Suryakant Tripathi "Nirala"

Suryakant Tripathi, known by his pen name Nirālā (“the unique one”), is one of the greatest and most original poets of modern Hindi — the most rebellious of the four pillars of Chhāyāvād and the poet who carried Hindi poetry beyond it. He freed Hindi from the bonds of fixed metre with Juhī kī Kalī (“The Jasmine Bud”), the first great free-verse poem in the language; wrote lyrics of mystical and romantic beauty, poems of fierce social compassion like “Toṛtī Patthar” (“Breaking Stones”) and “Bhikshuk” (“The Beggar”), the heartbreaking elegy Saroj Smṛti for his daughter, and Rām kī Śakti Pūjā (“Rāma’s Worship of Śakti”), one of the masterpieces of Hindi poetry; and in his last decades wrote satirical and experimental verse (Kukurmuttā) that anticipated modernism. His life — of poverty, bereavement, pride, generosity and, at the end, mental illness — made him a legend: Mahāprāṇ, “the great soul”.

Life

Nirala was born on 21 February 1896 (by tradition on Vasant Pañcamī) at Mahishadal in Midnapore district, Bengal, where his father, from a Brahmin family of Gaḍhākolā in Unnao district (Awadh), worked for the local raja. He grew up speaking Bengali, read Tagore and the Bengali classics, and was deeply influenced by the Vedānta of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda; he learned Sanskrit and English largely on his own. His mother died when he was a child; he was married young to Manohara Devi, who, he said, inspired him to write in Hindi.

In 1918 the influenza epidemic killed his wife, his father, his uncle, his elder brother and his brother’s wife within a short time; he was left responsible for a large family. He worked for the Ramakrishna Mission’s Hindi journal Samanvay in Calcutta and edited the satirical weekly Matvālā (from 1923), where his poems began to appear. Moving to Lucknow and then Allahabad, he lived by writing and translating, always poor, giving away what he earned. In 1935 his only daughter, Saroj, died aged nineteen after a long illness — an event he blamed on his poverty and his own failures — and he wrote Saroj Smṛti. From the 1940s he suffered episodes of mental illness and lived in increasing isolation and want in Daraganj, Allahabad, revered and cared for by admirers. He died on 15 October 1961.

Poetry

Juhī kī Kalī (written 1916, published 1922 in Matvālā) — “The Jasmine Bud” — is a sensuous free-verse poem in which the Malaya breeze returns to wake his beloved, a jasmine bud asleep on a creeper, who opens her eyes and smiles. Its irregular lines, free of rhyme and metre but shaped by the rhythm of the thought, scandalised the guardians of Hindi poetry. Nirala defended mukt chhand (free verse) in the preface to Parimal (1929): “Just as human freedom lies in liberation from karma, so the freedom of poetry lies in liberation from the rules of metre.”

His early collections — Anāmikā (1923, 1937), Parimal (1929), Gītikā (1936) — include lyrics of nature, love and mystical longing, and the invocation to Sarasvatī “Var de, vīṇāvādini var de” (“Grant the boon, O goddess of the vīṇā”), sung in schools across north India.

Social poems. Nirala was the first Chhāyāvādī to make the suffering poor the subject of great poetry. In “Toṛtī Patthar” (“Breaking Stones”, 1935), he sees a dark young woman breaking stones under a scorching sun on an Allahabad road, beside a row of shady trees and the mansions of the rich; she looks once at him, and at the sound of the sitar, then returns to her hammer: “Vah toṛtī patthar… dekhā maine use Ilāhābād ke path par” (“She was breaking stones… I saw her on the road in Allahabad”). “Bhikshuk” (“The Beggar”) shows a starving man, his belly stuck to his back, walking with a staff and two hungry children.

Saroj Smṛti (1935), a long elegy for his daughter, is one of the great elegies in any Indian language — personal, confessional, full of self-reproach, recalling her childhood and her marriage, mocking his own poverty and the hypocrisies of his Brahmin caste, and ending in grief: “Dukh hī jīvan kī kathā rahī, kyā kahū̃ āj jo nahīṃ kahī” (“Sorrow has been the story of my life; what shall I say today that I have not said?”).

Rām kī Śakti Pūjā (1936) is his masterpiece. On the night before the decisive battle of the Rāmāyaṇa, Rāma, despairing, sees that the goddess Śakti herself fights on Rāvaṇa’s side; Jāmbavān advises him to worship Śakti himself. Rāma performs the worship with 108 blue lotuses; at the end, the goddess secretly takes away the last lotus. Rāma, remembering that his mother called his eyes “lotus-eyes”, takes up an arrow to offer one of his own eyes — and the goddess appears, stays his hand, and blesses him: “Hogī jay, hogī jay, he puruṣottam navīn” (“Victory will be yours, victory, O new supreme man”) — and merges into his body. In dense, Sanskritised, thunderous verse, the poem makes Rāma a figure of human despair overcome by resolve and sacrifice — often read as an image of India’s struggle, and of Nirala’s own.

Later work. In Kukurmuttā (“The Mushroom”, 1942), a mushroom mocks the rose as a capitalist exploiter, in colloquial, satirical verse; Belā, Naye Patte, Archana and Āradhanā range from satire to devotion. He also wrote novels (Apsarā, Alkā, Nirupamā), the biographical sketches Kullī Bhāṭ and Billesur Bakriha, essays, and translations of Ramakrishna and Vivekananda.

Legacy

Nirala is regarded as the bridge between Chhāyāvād and modern Hindi poetry: his free verse, social realism and later experiments opened the way for the Progressive and Nayī Kavitā poets. His life of uncompromising integrity and suffering made him the archetypal poet in the Hindi imagination. “Var de, vīṇāvādini” is sung every Vasant Pañcamī.

In conversation

• “Vah toṛtī patthar” — “She was breaking stones”: the dignity and suffering of labour.
• Mukt chhand — free verse, which Nirala brought into Hindi.
• Rām kī Śakti Pūjā — strength won through sacrifice in the hour of despair.