Diptych in Verse: Gender Hybridity, Language Consciousness, and National Identity in Nirālā's "Jāgo Phir Ek Bār"

Abstract

Nirālā (literally the strange one) was the pen name of Sūryakānt Tripathi (1899?-1961), one of the four major twentieth-century Hindi poets associated with Chayavad, the first prominent movement in contemporary Hindi poetry. Many critics, both Western and Indian, have stressed Chayavad's parallels with Western Romanticism, mainly because of its preoccupation with individual consciousness and subjectivity. One of the most recurrent criticisms of the movement has been that it lacked a concern with the central political and social issues of its era, the twenties and thirties. While that may be true in general, it does not do full justice to at least some Chayavad poetry. Here it will be argued that, in particular, Nirala's poetry is surprisingly polemical, this-worldly, and is engaged with such issues as language consciousness, national identity, and gender constructs. This paper presents a close analysis of two of Nirālā's representative early Chayavad poems that form a kind of diptych in verse: they are both entitled Jago Phir Ek Bar (Wake up, once more), numbered 1 and 2 respectively. Both poems date from his early, most Chāyāvādī phase (1920-38) and are included in the first anthology, Parimal, which he published in 1929. 1 The analysis of these poems reveals how Chayavad techniques were adapted to convey a complex nationalist, Hindu- and Hindi-chauvinist message, and how this was overlaid with gender images. This conflation can be understood against the background of Nirālā's life: his search for his own linguistic identity in the light of his experience of growing up in Bengal, his obsession with Tagore, and his marriage and early loss of his wife.