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Literary Review
Recalling Mahadevi
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NEERA KUCKREJA SOHONI writes about Mahadevi Varma's human commitment and her benign brand of activism and discourse.
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Mahadevi Varma: Towering presence.
IN Stendhal's assertion that "Any genius born a woman is lost to humanity" there is much bitter truth. It is also the basis and compulsion for recalling Mahadevi around Holi as a personal annual ritual. Born on the day of Holi in 1907, Mahadevi died in 1987, filling those eight decades with her towering intellectual presence. She pushed her own person and inspired women of all callings around her to enter uncharted terrains. Posthumously associated with her work as a modest translator, her mind's intensity and her heart's compassion are compelling provocations to share her with the elite world of English media and readers.
Being the first born, she started life with a natural advantage. Her parents doted on her and committed to educate her for the starting years at home and later at a school and college. A comfortable middleclass small town setting gave her cultural connectivity with Indian culture and tradition. Her mother's religiousness and father's eclectic occupation as Professor of English gave her a strong grounding and exposure to Indian and Western intellect. Even though married at a ridiculously young age of nine years, she was able to continue her studies, securing a postgraduate degree.
Superseding the strictly wifely role, she decided to seek a career in writing, which she combined and complemented with her activist support for women. Her experience of marriage was contrary to those times. She does not herself declare what caused her to decide to stay out of a conventional marital lifestyle. Critics and biographers, however, offer personal, even sexual speculations on why she chose to override convention. But undoubtedly, the decision to do so conditioned her subsequent life, persona, creativity, and literary and activist discourse. Together with Subhadra Kumari Chauhan, Mahadevi constituted the cutting edge of a small sorority of female poet-writers poised to enter the hall of fame in Hindi literature. She rapidly broke male monopoly in poetry and was soon hailed along with Nirala, Pant, and Prasad as one of the four founder-leaders of Chhayavad, a new school of poetry writing.
A fulfilling compulsion, writing, claimed Mahadevi "gives me pleasure and not writing gives a feeling of emptiness in life." Her creative obsession led Mahadevi to author over five volumes of poetry and several volumes of memoirs, essays, and critiques on a variety of themes including women's status and literary criticism. Her poetry and prose quickly earned for her recognition as one of India's most lyrical and intellectually prolific writers. In recent years, informed observers have claimed that had her work been translated she may well have received the Nobel award for poetry.
The poet image unfortunately overshadows her feminist profile. Yet in essay after essay, published in Chand, a women's magazine, she tackles women's issues cogently, fearlessly, and often fiercely. Eleven of these break-through essays were later collectively published as Shrnkhla Ki Kadiyaan (1942), whose English translation is expected to be available shortly. Rather than being strictly an armchair analyst, she resembles Mahashweta Devi in her activism on behalf of the underprivileged, women and men. She records the life and outcomes of some of these unsung heroes in her famous biographical poignant sketches, Ateet Ke Chalchitra (1941; now available in English).
Feminism, like humanism, does not arise from theories of life but from its experience. In her prose sketches, Mahadevi uses her characters to tackle issues that timelessly bear on the female's status, rights, and potential. These include but are not confined to widow re-marriage, early marriage, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, the practice of elderly men and widowers marrying much younger women, bigamy, male infidelity, step-mother's ill-treatment of children, weaker status of girls, and economic difficulties for women. Mahadevi envies the state of smug certainty in which men live, thrusting women to experience alone the dilemmas and anguish of dual morality standards. She is pained at how that enables men to flout any kind of restraint or commitment in human relations. She questions the male's birthright to exploit and torment women and his cunning in getting the female to accept that as the only "natural" condition for her.
She speaks with compelling anguish and anger on behalf of the morally and sexually exploited female. She is equally aggressive about the exploitative unjust stance taken by women against women. Holding women responsible for perpetuating double standards in human ethics and behaviour, she takes them to task for not operating as a fraternity with compassion toward each other but instead, allowing "envy and jealousy to rule them."
Contemporary feminists are erroneously dismissive of Mahadevi's "benign" brand of activism and discourse. Clearly those who search for Marxist and colonial dialectic in Mahadevi are really looking for mathematical theorems in an art book. Intellectualisation of her humane involvement with the subaltern's dignity seems as unnecessary to me as it may have been to her. In any case, human commitment and creativity require no politically correct ideological tags.
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