Jaishankar Prasad

Jaishankar Prasad was one of the greatest figures of modern Hindi literature — poet, playwright, novelist and short-story writer — and the first of the “four pillars” (cār stambh) of Chhāyāvād, the romantic movement in Hindi poetry. His epic Kāmāyanī (1936), an allegory of the human mind told through the myth of Manu after the great Flood, is considered by many the greatest poem in modern Hindi. His lyric sequence Āṁsū (“Tears”, 1925) is a masterpiece of romantic longing; his historical plays — Skandagupta, Chandragupta, Dhruvasvāminī — gave the Hindi stage a heroic vision of India’s past; and his short stories (“Ākāśdīp”, “Puraskār”, “Mamtā”) and novels (Kaṅkāl, Titlī) explored history, love and social reality.

Life

Prasad was born on 30 January 1889 in Banaras (Vārāṇasī) into a prosperous merchant family known as “Sunghnī Sāhu”, dealers in snuff and tobacco, famous for their wealth and generosity to scholars and poets. His father died when he was young, and in a few years his mother and elder brother also died; family quarrels and debts reduced its fortune. He left Queen’s College after the eighth class and was educated at home by tutors in Sanskrit, Hindi, Urdu and Persian, and studied the Vedas, Upaniṣads, the epics, Buddhist literature and above all the philosophy of Kashmir Śaivism, which became the foundation of his thought. He managed the family business throughout his life, living quietly in Banaras, devoted to literature, philosophy and gardening, and seldom travelling. He married three times; his first two wives died. He died of tuberculosis on 15 November 1937.

Poetry

He began writing in Braj Bhāṣā, then turned to Khaṛī Bolī. His collection Jharnā (“The Waterfall”, 1918) is often taken as the first book of Chhāyāvād poetry. Āṁsū (1925), a sequence of quatrains, mourns a lost love in images of night, the moon, clouds and tears, gradually transforming personal grief into a compassion for all suffering:

Jo ghanībhūt pīṛā thī, mastak mẽ smṛti-sī chhāī Durdin mẽ āṁsū bankar, vah āj barasne āī.

The pain that had condensed and spread like memory in my mind Has come today, in evil days, to rain down as tears.

Lahar (“The Wave”, 1933) contains historical poems and lyrics, including “Arī Varuṇā kī Śānt Kachār” and “Pralay kī Chhāyā” (“The Shadow of Doom”). His supreme achievement is the epic Kāmāyanī (1936).

Plays

Prasad is the most important Hindi dramatist before independence. Steeped in ancient Indian history, he wrote plays set in the Buddhist, Mauryan and Gupta ages — Ajātaśatru (1922), Skandagupta (1928), about the Gupta prince who defends India against the Huns; Chandragupta (1931), about the founding of the Mauryan empire with Cāṇakya, which includes the patriotic song “Arun yah madhumay deś hamārā”; and Dhruvasvāminī (1933), a bold play in which a Gupta queen, married to a cowardly king who is ready to hand her over to the enemy, rejects him and marries his brave brother Chandragupta — a radical statement, in the 1930s, of a woman’s right to divorce and remarry. His plays combine Sanskrit and Shakespearean influences, with songs, long speeches and philosophical reflection; they were written more for reading than for the commercial Parsi theatre of his time.

Fiction

His short stories, collected in Chhāyā, Ākāśdīp, Āṁdhī and Indrajāl, are often lyrical and historical: in “Ākāśdīp” (“The Sky Lamp”), a captive girl, Champa, falls in love with the pirate Buddhagupta who killed her father, and refuses to leave the island where she lights a lamp for sailors; in “Puraskār” (“The Reward”), a farmer’s daughter in ancient Kośala refuses the king’s reward for her confiscated land and is tragically torn between love and duty to her country; in “Mamtā”, a Brahmin widow shelters a fleeing Mughal emperor (Humāyūn) out of compassion, though his people killed her father. His novels Kaṅkāl (“The Skeleton”, 1929), a sharp exposure of hypocrisy and sexual exploitation in religious institutions in Banaras, and Titlī (1934), on village life, show a more realistic side.

Thought

Prasad’s philosophy — sometimes called Ānandavāda, the doctrine of bliss — draws on Kashmir Śaivism and the thought of Abhinavagupta: the universe is the joyful self-expression of consciousness (Śiva), and the human goal is to recognise one’s identity with it and attain ānanda, bliss, through the harmonious balance of desire (icchā), knowledge (jñāna) and action (kriyā). He rejected both the pessimism of the “Buddhist” view that life is suffering and the cold rationalism of the modern West, which he saw as producing division and conflict. This vision is the heart of Kāmāyanī.

Legacy

Prasad is a towering figure of Hindi literature: his poems and plays are taught in schools and universities, Kāmāyanī is regarded as the great epic of modern Hindi, and “Himādri tuṅg śṛṅg se”, a patriotic song from Chandragupta, is widely sung. His house in Banaras is a place of pilgrimage for Hindi readers.

In conversation

• “Āṁsū” — the grief that becomes poetry.
• Ānandavāda — the philosophy of bliss through balance.
• Dhruvasvāminī — a queen who refuses to be traded away; women’s right to choose.