Muktibodh - the voice of courage and commitment 

Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh (13.11.1917 – 11.9.1964, centenary year 2017), arguably the greatest modern Hindi poet today, had already gained esoteric literary recognition and fame at the young age of 26 with the inclusion of his comparatively mature poems in Taar Saptak, the epoch-making anthology of new Hindi verse, selected and edited by the redoubtable pioneer Sachchidananda Hirananda Vatsyayan “Agyeya” in 1943. Of the seven poets included in the selection, Muktibodh’s was a totally different poetic persona.

As perhaps his unmistakably Maharashtrian name would betray, Muktibodh was a fourth-generation migrant to the Maratha-ruled Hindi-Malwi region of Gwalior, Central India. His indigent brahmin great-grandfather had left his native north-western Khandesh in search of a job and settled down in the erstwhile Scindia kingdom. The young Gajanan’s father was an honest police-officer and mother a god-fearing, reasonably-educated lady who would recommend and read the Hindi novelist Premchand to her son, would converse in Marathi at home but for all other purposes Hindi became his mother-tongue and lingua franca. Though a policeman, his father idolised both the national Marathi political leader Balgangadhar Tilak and the early MK Gandhi. The family atmosphere was intellectually-inclined but Muktibodh never cared for academic brilliance and even his Master’s degree in Hindi literature, earned much later in life, was an average achievement.

Muktibodh’s poetic stirrings begin in the early 1930s when he joined the renowned Madhav College in Ujjain. Makhanlal Chaturvedi, the senior poet and freedom-fighter, who also edited and published the Hindi weekly Karmaveer, from Khandwa, was a great inspiration to scores of budding mufassil poets like him. Two young contemporary poets, Prabhakar Machwe, a fellow-Maharashtrian, and Virendrakumar Jain also encouraged and guided him. His first poem in any periodical was published in Karmveer of December 14, 1935. His creativity and intellectual awareness grew leaps and bounds and within a decade he had not only grown into a more mature, finer poet but also a committed Marxist. There was no looking back.

But his life remained rife with personal, social, ideological, literary and professional struggle. His “love marriage” was opposed by his parents for many years. And but for the last eight years of his life in a small-town though peaceful, decent college as a respected lecturer in Hindi, he never got even modestly-paid chores to afford a good life to his self-sacrificing wife and suffering children. Doing small government jobs, he was hounded by a feeling of persecution and victimisation. On the other hand, his long poems with their complex style and personal language and diction were supposed to be too ideological, “unpoetic” and interminable, ever obtuse. It was paradoxical that while the younger generations of readers and poets of the 1950s-1960s found his poetry soul-stirring and revolutionary.

Muktibodh never abandoned his poetry nor his leftist commitments. He was briefly a member of the Communist Party of India but left it for creative differences yet never ceased to be a partisan, a sympathiser and Marxist. Post-independence he was an admirer of Jawarharlal Nehru’s policies of the socialistic pattern of society and secularism but criticised them when the occasion demanded. Muktibodh was a unique Hindi journalist of a high order and wrote both on national and world-politics under several pseudonyms.

Though his fame rests largely on his all-compassing mundane and cosmic poetry, Muktibodh’s achievements in the fields of fiction and literary criticism are nearly of the same order. His short novel Vipatra is considered a mini-classic while some of his short-stories are nearly of the caliber of Premchand, Jainendra and Yashpal. It is hard to turn Muktibodhian material into cinema but (the late) Mani Kaul was so drawn to a miscellany from his various genres that he created a full-length film inspired largely by his epic poem Andhere Main, along with some short fiction and even excerpts from literary essays.

Muktibodh’s poetry is a challenging personal, social and political collage. Prabhakar Machwe called it “Guernica in Verse”. The poet goes to villages, towns and cities, caves and jungles, wildernesses and river-beds, sand-dunes and the distant-most stars and solar systems. He enters into the world of ghosts, phantoms, tribal magical rituals and practices, of fallen Bramharakshasa, dacoits, assassins and sultans, of stories from the Epics, the Puranas, the Vedas and the Upanishads and the folk tales, beliefs and superstitions. At the same time there are horrifying pictures from demonic city-nights.

No other poet created such a complex world in Hindi. Muktibodh should be the most fearless poet writing in any Indian language today. His poems stand firmly against the exploitation and degradation of human beings anywhere. He stands unflinching against communalism, casteism and fundamentally against fascism. He was himself a victim of censorship and a book of his on the history of India was banned by the government of the day.

After a hundred years of his birth and more than fifty years after his tragic and untimely demise, Muktibodh remains eminently relevant both in his life and literature. He is unquestionably the greatest Hindi poet today and indeed one of the greatest Indian poets today. As the Indian nation passes through its darkest times now, it is Muktibodh’s life and poetry which give us great courage and fortitude. Muktibodh is a poet of the struggle of our common people. There are many committed poets in Hindi and they draw their life-inspiration from him. He is the role-model for the younger poets. His form and content pose a challenge to most budding talent today.