Mahadevi Varma was one of the leading poets of the romantic movement in Hindi poetry during the 1920s and 30s. She was also a writer of prose sketches, a translator of Sanskrit, and a literary theorist. This study combines intellectual history, biography, and literary criticism to create a vivid portrait of this important writer and her era.

"An outstanding literary biography" AMITAV GHOSH "Mukul writes beautifully, and brings to life a man who has often been misunderstood" BENJAMIN MOSER "This book is a remarkable contribution to the world of Indian letters: ANNIE ZAIDI 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.

Through analysis of an impressive array of 'low' and 'high' Hindu literatures, particularly pamphlets, tracts, newspapers, and archival data, Gupta explores the emerging discourse of gender and sexuality, which was essential to the development of notions of Hindu communitality and nationalism in the colonial period. The book offers an exceptionally nuanced account of Hindi gender politics.

In 1943 a slim volume of poetry, Tar Saptak, burst onto the Hindi literary scene. It gave voice to seven young poets who were determined to experiment both with the content and form of poetry. Tar Saptak heralded the beginning of Prayogvad (Experimentalism), which in turn became Nayi Kavita (New Poetry). Taken from Nayi Kavita, this parallel text anthology interprets it not as a narrow literary movement but as a modernist tendency still flourishing in Hindi poetry. The collection includes seven poets who first published in one of the Saptaks: Agyeya Muktibodh, Shamsher, Raghuvir Sahay, Sarveshwar Dayal Saxena, Kunwar Narain and Kedarnath Singh. This volume also significantly revises the literary map of modern Hindi poetry, demonstrating that, contrary to established opinion, the 1960s and 1970s produced gifted women poets such as Shakunt Mathur, Amrita Bharati and Jyotsna Milan, all of whose work is represented here.

Light was central to the visual politics and imaginative geographies of empire, even beyond its role as a symbol of knowledge and progress in post-Enlightenment narratives. This book describes how imperial mappings of geographical space in terms of ‘cities of light’ and ‘hearts of darkness’ coincided with the industrialisation of light (in homes, streets, theatres) and its instrumentalisation through new representative forms (photography, film, magic lanterns, theatrical lighting). Cataloguing the imperial vision in its engagement with colonial India, the book evaluates responses by the celebrated Indian painter Ravi Varma (1848–1906) to reveal the centrality of light in technologies of vision, not merely as an ideological effect but as a material presence that produces spaces and inscribes bodies.