A Vernacular Cold War Poet? Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh, his Long Poems, and Problems of Reading Hindi between India and the World

This talk presents the long poems of Hindi poet Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh (1917–1964) as the central problematic of a history of literary form. Muktibodh and his writings are arguably the most important site for aesthetic thought in modern Hindi, forming the location for crucial debates over language, politics, and the construction of the self. This criticism, for reasons both practical and stylistic, has tended to focus on the long poems written roughly in the last decade of Muktibodh's life. I build on this rich history of analysis and argumentation by seeing these long poems in the context of Muktibodh's prose writing, revealing the long poem to be as much a problem of genre and ideas of prose literature as an outcome of modern Hindi's lyric traditions. Through seeing the emergence of the long poem as an outcome of larger questions of literary form in the literary history of the Cold War, attention to Muktibodh's writing expands our understanding of the contexts of modern Hindi literary culture. Muktibodh's long poems, shaped as much by mythology and the remembered migration of Maharashtrian Brahman families to Central India as by science fiction and the imagination of the Cold War world, and driven by a tension in literary form between the novel's depiction of social totality and the lyric poem's capacity for imagination, can point towards a new history of Hindi's engagement with the literary worlds of the 1950s.