THE SELF-CONSUMING LAMP

Mahadevi Varma occu¬pies a unique position in the world of Hindi letters today. She is almost the solve sur¬vivor of the pre-Independence, the ‘heroic’ generation, a relic from a distant, simpler past—a past remembered with increasing nostalgia as we sink deeper into the mud of the present. The grotesque efflorescence of the national movement still lay in the womb of an ironic future; it was, it appeared to be, it appears to have been, a time of innocence and dreams of possibility. Certainly for literary folk. The nation was slowly coming to a conscious¬ness of itself. Modern Hindi literature, seeking to emerge from its folk, dialectal, medi¬eval backgrounds and to define for itself a contemporary identity, was a part of this larger process. There was an ineluctable, gratifying dimen¬sion to literary work, a larger movement of conscious¬ness which endowed literary writing with a range of public resonance that seems merely fantastic today. This is, as it happens, ironic in respect of Chhayavad, since—insofar as it was anything specifiable at all—Chhayavad was an ideology of aesthetic, subjectivity, a refusal of that public world which was the avowed domain of the lite¬rature of the Dwivedi Yug. The public adulation of the Chhayavadi poets—the giants of modern Hindi literature, Pant, Nirala, Mahadevi—is, I suppose, a kind of ‘poetic’ revenge. However, the over¬flow of this adulation into what should be serious critical attention is an unmitigated calamity.