THE year: 1929. The place: a nondescript village in UP, 10 km from Hardoi. In the baithak-khana of Ram Sahai, known for his expertise in Persian and Urdu, hookahs and lamps were being readied for a customary shairi session. Alone in the room for a moment, the devil in a restless 8-year-old prompted him to scrawl untidily across the fresh sheaf of papers arranged neatly to preserve in script the evening's booty of lyrical poetry. What young Raghuvansh thought was a simple prank, changed the course of his life. There was jubilation, for the child was writing for the first time. With his feet.
Sixty-eight years later, Allahabad-based Dr Raghuvansh, celebrated lexicographer, critic, litterateur, sharing prestigious Hindi literary honours with stalwarts like Mahadevi Verma and Dharam-veer Bharti, looks back on that day and smiles. Born with deformities in both arms and hands, "a sudden flash of intuition told me that I could write with my toes." He hasn't stopped since.
A former head of department of Hindi at Allahabad University, he is credited with pioneering new trends in Hindi criticism besides delving deep into the culture of humanity. Says Dr Vijayendra Snatak, former head of the department of Hindi at Delhi University: "He pioneered the Nayi Lekhan movement of the '60s. A staunch Lohiaite, Raghuvansh was also lauded for his articles on India's language policy." Adds Indu Jain, Hindi poetess and lyricist: "A great scholar, his knowledge of the shastriya paksh is unparalleled."
Co-editor of Hindi Sahitya Kosh, the monumental and only encyclopaedia of Hindi literature, the creative instinct in Dr Raghuvansh has taken him from ancient dramaturgy, to political analyses, human relationships, travelogues and critiques of modern Hindi poetry. Of the view that modernity is a continuous process in creative writing, his work Adhunikta aur Srijanshilata, a collection of 16 essays, comments on modernity, creativity, poetic sensibility and individual freedom. But what's closest to his heart is his doctoral thesis Manaviya Sanskriti ka Rachnatmak Ayaam
(The Creative Dimension of Human Culture)—a complex thread that weaves itself through the entire conversation, eluding comprehension at times. Is he speaking of Humanism? NO, he detests the word. "There is no 'ism' involved here," he asserts. "Humanity has its intrinsic culture and I believe in the individual value system rather than the individual."
The discussion requires gentle steering. "Once I realised that I could hold the pen between my toes, writing became a passion," he says quietly. His script neatly rounded, perfectly aligned. Did he use a writer during exams? Never, says he, affront writ large on his frail face. His memories take on concrete shape from his watershed eighth year. "I was sensitive. As soon as I realised that at play friends were making concessions for me, I would withdraw." As a result, he grew up quiet, introspective, his mind crowded with images of life around him. While some of them have blurred with age and a bout of a memory-debilitating illness, there's one constant image which refuses to fade: "While my handicap didn't really matter, my mind revolted if someone pitied me. "
Pity and charity are the two most hated words in his dictionary, cropping up time and again in the course of the conversation on human dignity and values. "These are Christian concepts I disagree with," says the writer of Manav Putra Issa, on the life of Jesus Christ. How about Mother Teresa? An amused smile plays on his lips as if he was expecting the question. "See," he says patiently, "on the one hand, I acknowledge that she was a noble lady. On another, like Christ's famous words 'Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do,' she didn't know what the entire process involved. For her it was a vocation. As a physically disabled person I dislike anybody giving me charity or pity."
He draws a parallel with his perspective of the present state of society. Rather than being degenerative, old values are being redescribed. "The man at the bottom is not allowed the opportunity to develop. He is directed from the top, fed and clothed, not given the freedom to grow," says the 76-year-old writer, betraying his socialist leanings. A close associate of Dr Ram Manohar Lohia and Jai Prakash Narain, Raghuvansh received his initiation in socialist ideology from none other than Acharya Naren Dev at the age of 15. That got him into the thick of the freedom movement. By the '40s, Raghuvansh was writing political pieces for various publications.
But, says the winner of the Bharat Bharati, the highest UP state award for Hindi literature, Partition was a revelation. "I was sent to the borders to provide emotional support to victims. The majority didn't know what it was all about. My disillusionment began then as we proceeded towards an era of power politics." By 1950 he was totally divorced from politics, preferring to engage himself in a kind of intellectual catharsis by a spate of furious writing aided by his close friendship with the matriarch of Hindi literature, Mahadevi Verma. "Niralaji and the Parimal club of Allahabad brought me in close contact with the intellectual elite of the time." His contemporaries—Premchand, Makhanlal Chaturvedi, Dinkar. And in this culturally fertile environment, the prose flowed.
The range and depth of his work is stunning. The easy way out is to question him on his fiction. Tantujal, written in 1958, went into three editions. The plot reveals yet another facet of the litterateur's mind—his belief that a man and woman can share pure friendship without the element of sex entering it, in an attempt to demolish popular theories that a very thin line divides the platonic from the sexual. Did this thought spring from dormant youthful fears of rejection by women? He throws his wife Savitri a bashful look and admits: "I was initially totally against marriage. Today I do analyse it as fear of rejection. But when the proposal came, I told Savitri if I was in her place I wouldn't have married me." It's curious that barring his wife and daughter, he and his three sons seem to use just one name each. "I renounced my surname a long time ago because it denotes caste and status," says the receiver of such awards as the Sahitya Bhushan, the K.K. Birla Foundation's Shankar Award for the greatest contribution in the field of culture and the first Jan Nayak award instituted by the Bihar state government this year.
He flits back and forth through the years. The Emergency aroused the political animal in him again. He was back in the arena with fiery articles as editor of Jan, a sister publication of the socialist mouthpiece Mankind. From nostalgia he's back to the present, answering stock questions on the state of Hindi literature today. "The social mentality has changed. Regional language publishers have to sustain themselves on small sales. So new writers get left behind. But you can't silence young voices for too long."
His present projects include an analysis of Gandhi's social thinking. Is he aware of the recent spate of critical writing on the Mahatma? "Why should I bother with others' criticism? I want to write about what I think of Gandhi," he throws back agitatedly. But most important, he's committed to writing a novel ("not an autobiography") about his physical handicap. "It's my duty to tell those affected similarly how I overcame all odds. And let me tell you, my financial background was the biggest handicap—and now, my failing memory," says the writer who for more than 50 years has literally held the literary world captive at his feet. With his feet.
