family, his marriages, his grief and his ambitions, and is a classic of Hindi prose.
In conversation
- “Bair baṛhāte masjid mandir, mel karātī madhushālā” — religion divides, shared joy unites.
- “Rāh pakaṛ tū ek calā cal” — choose one path and keep going.
- Agnipath — the path of fire: endurance without turning back.
Curiosities
did you know?- Bachchan himself never drank alcohol; the wine of Madhushālā is a metaphor.
- He was the second Indian to receive a doctorate in English literature from Cambridge (1954), with a thesis on W. B. Yeats.
- He was the father of the film star Amitabh Bachchan, who often recites Madhushālā.
- ‘Bachchan’ — ‘child’ — was a family nickname he adopted as his name.
Questions to Argue About
debate club →- Is the pursuit of pleasure wisdom or escape?
- Can a poem about wine be a poem about God?
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