The Language of Hariaudh's Priyapravas: Notes Toward an Archaeology of Modern Standard Hindi (Critical Essay‪)‬

Priyapravas [The Absence (1) of the Beloved] of 1914 by Pandit Ayodhyasimh Upadhyay "Hariaudh" (1865-1947) (2) is acclaimed as one of the most virtuosic original poetic works in Hindi (3) from the Dvivedi era (4) of Hindi literature, the period from roughly 1900 to the ascent of Chayavad poetry in the 1920s. (5) Priyapravas remains known and admired among the Hindi-medium educated today. Its famous narrative revision of the Krishna story--in which Radha is not the lover of Krishna in a physical sense, but rather devotes herself to social service--represents to some contemporary critics a defunct progressivism, and an objectionably functionalist interpretation of bhakti (devotion). Its subject matter has been held up as an example of the Dvivedi era's didacticism and uncomfortable modernizing of traditional poetic topics. The neo-conservatism of Priyapravas was also epitomized for many by its use of Sanskrit meters at a time when free verse began to dominate elite poetry. The work is widely considered representative of the Dvivedi era as one of the linguistic standardization and Sanskritization. It is considered a model of suddh (pure) Hindi: many would submit, along with R. S. McGregor, that "the contribution of Priyapravas to the development of modern Hindi poetry ... lies, first and last, in demonstrating the successful use of Sanskritized Khari Boli in a work of major scope...." (6) Published during the flourishing of the "Hindi movement," it contains virtually no non-Sanskritic lexical items, providing a showpiece for the amnesiac agenda of the Hindi movement in its effort to create a Hindi literature that excluded "Urdu." (7) This essay will address the linguistic aspects of Priyapravas, both in the words of the author in his "Introduction" and in the work's various editions, of 1914, 1921, and the vulgate of 1941, through which some complex aspects of the process of standardization of Hindi are apparent. An "archaeology" of the layered evolution of this text will provide a window onto the linguistic terrain of early modern poetic Hindi. (8) Hindi authors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as the well-known Maithilisaran Gupta and Gupta's mentor Mahavir Prasad Dvivedi, the editor after whom the "Dvivedi era" was named, sought to define a "Hindi" in contradistinction to both the "Hindustani" of common speech and the Persian-inflected "Urdu" of poetry and administration. Among them was "Hariaudh," (9) tax officer of Azamgarh district, United Provinces, who in Priyapravas wrote some 1700 verses in a Hindi he designated as "Khari Boli" (current speech), (10) the term still often used today to designate "standard" Hindi within the variants of its widespread use as a lingua franca. The late nineteenth century saw new experiments in Hindi prose and poetry and new venues for their dissemination. In the early twentieth century there was an explosion of Hindi periodicals, including many literary journals publishing in a variety of genres and registers--ranging from Braj Bhasa poetry in its traditional meters, to extremely Sanskritized translations of Bengali novels, to prose and poetry in the Nagari script in the mixed "Hindustani" register and Urdu meters, to highly Sanskritic poetry in Sanskrit meters. "Nature description" in poetry (seemingly a corollary of "realism" in prose) was in vogue, as were pro-national and historical themes in both poetry and prose. All of these were present in the content of Priyapravas. Texts in Hindi were an "emerging market," in demand by growing numbers of vernacular-medium schools. Hariaudh's Priyapravas became part of the emerging modern Hindi canon in the 1920s, and owing chiefly to this fame, Hariaudh later joined the Hindi department faculty at Banaras Hindi University, at the personal invitation of Hindi reformer and nationalist Madan Mohan Malaviya.