Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh and the Passing of Soviet India

Abstract

This essay traces the literary afterlife of Hindi writer Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh (1917–64). Like many in his generation, Muktibodh’s life and world-view were transformed by his encounter with communism during the years of World War II. Though much of his poetry remained unpublished while he was alive, Muktibodh was posthumously recognised as one of the most significant writers of the Nehruvian period and has been a cult figure in the Hindi literary world since the 1970s. By tracking the influence of Muktibodh’s elliptical poetry and prose on modern Hindi literature and cinema, this essay reconstructs the rise and fall of the late colonial vision of a possible ‘Soviet India’.

Keywords:

• Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh
• Hindi literature
• Indian New Wave
• Mani Kaul
• post-colonial print culture
• South Asia and the Cold War
• Soviet India

Acknowledgements

This piece greatly benefitted from the comments of Gregory Goulding, Suvir Kaul, Anjali Nerlekar, Udayan Vajpeyi, Anirudh Karnick, and the two anonymous reviewers at South Asia. I also owe thanks to Ankur Jaiswal, who travelled with me to New Delhi, Raipur, Bhopal and Rajnandgaon in search of Muktibodh’s ghost. I could not have finished this essay in the midst of a pandemic without access to works digitised by the Hathi Trust.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For more on the Soviet inspirations for the Nehruvian policies of import substitution and public-sector-led industrialisation, see David C. Engerman, The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).

2. My account of Muktibodh’s life and times borrows substantially from Gregory Goulding’s study: see Gregory Goulding, ‘The Cold War Poetics of Muktibodh: A Study of Hindi Internationalism, 1943–1964’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA, 2015.

3. All translations, unless otherwise stated, are mine. Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh, ‘Teesra Kshan (The Third Moment)’, in Muktibodh Rachnavali: The Collected Works of Muktibodh, Vol. 4 (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 1980), pp. 85–107. First published in Harishankar Parsai’s periodical, Vasudha, in the 1950s, ‘The Third Moment’ dramatises three stages in the poet’s intellectual journey: from Hindu mysticism and hatha yoga to Romanticism and (finally) Marxism. The first Five-Year Plan of the USSR (1928–32) is an important turning point in the essay’s chronology, marking a shift towards more rationalist, dialectical arguments.

4. For more on the print culture, politics and aesthetics of the Hindi public sphere, see Ram Vilas Sharma, Bharat Mein Angreji Raj Aur Maxvaad (English Rule in India and Marxism), Vols. 1–2 (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 1982); Francesca Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere 1920–1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012); Vasudha Dalmia (ed.), Hindi Modernism: Rethinking Agyeya and His Times (New Delhi: Manohar, 2012); Nikhil Govind, Between Love and Freedom: The Revolutionary in the Hindi Novel (New Delhi: Routledge, 2014); Alaka Atreya Chudal, A Freethinking Cultural Nationalist: A Life History of Rahul Sankrityayan (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016); Charu Gupta, The Gender of Caste: Representing Dalits in Print (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2016); Sujata S. Mody, The Making of Modern Hindi: Literary Authority in Colonial North India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018); and Shobhna Nijhawan, Hindi Publishing in Colonial Lucknow: Gender, Genre, and Visuality in the Creation of a Literary ‘Canon’ (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019). This list is indicative, not exhaustive.

5. The publication of the first Tar Saptak anthology in 1942, edited by the poet ‘Agyeya’, is traditionally seen as the beginning of Hindi modernism. With the advent of the Cold War, the divide between the prayogvaadi (experimental/modernist) and pragativaadi (progressive) camps grew increasingly bitter. ‘Agyeya’ came to be associated with the Indian Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was secretly funded by the CIA, while Muktibodh remained a lifelong communist: see Eric D. Pullin, ‘Money Does Not Make Any Difference to the Opinions that We Hold: India, the CIA, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1951–58’, in Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 26, nos. 2–3 (2011), pp. 377–98.

6. See Ashok Vajpeyi, ‘Introduction’, in Krishna Baldev Vaid, In the Dark—Andhere Mein (Noida: Rainbow Publishers, 2001). No recordings of Muktibodh’s voice exist.

7. A beedi is an inexpensive mini-cigar that consists of tobacco rolled in a leaf, tied together by a thin string at one end, typically seen as a poor man’s cigarette. In Muktibodh’s own time, it would not have been unusual for a Hindi writer to be smoking beedis instead of cigarettes.

8. Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh, ‘Zindagi ki Katran (The Leftover Cloth of Life)’, in Muktibodh Rachnavali: The Collected Works of Muktibodh, Vol. 3 (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 1980), pp. 71–82.

9. Interview with the writer and critic Udayan Vajpayi, Bhopal, 14 Aug. 2018. See also Moti Ram Verma, Lakshit Muktibodh (Destination Muktibodh) (Delhi: Vidyarthi Prakashan, 1973), for interviews of Muktibodh’s family and friends full of hints about what they suggest are ‘furtive’ or ‘shameful’ aspects of his private life that cannot be shared in the public domain.

10. Early interventions by the critic Namvar Singh played an important role in establishing Muktibodh’s reputation in Left-wing circles as a poet of middle-class alienation. Singh’s influential 1968 work, Kavita ke Naye Pratiman (The New Modes of Poetry) (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 1968), is dedicated to the memory of Muktibodh and contains substantial commentary on his long poems. For a more critical assessment of Muktibodh as a ‘schizophrenic’ rather than Marxist poet, see Ram Vilas Sharma, Nayi Kavita aur Astitvavaad (Existentialism and the ‘New Poetry’) (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 1978), pp. 120–39. For more on Muktibodh’s reception, see Goulding, ‘The Cold War Poetics of Muktibodh’.

11. Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh, ‘Akelapan aur Parthakaya (Solitude and Seclusion)’, in Muktibodh Rachnavali: The Collected Works of Muktibodh, Vol. 4 (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 1980), pp. 111–5.

12. Chris Moffat, ‘Politics and the Work of the Dead in Modern India’, in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 60, no. 1 (Jan. 2018), pp. 178–211; and Chris Moffat, ‘Bhagat Singh’s Corpse’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 39, no. 3 (2016), pp. 644–61.

13. See Gargi Chakravarty (ed.), People’s ‘Warrior’: Words and Worlds of P.C. Joshi (New Delhi: Tulika, 2014). An enduring legacy of the ‘P.C Joshi years’ was the vision of harmony between middle-class dreams of cultural reconstruction and a broader working-class movement.

14. This expansion came at a political cost. The Communist Party of India’s (CPI’s) support for the Muslim League’s demand for Pakistan and its opposition to the Quit India Movement caused a lasting wedge between it and the Left wing of the Congress Party, dooming attempts to capture the Congress Left wing from within. The Communist Party’s policy of refusing to recognise Nehru’s government between 1948 and 1951 under the slogan, ‘Yeh Azaadi Jhoothi Hai (This Independence Is a Lie)’, cemented this division. Meanwhile, across the border, the newly-formed Communist Party of Pakistan never recovered from the crushing blow of the arrests that followed the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case of 1951.

15. For an overview of the role of censorship in the early history of the CPI, see Suchetana Chattopadhyay, An Early Communist: Muzaffar Ahmad in Calcutta, 1913–1929 (New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2011).

16. This paragraph draws on my forthcoming article, ‘War, Famine and Newsprint: The Making of Soviet India’, in Kerry Bystrom et al. (eds), The Cultural Cold War and the Global South: Sites of Conflict and Communitas (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021).

17. Muktibodh’s unmemorable poem, ‘Lal Salaam (Red Salute)’, was published in Lok Yudha, the Hindi edition of People’s War on 11 June 1944. Copies of Lok Yudha can be found at the P.C. Joshi Archives on Contemporary History, Bhimrao Ambedkar Central Library, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. For a brief reference to the poet’s experience as a stenographer for Rahul Sankrityayan at the CPI headquarters, see the interview with Sharatchandra Muktibodh in Moti Ram Verma, Lakshit Muktibodh (Destination Muktibodh) (Delhi: Vidyarthi Prakashan, 1973).

18. Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh, ‘Letters to Nemichandra Jain’, in Muktibodh Rachnavali: The Collected Works of Muktibodh, Vol. 6 (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 1980), pp. 246–7.

19. Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh, ‘Zamane ka Chehra (The Face of Our Age)’, in Muktibodh Rachnavali: The Collected Works of Muktibodh, Vol. 2 (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 1980), pp. 63–91.

20. The Indian parliamentarian and poet Makhdoom Mohiuddin’s ‘Mulakat (Rendezvous)’ is a particularly haunting account of a flight from Delhi to Moscow. At 3 am, as his plane flew 30,000 feet above the Hindu Kush mountains, the poet found himself suspended between night on one side and a red dawn on the other [https://www.rekhta.org/nazms/mulaaqaat-main-aaftaab-pii-gayaa-huun-makhdoom-mohiuddin-nazms, accessed 31 Oct. 2020].

21. Balraj Sahni, who was briefly jailed in the late 1940s for his Communist Party links, brought gentleness and dignity to his portrayal of the long-suffering Indian peasant in social realist classics like Dharti Ke Lal (Children of the Earth) (1946) and Do Bigha Zamin (Two Acres of Land) (1953). For Sahni’s account of his 1969 trip to Moscow and Uzbekistan, see Balraj Sahni, ‘Mera Rusi Safarnama (My Russian Travelogue)’, in Balaraja Sahni Santosha Sahni Samagra (The Complete Works of Balraj and Santosha Sahni) (Varanasi: Hindi Pracharaka Sansthana, 1994). The Urdu writer and film director Khwaja Ahmad Abbas was perhaps the most famous ‘fellow traveller’ of the Communist Party of India in the 1950s and 1960s. Abbas described his visits to the Soviet Union in numerous articles as well as in his memoirs: Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, I Am Not an Island: An Experiment in Autobiography (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1977). For the Soviet trips and inspirations of Mahalanobis, see David Engerman, ‘The Professor Goes to Moscow’, in Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 53, no. 7 (17 Feb. 2018), pp. 29–32.

22. For more on how the museums, tree-lined streets and scientific and engineering facilities of Tashkent served as a showpiece Soviet city for visitors from the Third World, see Paul Stronski, Tashkent: Forging of a Soviet City 1930–1966 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010).

23. Abbas, I Am Not an Island, p. 177.

24. Goulding, ‘The Cold War Poetics of Muktibodh,’ p. 26.

25. This divide mapped only roughly onto internationalist patronage and citational networks. For an English-language introduction to the cultural Cold War in Hindi, see Vasudha Dalmia, Fiction as History: The Novel and the City in Modern North India (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2017), chapters 4 and 5.

26. For more on the bare-bones Left-Modernist style of Anil Karanjai, see Juliet Reynolds (ed.), Roads across the Earth: On the Life, Times and Art of Anil Karanjai (New Delhi: Three Essays Collective, 2018).

27. The invitation to this conference asked litterateurs from all ideological persuasions to come together to discuss ways of moving beyond the sense of hopelessness that dominated contemporary Hindi writing. The conference ended in chaos and shouting matches, with the writers rejecting any attempts at reconciliation. The memoirs of the poet Neelabh Ashk (who later became associated with the broadly Naxalite-supporting ‘third stream’ of communist writers) recount the bohemian, Leftist and deeply sexist ethos of this period in colourful detail: Neelabh Ashk, Gyanranjan Ke Bahane (By Way of Gyanranjan) (New Delhi: Nayi Kitab, 2012).

28. For an overview of the rise and fall of the Paraspar: Bhasha, Sahita, Andolan (Interconnections: Language, Literature, Movements) (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2018), pp. 120–87. On middle-brow literary culture in post-colonial India, see Aakriti Mandhwani, ‘Sarita and the 1950s Hindi Middlebrow Reader’, in Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 53, no. 6 (2019), pp. 1797–815.

29. The classic account of this period is Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), Report from the Flaming Fields of Bihar (Calcutta: Prabodh Bhattacharya, 1986); see also Ashwini Kumar, Community Warriors: State Peasants and Caste Armies in Bihar (New Delhi: Anthem Press, 2008).

30. The translation is by Amitava Kumar, ‘The Poet’s Corpse in the Capitalist’s Fish Tank’, in Critical Inquiry, Vol. 23, no. 4 (Summer 1997), pp. 894–909.

31. When I interviewed him in Patna in May 2019, Alok Dhanwa described how his generation of poets had been shaken by Muktibodh’s long and unsuccessful struggle with poverty: ‘When I wrote the Janata ka Aadmi (A Man of the People) in the late 1960s, I was deeply involved with the [Naxalite] movement. It upset me to see how the establishment was celebrating Muktibodh only after his death. The poet had lived and died in obscurity, and nobody cared about what he had to say. But now that he was safely dead, everybody wanted to publish his work’.

32. Kaul describes the experience of encountering Bresson for the first time in his wide-ranging interview with the critic Udayan Vajpeyi, which remains the best introduction to Kaul’s unique perspective on cinema: see Mani Kaul, Abheda Aakash: Mani Kaul se Udayan Vajpeyi Ki Baatcheet (The Undivided Sky: A Conversation between Mani Kaul and Udayan Vajpayi) (New Delhi: Vani Prakashan, 2011), p. 104.

33. See Ashish Rajadhyaksha, ‘Mani Kaul and the Cinematic Object: Uski Roti and the Rulebook of Cinema’, in Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).

34. Bhau Samarth, ‘Tippani (Commentary)’, in Kanka, Vol. 9, nos. 51–55 (Nov.–Dec. 1980), p. 16.

35. Satah Se Uthata Aadmi (Man Rises from the Surface) (dir. Mani Kaul, prod. Ashok Vajpeyi, Madhya Pradesh Kala Parishad, 1980).

36. Interview with Virendra Saini, Mumbai, Oct. 2018. Saini, the cinematographer of Satah Se Uthata Aadmi, does not own a copy of the film himself and refused to accept my bootleg digital version. ‘I can’t bear to look at this’, he told me. ‘It makes me too sad to see the condition of my life’s work’. Given the lack of proper exhibition facilities at the time, the predilection of the National Film Development Corporation of India for shooting in 16 mm stock and then blowing it up to 35 mm, and the state of archiving practices, Saini felt as if he had been permanently cheated of an audience.

37. This fragment is based on an early short story by Muktibodh, also titled ‘Andhere Mein (In the Dark)’, in Muktibodh Rachnavali: The Collected Works of Muktibodh, Vol. 3 (New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 1980), pp. 83–94.

38. The rudra veena is a string instrument used in Hindustani classical music, particularly in the dhrupad style. Ragamala paintings, popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, were a genre of highly formalised visual representations of the ragas of Indian classical music. By the time of Kaul’s career, they represented a tradition of classical aesthetics no longer legible to most post-colonial Indians. Kaul consciously modelled his cinema on the ragamala painting tradition to undercut what he saw as false binaries between object–horizon and foreground–background in the Western perspectival tradition: see, for instance, Mani Kaul, ‘Seen from Nowhere’, in Kapil Vatsyayan (ed.), Concepts of Space: Ancient and Modern (New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, 1991), pp. 415–28.

39. The contrast with the optimism of the famous train sequence in Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali (Song of the Little Road) (1955) is instructive.

40. Timothy Corrigan, riffing off Andre Bazin: ‘Like a beam of light sent through a glass-cube, refractive cinema breaks up and disperses the art or object it engages, splinters or deflects it in ways that leave the original work scattered and drifting across a world outside’: Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 191.

41. It was also the site of some terrible poetry, for example Ekaterina Sheveleva, Bhilai, 1961 (anon., trans.): ‘This grey square seems to me a rare/ glittering bar of some precious metal/ a blood relation of the five year plans of my youth/ the first Soviet metalworks!// I greet you, my faraway young days/ Age is no danger for metal/ And this first production of the Bhilai works/ is a reflection of our history’. For more of this sort of thing, see Felix Kuznetsov et al., (eds), Links: Cultural, Historical and Literary Links between India and the Soviet Union (Delhi/Moscow: Rajpal Press/Raduga, 1987).

42. ‘Ramesh’ is also the name of Muktibodh’s eldest son, who himself worked at the Bhilai Steel Plant for all of his adult life.

43. Translation mine; the poem is online [http://kavitakosh.org/kk/%E0%A4%85%E0%A4%82%E0%A4%A7%E0%A5%87%E0%A4%B0%E0%A5%87_%E0%A4%AE%E0%A5%87%E0%A4%82_/_%E0%A4%97%E0%A4%9C%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%A8%E0%A4%A8_%E0%A4%AE%E0%A4%BE%E0%A4%A7%E0%A4%B5_%E0%A4%AE%E0%A5%81%E0%A4%95%E0%A5%8D%E0%A4%A4%E0%A4%BF%E0%A4%AC%E0%A5%8B%E0%A4%A7, accessed Dec. 2020].

44. Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, Claudia Gorbman (trans.) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).

45. Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 1995), p. 195.

46. Bhilai Story (dir. Ramesh Gupta, prod. K.L. Khandpur, Films Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, 1956).

47. For an account of Indira Gandhi’s swing from socialist rhetoric towards a pro-business stance after 1980, see Atul Kohli, Poverty amidst Plenty in the New India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

48. For more on Niyogi and the Chhattisgarh Mukti Morcha (or Liberation Front), see Radhika Krishnan, ‘Red in the Green: Forests, Farms, Factories, and the Many Legacies of Shankar Guha Niyogi (1943–91)’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Vol. 39, no. 4 (Dec. 2016), pp. 758–72; and Jonathan Parry, ‘Sociological Marxism in Central India: Polyani, Gramsci, and the Case of the Unions’, in Chris Hann and Keith Hart (eds), Markets and Society: The Great Transformation Today (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) pp. 5–28.

49. Regis Debray, ‘Socialism: A Life Cycle’, in New Left Review, Vol. 46 (July–Aug. 2007).

50. Uday Prakash, Paul Gomra Ka Scooter (Paul Gomra’s Scooter) (New Delhi: Vani Prakashan, 2004). Though Prakash has often described himself as primarily a poet, it is his short stories and novellas that have won him a dedicated readership across North India as well as a Sahitya Akademi award, which he returned in 2015. The figure of Muktibodh recurs through many of these stories and novellas, most famously in Uday Prakash, Mohan Das (New Delhi: Vani Prakashan, 2006).

51. My source for this number is admittedly dubious, a propaganda handbook popular in CIA-funded anti-communist circles such as the Indian Congress for Cultural Freedom: see Pete Sagar, Moscow’s Hand in India (Bombay: Lalvani Publishing House, 1967).

52. For the Hindu concept of evil as a debased ‘bodily’ instinct that must be conquered, see Ronald Inden, ‘Hindu Evil as Unconquered Lower Self’, in David Parkin (ed.), The Anthropology of Evil (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985). In a related vein, Rajarshi Dasgupta argues that the Indian communist emphasis on austerity and sexual puritanism led to the paradox of a generation of radicals possessing ‘Gandhian bodies and Marxist minds’: Rajarshi Dasgupta, ‘The Ascetic Modality: A Critique of Communist Self Fashioning’, in Nivedita Menon et al. (eds), Critical Studies in Politics: Exploring Sites, Selves, Power (New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2014), pp. 67–87.

53. Wendy Brown, ‘Resisting Left Melancholy’, in boundary, Vol. 2, no. 26.3 (Fall 1999), pp. 19–27.