Editor’s Note

 

Modern Hindi prose literature grew and flourished in the early years of the 20th Century, particularly since Bharatendu Harishchandra. This phase of Hindi literature closely paralleled the Indian freedom movement. By the second decade, Hindi journalism was in the forefront of the freedom movement. Acharya Shivapoojan Sahay began his literary career in journalism and literary writing precisely during this period.

 

‘Shivapoojan sahay Sahitya Samagra’ is a compilation of his best writings spanning practically the whole Indian freedom movement from around 1920 till India’s independence and beyond. His most famous work is ‘Dehati Duniya’ (The Village World), a novel considered to be the prototype of the ‘anchalik’ (regional) novel genre in Hindi, first written and published (1926) during the non-cooperation movement. Written in an autobiographical style, the novel gives a realistic depiction of the picture of a village society in the Bhojpur district of Bihar where the author grew up from childhood. The period of the novel is around the end of the nineteenth century.  The first volume also contains his best short stories and other fictional writings. Volume 2 contains nearly all his valuable literary memoirs beginning from Bharatendu Harishchandra to Premchand and Nirala which presents a veritable panorama of the Hindi literary world, with precious literary reminiscences of over 125 famous Hindi litterateurs of the ‘Nava Jagaran’ (Hindi literary renaissance) period of modern Hindi literature.

 

All Shivapoojan Sahay’s prose writings – literary essays, journalism, editorials of the various literary journals like ‘Matawala’ (with Nirala), ‘Madhuri’ (with Premchand), ‘Jagaran’, ‘Ganga’, ‘Himalaya’, ‘Sahitya’, etc – are collected in Volume 3. These are continued, including his prefaces, speeches, reviews, and other writings and some of his other books, in Volume 4 and 5. Volumes 6 and 7 contain his diaries from 1916 through 1963, till less than a week before his death. Volumes 8 to 10 contain his correspondence ( nearly 2,200 letters of most of the great Hindi literary figures of those times). The last Volume 10 contains the author’s own letters to many of these correspondents. These last five volumes (6 to 10) of diaries and letters are a virtual mine of literary information about all the major literary figures, publications and movements of the first half of the 20th century. All related biographical information about Acharya Shivapoojan Sahay with some more material on him, including translations of his selected writings, is available on the editor’s blog -  vibhutimurty.blogspot.com & vagishwari.blogspot.com.

 

 

‘Virendra Narayan Granthavali’ in 5 volumes is centred mainly on drama and music. Virendra Narayan was a man of theatre, a dramatist of repute, a brilliant actor and a connoisseur of Indian classical music. Volume 4 has a detailed biographical note on him at its end. His plays, many of them successfully staged in various theatres across India, are collected in Volume 1. Volume 2 contains his critical writings on drama and theatre. His four novels are collected in Volume 3. Volume 4 contains his miscellaneous prose writings – short stories, poems, memoirs, literary reviews and notes, diaries and correspondence. The last Volume 5 contains his English writings and translations from world drama. Shri Virendra Narayan was married to the elder daughter, Sarojini Narayan, of Acharya Shivapoojan Sahay.

 

‘Premchand Patron Mein’, offered here in full, is a volume of about 200 letters centred on Premchand or written by him to his contemporaries, including Shivapoojan Sahay. These letters provide a most authentic literary source for the study of Premchand and the historically most significant period, during the Indian freedom movement, when he was engaged in his literary writings and journalism.

 

Both these sets of volumes of the collected works of Acharya Shivapoojan Sahay and Shri Virendra Narayan, along with ‘Premchand Patron Mein’, reflect the seminal literary values of Hindi literature in the modern times. In editing these volumes I have tried to present a representative selection of literary writing reflecting the social and political concerns of the age. 

 

Janawar Farm : a complete Hindi recreation of George Orwell’s classic novel ‘Animal Farm’ (1943), done by me, is also available here. Orwell’s celebrated novel, translated in almost all major world languages is a satire against ‘the Stalinist corruption of the original socialist ideals’. Orwell chose to write it in the form of an animal fable with animal  characters representing the second world war leaders of the communist and the imperialist blocs. The introduction to this Hindi translation provides the full political perspective to the novel. A short original biographical note on Orwell, born in Motihari (Champaran, India), can also be read on my blog : vibhutimurty.blogspot.com (Nov., 2017). 

 

Pravasi ki Atmakatha is the story of the illegal and forcible recruitment of indentured labourers from India transported to South Africa and to some other island-countries for being used as slave labourers. Jairam Singh, the father of the writer Bhawani Dayal (born in South Africa) was similarly recruited forcibly and transported with a companion (the writer’s mother), after a forced marriage in a Calcutta ‘recruitment depo’, to South Africa. Jairam Singh, and subsequently the writer also, came in close contact with M.K.Gandhi during the latter’s campaign of the emancipation of Indians there during the early 1900s. The whole fascinating story can be read in this autobiography of Bhawani Dayal, edited with new supplementary material by me, with photographs and a reading bibliography on the subject of indentured labour.

 

Suno Parth

Written in ultra-modern Hindi, SUNO PARTH, is a full Hindi translation of Shrimad Bhagawad Geeta, the holiest of the Hindu scriptures. It is presented in an ultra-modern Hindi version, without any scholarly exegesis, giving only a shloka-by-shloka Hindi version of the full 18-chapter text, without the corresponding Sanskrit shlokas, to enable the modern reader a free-flowing reading of this great exposition of the Hindu philosophy of Karmayog.The book also gives brief explanatory passages where necessary, interspersed with the translated shlokas, fully expounding the meaning of the more difficult passages. The true worth of this translated version can be realized only by a single straight reading. By Dr Mangal Murty

 

Shri Ramcharit Manas

A spirited narration of the full story of Tulsi Das’s Ramcharit Manas, embedded with copious quotes from the original text meant to be read by the new contemporary generation of young readers with convincing explications of Seeta’s fire ordeal and the idea of Ram Rajya, after Ram’s vanquishment of Ravana and return to Ayodhya with Seeta. Written in simple and lucid Hindi prose, the story presents many new facets of the central characters of Rama and Seeta and unravels many of the abstruse issues of the famous Hindi literary epic. By Dr Mangal Murty,

                                                             

Man ek Van

A delightful amalgam of Hindi poems with a rich tapestry of translated poems from English by Dr Mangal Murty – culling the best from poets like Shakespeare, Shelley and Browning, up to modernists like Eliot, Yeats and Auden. With a Preface by the eminent Hindi poet, Arun Kamal, this collection of Hindi poems presents a rich confluence of the old and the new across the two languages, Hindi and English. It also enhances the flavour of the contemporary with the poet’s original Hindi poems, with additional detailed commentary on the translated poems and poets by him. By Dr Mangal Murty

                    

Two-Way Mirror

A collection of 50 English poems by Dr Mangal Murty, and an equal number of poems translated into English – poems by eminent Hindi poets like Nirala, Dinkar, Dharmveer Bharati, Kedar Nath Singh, Alok Dhanwa, Naresh Saxena, et al. It is a veritable treasure of the best poetry encompassing a spectrum of delightful contemporary verse for the lovers of Indian English poetry. In his Preface, the American poet Thomas Graves professes: “the moment you enter a poem by Murty, the poem arrests you…It is the poem, in truth, which is thinking for Murty, and for you.” By Dr Mangal Murty

                              

The Story of Rama

Valmiki wrote his Ramayana 2,500 years in the past - in a massive volume comprising thousands of shlokas. And that immortal story of the ideal man’s struggles and travails in life ending in an epic battle that leads to the triumph of Truth over Evil, is recounted in this small book, written in limpid contemporary English prose, with translated verse passages echoing the original sage’s voice. It gives you a real feel of the great Indian epic that remains unique and relevant for all time. By Dr Mangal Murty

                              

The Wizard in the Street

Read Ten Best Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, famous as the ‘Father of the modern short story’, introduced by an eminent Poe scholar, presenting the stories in the environment they were written; their unique themes balancing fantasy and mystery with comedy and terror, in a rare combination. These are stories the likes of which you have never read, with all their intricacies and art lucidly analysed and explained in the editor’s prefacing commentaries. And all stories have rare illustrations by world class artists to enrich their effect.             Editor: Dr Mangal Murty.

 

The Haunted Palace                                                                   

The book is a critical study of the American writer, Edgar Allan Poe’s fiction. It is a comprehensive and in-depth analysis of his critical principles of pure poetry and lyrical short story, including the ratiocinative tale, the progenitor of the modern ‘detective’ short story. It critically explicates 20 of his best ‘tales’ which he characterized as ‘arabesque’, ‘grotesque’ and ‘ratiocinative’. In his fiction, Poe tried to forge a reconciliation of the poetic elements with the fictional, imbuing the prose tale with the essential qualities of lyric poetry.              By Dr Mangal Murty

 

 

 

 

 

The Editor/ Writer

 

Dr Mangal Murty, son of the Acharya Shivapoojan  Sahay. is an accomplished writer and editor, both in English and Hindi, in his own right. Dr Murty retired as Professor of English & American Literature and Applied Linguistics from Taiz University in Yemen, after his four-decade-long career as a distinguished Professor in Bhagalpur and Magadh universities in Bihar, India. Presently, Dr Murty, is living in Lucknow (India : bsmmurty@gmail.com) and writing books and journalism as a free-lancer.