AgyeyaAgyeya (1911-1987)

In his time and ours

Poetry in Agyeya's Own Voice

Agyeya was born on March 7, 1911 in Kushinagar, on the border of Nepal. He travelled the length and breadth of India, from Kashmir to Tamil Nadu, with his archaeologist father. He was an underground revolutionary in the group around Bhagat Singh, agitating for India's freedom, but half a decade later, also anti-fascist officer in the British army on its Eastern front in Assam. At the same time, he threw himself into the midst of the literary controversies that raged and the little magazines that were spitting fire in the Hindi heartland of the mid-1940s and early 1950s, as the Indian subcontinent went through the last phase of World War II, independence, partition and the first troubled years of nationhood. This was also a period, as we may recall, when the Hindi world, divided as it was, still nurtured the ambition that Hindi would become the national language of the nation.

Formations was then the key word of the Berkeley conference: not only of the nation, but also of the literary vanguard and movements in which Agyeya played a leading part, as much as of those movements that so vehemently opposed him. Today it is impossible to think of prayogvadis or experimentalists with whom he was linked in the late 1940s and 1950s, without thinking of the pragativadis or progressives. But are the rubrics which label the Hindi literary movements of the day, and the divisions which are also kept alive to this day, the only way to access Agyeya or indeed the other leading modernists of this period? A half century later, the Berkeley symposium set itself the task of reappraisal and possible new access to Agyeya and his works in and of themselves but also vis-à-vis his contemporaries.