Akshaya Mukul’s biography of Agyeya captures the life of one of Hindi literature’s most iconic practitioners | Books and Literature News,The Indian Express
Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover: The Many Lives of Agyeya is set against the cultural landscape of the 20th century and explores the life of the iconic writer, who was one of the mainstays of the Nayi Kavita literary movement
Sunday, Sep 11, 2022
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HomeBooks and LiteratureAkshaya Mukul’s biography of Agyeya captures the life of one of Hindi literature’s most iconic practitioners
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Akshaya Mukul’s biography of Agyeya captures the life of one of Hindi literature’s most iconic practitioners
Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover: The Many Lives of Agyeya is set against the cultural landscape of the 20th century and explores the life of the iconic writer, who was one of the mainstays of the Nayi Kavita literary movement
Written by Manoj Kumar Jha
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September 10, 2022 12:00:31 pm
Prolific and provocative, Agyeya remains one of the most prominent — and enigmatic — Hindi writers of the 20th century (Courtesy: Penguin Random House)Those of us who grew up across north Indian towns and cities in the 1980s, attempting to unravel the contradictions of the self, often found ourselves divided when it came to the work and life of Sachchidananda Vatsyayan, or Agyeya (1911-1987). Prolific and provocative, he was regarded as not only one of the most prominent Hindi writers of the 20th century but also an enigmatic cultural figure who animated the otherwise complex and dreary — or, at least, that’s what it appeared to us then — Hindi literary scene. Despite all his literary prowess and achievements, our young selves sometimes found it challenging to embrace Agyeya fully, for his intellect, poetry, and writings dared to bare the complexities of the human mind, the inner contradictions, and the tussle between social identity and self.
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My quest with Agyeya’s writings in the past and now has often taken me to the pioneering work of CH Cooley — the American sociologist who propounded the theory of looking-glass self, the tug of war between perception and reality, the general questions around the sense of social self and identity. I, however, reserve this extension of my interpretation to a later time and straightaway deep dive into Akshaya Mukul’s biography of Agyeya, which attempts to answer most of the questions that linger around his legacy, placed in a larger context of colonial and post-colonial history, the subjectivities of which find relevance in today’s public sphere.
Writer Rebel Soldier Lover: The Many Lives of Agyeya is a veritable doorstopper and makes for rewarding reading, illuminating the life of Agyeya and the world around him. Through a critical lens, Mukul has delved into a vast wealth of papers and archival material and attempted to decode the enigma surrounding Agyeya. One need not be a fan of Agyeya’s work or interested in the minutiae of his life to understand this biography, for his work, for the most part, is set in the social and literary history of India in the 20th century.
A simple reckoning with Agyeya or any of his contemporaries from the 1980s is difficult at the outset. The title of the book is a window to the complexities of Agyeya the artiste’s life. After all, an artiste is a constantly evolving, multifaceted, multi-layered “idea” and not a fixed entity, and rarely embodies monochromatic, cast-in-stone rigidities. Agyeya resonated naturally with these complexities emerging from within a single idea or thought, which makes his work fulfilling to curious minds trying to break into the concepts of freedom, liberation, and critical thinking.
Rating: 5