Hindi, Hindu sans Hindutva

A fascinating account shows how much of the maverick writer and polymath's thinking was rooted in cosmopolitanism

Akshaya Mukul, who wrote the much-feted Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India (2015), is back with a new book called Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover: The Many Lives of Agyeya. It is a biography of Hindi poet-novelist Sachchidanand Hirananda Vatsyayan ‘Agyega’ (1911-1987). The tome of 808 pages looks formidable but is entirely worth your time if you enjoy immersion in scholarly work that is rigorous in method and racy in style.

Why did the Sahitya Akademi Award and Jnanpith Award-winning Agyeya, a man whose first language was English, write in Hindi? Mukul explains, “While he never abandoned his cosmopolitanism, over the course of his life, Agyeya became more and more adamant that an Indian writer could not successfully write fiction and poetry in the colonizer’s tongue.” That said, Agyeya was eager to have English translations of his Hindi poems published. He even managed to coax Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru to write the foreword. The politician kept his word.

Mukul’s curiosity leads him to tease out interesting ironies; for instance, the fact that Agyeya’s “stance on language politics bordered on Hindi chauvinism” but he was profoundly inspired by European Romanticism, wrote characters spouting T.S. Eliot and D.H. Lawrence, and nurtured a network of international collaborators. On bad days, Agyeya found solace in reading the poetry of Christina Georgina Rossetti and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Anarchist Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin was his favourite thinker. John Galsworthy, Rabindranath Tagore, Anatole France, and Nicolas Roerich were some of the major influences on Agyeya. He embarked on projects to translate Walt Whitman and Aristophanes into English.

Why did Agyeya take issue with Pragativad (Progressivism) in Hindi literature? How did he contribute to the Prayogvad (Experimentalism) movement? Which literary journals was he associated with? What made him warm up to the idea of facilitating exchanges between Hindi, Bengali, Malayalam, Gujarati, and Marathi writers? How did his romantic liaisons affect his intellectual life? What role did the Rockefeller Foundation play in his evolution as an internationally renowned writer? The book looks into all these aspects of Agyeya’s life.

What did he think of his contemporaries? Mukul writes, “Agyeya tended to be condescending towards literary trends in Hindi that were driven by moral posturing, finding it hard to accept that writers who had not seen a thatched hut were writing about peasants, that those who had not seen a factory were writing about workers”. He believed that this kind of writing “can bring tears to the rich living in their high-rises, but it is far from inspiring a revolution.” Agyeya went to prison for engaging in so-called seditious activities against British rule in India but he also served in the British Indian army during the Second World War in 1942.

Using state archives, jail records, private papers, and documents belonging to the Congress for Cultural Freedom funded by the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America, Mukul depicts Agyeya as a complex person shaped by multiple preoccupations. Some of the details may not be easy to digest for people who like to idolise Agyeya but Mukul’s effort to ground his claims and observations in a range of sources is admirable.

Agyeya is presented as a polymath – a photographer, journalist and travel writer who also dabbled in painting. He was a student of physics. Agyeya knew how to make bombs. He was a pamphleteer and revolutionary. He had intense relationships with women, which were “extractive, whether financially or for creative gain.” He was “emotionally involved” with a cousin, and had homosexual encounters in college. He documented his “nocturnal fantasies”. Clearly, no one will be able to accuse Mukul of writing a hagiography.

The book is divided into five parts, following a chronological order that makes sense because Mukul has so much material at hand that organising it would have been a nightmare. The end notes, bibliography, and index together make up close to 200 pages of this volume that will acquaint you with Agyeya’s life in Kushinagar, Lahore, Delhi, Nagpur, Lucknow, Shillong, Allahabad, Bombay, Calcutta, Santiniketan, Paris, Vienna, Dublin, Berkeley and other places.

Many luminaries from politics, literature and cinema make brief appearances in this book. You will run into Munshi Premchand, Sarojini Naidu, Chandra Shekhar Azad, Balraj Sahni, Nemichandra Jain, Minoo Masani, Harivansh Rai Bachchan, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, Mahadevi Varma, M.N. Roy, Khwaja Ahmed Abbas, Chetan Anand, and Krishan Chander.

Mukul has written a fascinating book, exploring serious questions. Why did Agyeya, once a cheerleader for communism, begin to find it oppressive? What made peers view him as a man with right-wing sympathies despite the fact that called out “the rising tide of communalism” fostered by divisive history textbooks that referred to Hindu and Muslim periods in India’s past? How did Agyeya end up being drawn to Zen Buddhism and Taoism in his later years?

Mukul points out that Agyeya was “a proud Hindu” but “tore into the concept of Hindutva”. According to this book, Agyeya saw the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the All India Muslim Majlis as “two sides of the same coin” because both organisations “used religion to encourage narrow-mindedness and enmity”. He was a nationalist invested in having India become “a nuclear state” to protect its strategic interests with respect to Pakistan and China.

This book is an ambitious undertaking, and Mukul has done justice to his subject. A biography of Agyeya would have been incomplete without the women in his life – Santosh Malik, Kapila Vatsyayan, and Kripa Sen. Mukul has written them with dignity. If you tend to skip the acknowledgements section, make an exception this time. It is a testament to the generosity of friends and strangers that made this book possible. It was to be published by Westland before Amazon pulled the plug on the operation but, thankfully, Vintage stepped in.

BOOK DETAILS

Title of the book: Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Love: The many lives of Agyeya

Author: Akshaya Mukul

Publisher: Vintage

Pages: 808

Price: Rs 999