East-West Romanticisms: Understanding Indian Romanticism through Chhayavad - A Study in Comparative Indian Literature

Abstract

According to Arthur o’ Lovejoy “the romanticism of one country may have little in common with that of another; that there is, in fact a plurality of romanticism of possibly different thought complexes”. With the advent of a ‘modern’ kind of poetry in Hindi Literature, many speculations were made with regards to the influence, that Western literary movements have had on Indian literature. In the spectrum of this speculation, the Chhayavad movement of Hindi Literature gained momentum as an Indian synonym of Western Romanticism.  Where, few scholars believed that the Chhayavad movement was simply a reaction to the didactic Dwivedi Yug and had nothing to do with the Western Romanticism, others felt that Chhayavad was an Indian kind of Romantic Movement as it was influenced by the tender writings of Rabindranath Tagore in Bengali, which were in turn Influenced by English romanticism. This paper tries to do a comparative study of the western Romantic Movement (keeping in mind, its preoccupations with poetry as an expression of imagination, individual freedom and the conception of nature) and the Indian Chayavad movement pioneered by SuryakantTripathi Nirala. It looks at the poems of Jayashankar Prasad and Sumitranandan Pant, and tries to trace the trajectory of Romantic Movement in Hindi Literature taking up the concepts of lyricism and mysticism, along with their use of nature in developing a poetic movement. This paper will help us to look at the relations, not only between India and the West, but also at the relations between two Indian languages, i.e., Hindi and Bengali, while tracing Tagore’s influence on Hindi Chhayavadi poets. This will finally help us in establishing the plurality of romanticism, talked about above and will lead us to the  understanding of, how genres and movements of literature travel over different cultures making them their own and leading to newer innovations as a result of these interactions.