Sumitranandan Pant

Sumitranandan Pant was one of the four pillars of Chhāyāvād, the romantic movement in Hindi poetry, and its great poet of nature. Born in the village of Kausani in the Kumaon Himalaya, he filled his early collections — Vīṇā, Granthi, Pallav (1926) and Guñjan (1932) — with the clouds, mountains, rivers, flowers and seasons of the hills, personified, luminous and charged with feeling, in a delicate, musical, Sanskritised Hindi. He later turned to social and Marxist themes in Yugvāṇī and Grāmyā (1940), and then, under the influence of Sri Aurobindo, to a mystical vision of the spiritual evolution of humanity. In 1968 he became the first Hindi poet to receive the Jnanpith Award, for Chidambarā.

Life

Pant was born on 20 May 1900 in Kausani, Almora district, in the Kumaon hills of what is now Uttarakhand; his mother died a few hours after his birth, and he was brought up by his grandmother and father. He grew up amid the snow peaks, forests and valleys of the Himalaya, which became the central inspiration of his poetry. He studied in Almora and Banaras, and at Muir College, Allahabad, but left in 1921 in response to Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement. He lived in Allahabad most of his life, never married, and worked for some years with All India Radio as an adviser. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award (1960), the Padma Bhushan (1961) and the Jnanpith (1968). He died in Allahabad on 28 December 1977.

Poetry

Nature. Pant’s early poetry made nature the first object of love and wonder. In Pallav and Guñjan, the clouds are messengers and lovers, the “mountain-country” (parvat pradeś) changes its dress every moment, and a girl’s beauty is set against the beauty of the natural world. In “Prathama Raśmi” (“The First Ray”) he greets the dawn; in “Bādal” the clouds speak. He wrote that his earliest muse was nature, before any human beloved. His preface to Pallav (1926) was a manifesto for Chhāyāvād, defending Khaṛī Bolī as a poetic language and calling for a new music in Hindi verse.

Sorrow and longing. His famous lines on the origin of poetry — “Viyogī hogā pahlā kavi, āh se upjā hogā gān; / Nikalkar āṁkhõ se chupcāp, bahī hogī kavitā anjān” (“The first poet must have been one separated from his beloved; song must have been born of a sigh; poetry must have flowed unknowing, silently, from the eyes”) — sum up the Chhāyāvādī link between pain and poetry.

Society. In the 1930s, influenced by Marxism and the Progressive movement, Pant turned to the life of villages and labourers. Grāmyā (1940) portrays rural India — “Bhārat Mātā grāmvāsinī” (“Mother India is a village-dweller”), whose “green fields are her sari, dusty and soiled” — with compassion and a call for change.

Spirit. From the 1940s, after meeting Sri Aurobindo’s ideas, he wrote of the evolution of human consciousness toward a higher, divine life, in Svarṇkiraṇ, Svarṇdhūli, Uttarā and the epic Lokāyatan. Critics have been divided over this late work; his early nature poetry remains most loved.

In conversation

• “Viyogī hogā pahlā kavi” — poetry is born of the pain of separation.
• “Bhārat Mātā grāmvāsinī” — India lives in its villages.
• The Wordsworth of Hindi — Pant as the poet of the Himalayan landscape.