Mahadevi Varma

Mahadevi Varma was one of the greatest poets of modern Hindi, the fourth pillar of Chhāyāvād, and one of the most important women in Indian literature — poet, essayist, memoirist, painter, educator and pioneering feminist. Her lyrics of mystical longing for an unseen, eternal beloved — collected in Nīhār (1930), Rashmi (1932), Nīrajā (1934), Sāndhyagīt (1936) and Dīpśikhā (1942) — earned her the name “the modern Mīrā”. Her essays in Śṛṅkhalā kī Kaṛiyāṁ (“Links in the Chain”, 1942) are a landmark of Indian feminist thought; her memoir-sketches of servants, villagers and animals (Atīt ke Calcitr, Smṛti kī Rekhāeṁ) are among the finest prose in Hindi. For decades she was principal of the Prayag Mahila Vidyapeeth, a women’s college in Allahabad.

Life

Mahadevi Varma was born on 26 March 1907 (on Holi) in Farrukhabad, Uttar Pradesh, into a family in which, it was said, no daughter had been born for seven generations — so she was welcomed as a goddess and named Mahādevī. Her father, Govind Prasad Varma, was a professor; her mother, Hemrani Devi, was devout and loved the Rāmcaritmānas and Mīrā’s songs. She was married at nine to Swarup Narain Varma but did not live with him; she later refused to join her husband, chose a life of study and independence, and remained, in effect, an ascetic. She studied at Crosthwaite Girls’ College in Allahabad, where her roommate was the poet Subhadra Kumari Chauhan (author of “Khūb laṛī mardānī vah to Jhāṁsīvālī rānī thī”), and took an MA in Sanskrit from Allahabad University in 1933.

She was drawn to Buddhism and planned to become a nun, but, it is said, when she went to meet a Buddhist monk he covered his face with a fan so as not to look at a woman, and she turned away. She came under the influence of Gandhi and devoted herself to education and service. In 1933 she became the first principal of the Prayag Mahila Vidyapeeth, a college for women’s education in Hindi, and served it for most of her life. She edited the women’s magazine Chāṁd and founded the literary organisation Sāhityakār Saṁsad. She was nominated to the Uttar Pradesh Legislative Council. She received the Jnanpith Award (1982) for Yāmā and the Padma Vibhushan (1988, posthumously). She died in Allahabad on 11 September 1987.

Poetry

Mahadevi’s poetry is lyrical, musical, intensely personal and mystical. Its constant theme is the soul’s love for an infinite, unseen beloved (priya) — who may be God, the absolute, or an ideal — and the pain of separation (viraha), which she does not wish to end, for in longing lies the soul’s identity and sweetness. Its images are the lamp (dīp) burning through the night, clouds full of rain, tears, the night, the path, the flower that blooms only to fall. In “Main nīr bharī dukh kī badlī” she calls herself a cloud heavy with the water of sorrow:

Main nīr bharī dukh kī badlī! Spandan mẽ cir nispand basā, krandan mẽ āhat viśva hãsā, Nayanõ mẽ dīpak se jalte, palkõ mẽ nirjhariṇī macalī!

I am a cloud filled with the water of sorrow! In my pulsing dwells eternal stillness; in my weeping the wounded world laughs; In my eyes burn lamps; on my eyelids streams leap.

In “Madhur madhur mere dīpak jal!” she asks the lamp of her heart to burn sweetly, steadily, through every night, to light the beloved’s path. Her verse draws on the bhakti tradition of Mīrā, on Buddhist ideas of suffering and compassion, on the Upaniṣads, and on English Romantic poetry, and her Hindi is pure, refined and Sanskritised.

Her collected lyrics, Yāmā (1940), and Dīpśikhā (1942), which she illustrated with her own paintings, are her major collections.

Prose

Mahadevi’s prose is equally important. Śṛṅkhalā kī Kaṛiyāṁ (1942), a collection of essays on the condition of Indian women, analyses the economic dependence, lack of education, legal disabilities, marriage customs, the treatment of widows and the double standard that bound women, and argues for their economic independence and full equality — anticipating much later feminist thought.

Her memoir-sketches — Atīt ke Calcitr (“Moving Pictures of the Past”, 1941), Smṛti kī Rekhāeṁ (“Lines of Memory”, 1943), Path ke Sāthī (portraits of fellow writers), and Mere Bacpan ke Din — portray the servants, peasants, widows and outcasts she knew, with compassion and humour: Bhaktin, her fierce old village servant; Ghisa, a poor boy. Her sketches of animals — Gillū, a squirrel she rescued and raised, who would sit on her shoulder and died with the coming of spring; the dog, the deer, the peacock — are beloved school texts.

Legacy

Mahadevi Varma stands with Mīrā as the most loved woman poet in Hindi, and as a model of the independent woman intellectual in modern India. Her songs are sung and recited; her prose sketches are read by every Hindi schoolchild; her feminist essays are increasingly recognised as foundational.

In conversation

• “Main nīr bharī dukh kī badlī” — “I am a cloud heavy with sorrow”: the poetry of longing.
• “Madhur madhur mere dīpak jal” — the steady lamp of devotion burning through the night.
• Śṛṅkhalā kī Kaṛiyāṁ — the “links in the chain” that bind women.