Muktibodh biography of martin
Muktibodh, a lonely poet, who was avant-garde in his times
In a dim-lit private room in the AIIMS that Muktibodh lay dying after a prolonged illness on September 11, 1964. I was helplessly watching a major Hindi poet breathe his last before completing 47 years of age and seeing his first collection of poems published. It was tragic that even his classic, the long poem ‘Andhere Me’ was not yet published in ‘Kalpana’ which brought it out soon after. I was more than 23 years old and was teaching in a college in New Delhi.
I had known Muktibodh barely for 7 years, from 1957 to 1964. He had not made a success of anything in life; he wrote long poems in the days of short poems; he questioned his Marxist fellow writers; he was carving out a new aesthetics for Hindi poetry which had few admirers and his physical and economic circumstances were wholly inadequate. He was not drawn to success though he never wallowed in his failures. Endowed with a deeply interrogative mind, a robust critiq Muktibodh biography of martin short.