ISBN 9780670097210|Hardback|808 pages|2022|Penguin Random House
Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover: The Many Lives of Agyeya by Akshaya Mukul is an ambitious and scholarly study of Agyeya, a towering figure in Hindi literature with a multi-faceted personality.
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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.
This book brings to life a man who has often been misunderstood.
Author:
Akshaya Mukul
ISBN:
9780670097210
Binding:
Hardback
Pages:
808
Year of Publication:
2022
Publisher:
Penguin Random House
Edition:
First
Condition:
New
Country of Origin:
India
About the Author
The author wrote 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.
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