After a week-long effort, I am presenting before you the summarised article about Baba Nagarjuna collecting information from various sites or putting most of the information directly. Nagarjun was born as Baidyanath in a Maithil Brahmin family on June 30, 1911, in Satlakha Village of Madhubani District which was his mother’s village, though his family belonged to Tarauni village in Darbhanga district, Bihar. His mother died when he was only three. His father lived as a vagabond and hedonist. So as a child Nagarjun had to depend upon compassionate relatives and some generous landlords for financial assistance for his education.
He showed excellence in the learning of the ancient Indian languages like Sanskrit, Pali, and Prakrit first at the rural centers and later in the cities of Varanasi and Calcutta where alongside his higher studies he also worked for his livelihood. Though Nagarjun’s academic expenses could be met by the scholarships which he won as a bright student, he always bore the fact on his mind that he had also to support his father who could barely earn any money by himself. After the years of learning and semi-employment in Calcutta, Nagarjun moved to Saharanpur (U.P.) where he got a full-time teaching job. Meanwhile, he married Aparajita Devi and the couple had five children.
Apparently Nagarjun had moved to a better paying job but in fact, his insatiable urge to delve deep and yet deeper into the traditional wisdom of India — particularly the Sanskrit treatises and philosophical discourses, Buddhist scriptures and handwritten manuscripts of sorts — put him on the path of an unstable nomadic existence. This pursuit took him to Sri Lanka wherein the Buddhist monastery of Kelania, he had to adopt Buddhism in order to have free access to the well-guarded manuscripts which were inaccessible to the outside world. (This had a precedent. Nagarjun’s mentor Mahapandit Rahul Sankrityayan had to pass through the same experience).
It was in 1935 that Nagarjun became a Buddhist monk. As an imperative, he had to change his name. That is how, Vaidyanath Mishra who had also taken the pen name YATRI and published many poems under this name, became Nagarjun. There had been three other Nagarjun’s in the past — all equally illustrious in their respective fields. Vaidyanath Mishra Yatri was much influenced by one of them who was a Buddhist philosopher. Hence his choice of this name for himself.
Apart from Mahapandit Rahul Sankrityayan, Nagarjun had established contact with many other intellectual giants by then, like the renowned historian Kashi Prasad Jaisawal, the great fiction writer Munshi Premchand, the classicist poet, playwright and fiction writer Jaishankar Prasad etc. Nagarjun was well accepted and admired among them as a creative writer, scholar and an avid pursuer of knowledge.
In the monastery of Kelania Nagarjun got acquainted with the ideology of scientific socialism through a couple of revolutionaries from Calcutta who had taken shelter in the monastery in order to avoid arrest by the colonial British police.
Nagarjun stayed at the monastery as a monk for three years and during this period he read the writings of Marx, Lenin and Stalin. This was, perhaps, the most decisive period of his life when his sense of commitment to the suffering and exploited humanity took a definite shape under the revolutionary teachings of Marxism-Leninism. In 1938, when Nagarjun left Sri Lanka and returned to India, it was this commitment that brought him to the eminent peasant leader Swami Sahajanand of Kisan Sabha fame. Nagarjun joined the ‘Summer School of Politics’ organised by the Swami where many stalwarts from among communists, socialists and congressmen came to lecture. After a month long interaction and discourses with them Nagarjun was sent to join the peasants of Bettiah (Bihar) in their struggle against the feudal landlords. Here was the beginning of the tempering of his soul’s steel.
Since then Nagarjun got transformed into someone whose first priority remained his physical and intellectual oneness with the exploited and oppressed and their fight against the perpetrators of injustice. Nagarjun’s mentor Rahul had already emerged as a brave peasant leader. Rahul, too, moved with the spontaneous social uprisings, organised movements of the Kisan Sabha, zealously he participated in the politics of the Indian National Congress and finally joined the Communist Party of India. Thus, one can see that Nagarjun was faithfully emulating Rahul in every possible manner. Nagarjun, despite his own meandering life, also acted as a companion and friend to Rahul in some of his most difficult journeys and shared the organisational burden which Rahul would take upon himself as a political activist. At the time when Rahul went to Village Amwari in District Siwan, Bihar and was beaten by the goons of a local landlord, after his formal arrest by the police, Nagarjun was present as a trusted comrade who shared each moment of his mentor’s struggles. This relationship between the two of them continued until Rahul breathed his last.
After a long practical training in organising and radicalising the working class in Bihar Nagarjun began to play different roles intermittently. He was a communist writer and agitator and at the same time he was the sole provider for his wife and young children. Though a strong-willed woman Nagarjun’s wife, Aparajita Devi often found herself alone to bear the familial burden with their five children. Nagarjun took his wife to some places and planned a life of togetherness in the early part of their married life but in the later years, Aparajita Devi preferred to stay at Tarauni — Nagarjun’s ancestral village, as she would find the setting familiar and ambience congenial. Tarauni certainly gave her a sense of security which was not easy to have elsewhere with an unpredictable wanderer like Nagarjun. Aparajita, throughout her life, lived as a financially troubled matriarch. She had to fit in this role as it was forced upon her by the strangeness of her husband’s character and life style.
Though after the Communist Party of India’s virtual surrender of Telangana’s valiant armed struggle to the Nehru government Nagarjun lost his interest in practical politics and to a great extent his previous zeal for participation in prolonged movement, marches and demonstrations waned, yet his dedication to the Marxist-Leninist world view persisted in his creative writing and in his approach to the contemporary issues of culture and society.
It was indeed the vacillation and wavering in the policies and programmes of the CPI vis à vis Jawaharlal Nehru’s bourgeois democratic rule made Nagarjun maintain a distance with the leadership but his regular lively contact with the common activists and sympathisers remained intact. He would engage in lengthy discussions and occasional quarrels with them, yet he would remain their very own Baba (Grandpa, or an elderly saintly figure). Actually Nagarjun’s casual attire (badly crumpled and mostly not exactly clean), his overgrown beard and moustache and faqir-like mannerism had made him a universal Baba. Even the poets of his own age (like Shamsher Bahadur Singh and Trilochan Shastri) called him ‘Baba’ and wrote poems on his Babahood.
Like many other disenchanted and frustrated communists, Nagarjun’s spirit was rekindled in the wake of the armed revolt by the peasants of Naxalbari (West Bengal). Nagarjun welcomed this outburst of revolutionary rage and the ensuing formation of the CPI (ML). The revolutionary war cry initiated by the peasants of Naxalbari echoed far and wide. Apart from the worst oppressed peasants, tribal and working sections, in different parts of India, it also inspired and electrified the idealist petty – bourgeois intelligentsia — mainly students and writers. Nagarjun felt that it was a rebirth of the lost dream of the Indian revolution. Nagarjun, with his mighty pen, rose in complete unison with the ‘Naxalites’. Some of his most memorable poems are based on the places and personalities associated with the CPI (ML).
Nevertheless more than once in his interviews Nagarjun called himself ‘an independent communist’. Being a voracious multilingual reader and abundantly rich in experience Nagarjun pointed out the lapses and shortcomings on the part of the Indian revolutionaries in different time periods.
He also participated in many mass-awakening movements before and after independence. Between 1939 and 1942, He was jailed by the British courts for leading a farmer’s agitation in Bihar. For a long time after independence he was involved with journalism.
Early on, he was disillusioned by the great compromises and the dilution of the revolutionary agenda affected by the national leaders. He started writing about the middle-class character of Congress-led nationalism and its disastrous implications for the poor peasantry, artisans and labouring classes. He was jailed for his political and agitational activities several times before as well as after Independence. He played an active role in Jaya Prakash Narayan’s movement prior to the Emergency period (1975–1977), and therefore was jailed for eleven months, during the emergency period. He was strongly influenced by Leninist-Marxist ideology. This was one of the reasons that he never found patronage from the mainstream political establishments. Because of his formal dissociation from the communist parties Nagarjun took some very impulsive decisions at times reflecting them in his poetry and later regretted them too. A couple of such significant moves on his part were witnessed in his vitriolic attack on the Chinese communist leaders at the time of India’s border war with China in 1962.
His vehement poetic attacks on the autocratic moorings of Indira Gandhi endeared him to the masses but he also received an award from Mrs. Gandhi’s hands which evoked sharp criticism among his admirers and contemporary leftist writers.
Maithili was his mother tongue and he authored many poems, essays and novels in Maithili. The Hindi of his works varies from highly sanskritized to vernacular forms. Therefore he never adhered to specific bounds of languages. He also had good grasp of the Bengali language and used to write for Bengali newspapers. He was close to the Bengali Hungry generation or Bhookhi Peerhi poets and helped Kanchan Kumari in translating Malay Roy Choudhury’s long poem JAKHAM in Hindi.
Though always a well-known a popular poet and writer he was ignored by the conservative literary and critical establishment for a long time—till the great cultural upsurges in the Hindi speaking north Indian belt in late 60s and early 70s broke down the old literary order and turned writers like Nagarjun, Muktibodh, Shamsher Bahadur Singh, Trilochan and Raghuvir Sahay into cult figures. He was a major Hindi and Maithili poet who has also penned a number of novels, short stories, literary biographies and travelogues, and was known as Janakavi- the People’s Poet. Nagarjun also became the poetic voice of the famous Bihar Movement led by Jayaprakash Narayan and was put behind the bars by Indira Gandhi’s Emergency Regime. He became a popular hero and cause célèbre of Resistance movement against the Emergency. He soon got disillusioned with the right wing tilt and politically dubious character of the leadership of the Total Revolution, i.e., Bihar Movement, which he openly criticised and immortalised his critique in a collection of poems called Khichri viplav dekha hamne (Witnessing a hotchpotch insurrection). In the succeeding years he continued his creative onslaught on the establishment.
Baba was known for his revolutionary ideas and unconventional lifestyle. His writings inspired generations and he was known for his candid and anti –establishment views.
Baba’s lasting contribution to Hindi poetry is his attempt to give a public face to contemporary poetry which otherwise has tended to get more and more personal, private and introvert. He also brought to it the force of the tradition, which he freely manipulated to serve his radical purpose. He also set an example for the intelligentsia by sticking to the lifestyle of a fakir—bereft of all unnecessary trimmings of middle class existence and his readiness to rub shoulders with the riffraff with whom he always identified himself.
The subjects of his poetry are varied. Effects of both his wandering tendencies and activism, is evident in his middle and later works. His famous poems like Badal ko Ghirate Dekha hai , is a travelogue in its own right. He often wrote on contemporary social and political issues. His famous poem Mantra Kavita, is widely considered the most accurate reflection of a whole generation’s mindset in India. Another such poem is Aao Rani Ham Dhoenge Palaki , which sarcastically humiliates the then prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, for the extravagant welcome thrown by him for Queen Elizabeth.
Besides these accepted subjects of poetry, Nagarjun found poetic beauty in unconventional subjects. One of his most astonishing works is a poem based on a female pig called paine daanto wali. Another such creation is a series of poems on a full-grown jack fruit.
Because of the breadth of his poetry, Nagarjun is considered the only Hindi poet, after Tulsidas, to have an audience ranging from the rural sections of society to the elite. He effectively freed poetry from the bounds of elitism.
Babas works include: Baba Batesarnath, Balchanma(1967), Ratinath ki Chachi, Himalaya ki betiya, Nai Paudh, Varun Ke Bete, Dukh Mochans, Ugratara, Jamania Ka Baba, Kumbhi Pak, Paro(1946) and Asman Mein Chanda Tare, Abhinandan, Imaratia; (Novels); Yugdharao, Navturia(1954), Citra (1949), Satrange Pankhon Wali, Talab ki Machhliyan, Khichri Viplava Dekha Humne, Hazar Hazar Bahon Wali, Purani Juliyon Ka Coras, Tumne Kaha Tha, Akhir Aisa Kya Kah Diya Maine, Is Gubare Ki Chhaya Mein, Yhe Danturit Muskan, Mein Military Ka Boodha Ghoda, Ratnagarbha, Aise bhi hum kya, Bhool jao purane sapne, Apne Khet Mein Chandana; (Poetry); Ant Hinam Kriyanam, Bum Bholenath, Ayodhya ka Raja;(essay); Patrahin nagna gachh(1967), Khichri viplav dekha hamne; translations of Jayadevas Gita Govinda, works of Kalidasa and many other classical works of Sanskrit literature. His work on culture has been published in the form of books entitled Desh Dashkam and Krishak Dashkam. Nagarjun was given the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1969 for his historic book Patarheen Nagna Gachh, and the ‘Bharat Bharati Award’ by the Uttar Pradesh government for his literary contributions in 1983. He was also honored by the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship, India’s highest literary award for lifetime achievement, in 1994.
He died on November 5, 1998 at the age of 87 in Khwaja Sarai, Darbhanga. There will never be a Baba again.
Sources:
http://revolutionarydemocracy.org
Produced by MithilanchalGroup
