Sachchidanand Hirananda Vatsyayan ‘Agyeya’ is unarguably one of the most remarkable figures of Indian literature. From his revolutionary youth to acquiring the mantle of a (highly controversial) patron saint of Hindi literature, Agyeya’s turbulent life also tells a history of the Hindi literary world and of a new nation-spanning as it does two world wars, Independence and Partition, and the building and fraying of the Nehruvian state.
Akshaya Mukul’s comprehensive and unflinching biography is a journey into Agyeya’s public, private and secret lives. Based on never-seen-before archival material-including a mammoth trove of private papers, documents of the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom and colonial records of his years in jail-the book delves deep into the life of the nonconformist poet-novelist. Mukul reveals Agyeya’s revolutionary life and bomb-making skills, his CIA connection, a secret lover, his intense relationship with a first cousin, the trajectory of his political positions, from following M.N. Roy to exploring issues dear to the Hindu right, and much more. Along the way, we get a rare peek into the factionalism and pettiness of the Hindi literary world of the twentieth century, and the wondrous and grand debates which characterized that milieu.
Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover features a formidable cast of characters: from writers like Premchand, Phanishwarnath Renu, Raja Rao, Mulk Raj Anand and Josephine Miles to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, revolutionary Chandra Shekhar Azad and actor Balraj Sahni. And its landscapes stretch from British jails, an intellectually robust Allahabad and modern-day Delhi to monasteries in Europe, the homes of Agyeya’s friends in the Himalayas and universities in the US. This book is a magnificent examination of Agyeya’s civilizational enterprise.
Ambitious and scholarly, Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover is also an unputdownable, whirlwind of a read.
Akshaya Mukul is the author of Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India (2015), which won every major non-fiction award in India on its release, including the Crossword Book Award, Ramnath Goenka Award, Tata Literature Live Award, Atta-Galatta-Bangalore Literature Festival Prize and the Shakti Bhatt Award. Mukul is the recipient of the Homi Bhabha, Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund and the New India Foundation fellowships. He has contributed essays to Keywords for India: A Conceptual Lexicon for the 21st Century, edited by Rukmini Bhaya Nair and Peter Ronald deSouza, and A Functioning Anarchy? Essays for Ramachandra Guha, edited by Srinath Raghavan and Nandini Sundar.
By the age of thirty-four, Sachchidanand Hirananda Vatsyayan 'Agyeya' had been a revolutionary, jailed for fighting for Indian independence, and a captain in the British Indian Army, driven by anti-fascist ideals during the Second World War. He had behind him one marriage that had been a mistake and a passionate love affair. He had been the editor of a prestigious literary journal and the author of a beloved two-part novel, and he was about to publish a hallmark anthology that would usher in a new poetry movement in Hindi.
Yet, during that summer of 1945, Agyeya wrote to a fellow writer about how demoralized he was by his failed efforts to launch a journal: 'If I don't find a way in the next two years, I will take my own life. I could have done so now. But then, I thought I haven't reached the point where I could say that I've tried everything..."
Coming from someone whose silence and reticence defined his reputation in the Hindi literary world, this is a startlingly vulnerable confession. Agyeya addressed his own inscrutability in the letter, admitting, 'My entire life is led internally and never gets expressed. The other life, which is led on the surface, is almost impersonal. If the story of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde fits anyone, it's me.
Agyeya traced this 'double life, his 'dual self', back to his adolescence, around the time he left his large Punjabi family to attend college all the way across the country in Madras. Despite being a tremendously prolific writer and poet, he wrote that 'Silence has become my nature. And yet, though he understood why others thought of him as 'abrasive' and 'stony', Agyeya insisted that 'I am neither??
He was, in fact, a contradictory person in many ways-a reflection perhaps of the complexity of the last century of Indian history, which saw two world wars, the rise of Gandhi and the struggle for freedom, Independence and the aftermath of Partition, the ambitions of the Nehruvian state, the imperilment of democracy during the Emergency and even the rise of the Hindu Right. The different strands of twentieth-century Indian literature, its various ideologies and divisive politics, when viewed through the story of Agyeya's life, is not the monochrome that Indian history is so often seen as.
**Contents and Sample Pages**
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