The Birth Of Hindi

There are of course more commonplace reasons why the world of our public discourse appears so shallow and meretricious. It is a necessary, inescapable consequence of the collapse of our education system. And the evidence is all around us, in the august assemblies where the semi-literati gather. The new "ethnic" middle class—as opposed to the "English" one, which has its own sad story—so anxious to embrace the globalised future, is in many ways the perfect symbol of this lack of depth and resonance. It is so impatient to get to the future, it has no time to know how it came to the present.

By the same token, then, anything that serves to bring the cultural origins of this new middle class into view is to be welcomed. It should, in fairness, be made clear that Schomer's scholarly study of Mahadevi Varma and the Chhayavad age of modern Hindi poetry is unlikely to set the Yamuna on fire. But if it serves even in small measure to introduce the problematic of the cultural formation of modern Hindi into the upper reaches of our public discourse, it will have made a valuable contribution. Even barbarians have to come from somewhere.

The task that Schomer has set herself is not an easy one. Thus, the book is part cultural history, part biography. In order to address her chosen project with any adequacy, Schomer has to write about: a movement, Chhayavad; a city, Allahabad; and a person, Mahadevi herself. Each of these subunits of her narrative in turn demands more context, more historical detail, more flesh-ing-out. It is a daunting task, but it adds up to rich fare. The carefully researched detail on the modern "Mira" might well be of interest only to specialist readers, but Schomer's narrative touches upon much more: "the low status of modern Hindi as a language of literature, the acrimonious debates surrounding attempts to redefine the nature and purpose of poetry, the modern Hindi intelligentsia's ambivalence towards its cultural heritage."

It is perhaps symptomatic of the fact that this is an unrevised reprint dating from 1982 that Schomer accepts the idea that "modern Hindi" had no tradition. Today, one would acknowledge this "traditionless-ness" was elective—a way of severing the organic connection with what was anathe-matised as "Urdu"—this refers to a language as well as a cultural domain, a social style and a kind of politics. There is no reason why this elective innocence should only be evaluated negatively. Of course, there was a cost involved in breaking the connection with Urdu. But there is a heroic, creative dimension to this as well. Thus, Schomer's discussion of the Chhayavadi struggle to define a proper mode of attention to women is a valuable instance of the attempt to define an indigenous modern.

Schomer makes a subtle distinction between the ideologically driven Sanskritis-ation of the Dwivedi period and the Chhayavadi attempt to invent a largely tatsama but etymol-ogically sensitive diction, which is adequate to address their thoroughly modern and unprecedented circumstances. This provides historical context to a debate—regarding the proper form of Hindi, and Bangla, Marathi, Kannada...—the question of Sanskritisation as against tadbhava-deshaja usages—that appears to be in grave danger of being superseded altogether by the uncontrolled proliferation of the rubbed-down transit lounge patois favoured by the two-dimensional yuppies of Zee and Star.