The language of Hariaudh's Priyapravas: notes toward an archaeology of Modern Standard Hindi.

• Author: Ritter, Valerie
• Position: 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.

For Hariaudh, Khari Boli represented a distinct contrast from Braj Bhasa, still in use in poetry, a Hindi "dialect" of cosmopolitan literary stature with premodern linguistic features preserved in its canon and contemporaneous production, and also strongly associated with religious devotion to Krishna. Braj Bhasa itself had a long tradition of borrowing lexicon and features of form from Sanskrit, and Priyapravas might be seen as merely repeating this phenomenon. However, motivations for Sanskritization differed substantially in the context of the "Hindi movement," and furthermore, Priyapravas displayed a consonance with Sanskrit that surpassed that of most Sanskrit-inspired Braj Bhasa texts. For instance, the work maintains the highly determined kavya meters of Sanskrit throughout, and in several sections is recognizable as Hindi only by virtue of a few postpositions and copula verbs.

Priyapravas, as a cultural commodity widely disseminated by Hindi-movement supporters and Indian government monies, can be identified as a literary and linguistic object that expresses "a sensitive gauge of sentiments of belonging" (11) to a Hindu polity. The language of Priyapravas provides an artifact of a little-studied moment of linguistic engineering in a North Indian polity, as the definition of "Hindi" was carved out of more complicated realities. Expressing a demotic (though biased) linguistic ideal, and articulating its identity as against the supposedly decadent worldliness of both Urdu and courtly Braj Bhasa, this "Hindi" evoked equally a former Sanskritic cosmopolitanism (albeit filtered through nineteenth-century colonial thought), and a possible future Sanskritic linguistic cosmopolitanism (a linking lexicon between Indian languages), meant to be on a par with any literature of the world. The Hindi cosmopolitanism was thus envisioned as a "vernacularity" embedded in the judiciously revived remains of a premodern and largely Sanskrit literary culture, and a vernacular medium explicitly not-English, not-Urdu, and not-Bengali, which would speak for all of India on the international stage. The complex designs of Hindi supporters of this historical moment, linguistically and literarily, are reflected in the complexity of Priyapravas.

Hariaudh states initially, in the introduction to Priyapravas, that he offers this text with a feeling of devotion, and he self-denigratingly compares his work to those of the Braj Bhasa courtly poets, bhakti poets, the Sufi allegorical romance, and the recently discovered heroic epic Prithviraj Raso, but goes on to implore the reader: "[T]he right to serve (seva karna) the mother tongue belongs to everybody.... [The great poets of Hindi] have performed their adoration in a tearful, ecstatic state of bhakti. Am I not able to do puja to her [the mother language] with one very ordinary flower?" (12) In deference to the premodern literary giants, Hariaudh may have considered his offering only "ordinary" (sadharan), but perhaps he meant this term to characterize the language of his text, not only the text itself. The phrase "ordinary flower" could suggest the notion of Khari Boli Hindi as a language of the "authentic" and "ordinary" North Indian citizen. Ironically, the text's language displays an extraordinary nature, a quality that became even more pointed as the text evolved through its various editions from 1914 to 1941. Priyapravas, while being one of the first very long poems in an allegedly demotic modern Hindi, remains the epitome of a Sanskritized Hindi that few actually speak. Its status as kind of linguistic exemplar of the Hindi movement and Hariaudh's status in the canon as a "suddh Hindi" author are implied by the words of Congress president Rajendra Prasad, who in 1935 wrote that "one who wants to learn Sanskrit through Hindi should read the works of Hariaudh." (13)

THE VARIANTS: MULTIPLE PURPOSES

An examination of four editions of Priyapravas, which span almost thirty years, shows that Braj Bhasa and other grammatical elements now considered "non-standard" were gradually excised from the text, presumably to fulfill Hariaudh's vision of modern Hindi. There are five known edition of Priyapravas, one of which was a serial publication in a periodical of 1913. The book editions considered here include the first (1914), the second (1921), a fourth (or possibly third (14)) undated version, and the last "revised and corrected" edition (1941). The latter constitutes the vulgate, having been reprinted in stable form since 1941. The four book publications of the text are referenced as follows: (15)

A: KVP, (16) 1914 (17)

B: KVP, 1921

C: KVP[?], 1931 [?]

D: HSK, (18) 1941

Through an analysis of the variants between the editions, it is possible to discern some linguistic matters that troubled Hariaudh. Some cogent trends in the variants will be discussed below, and their possible significance in terms of the codification (19) of Modern Standard Hindi (MSH) will then be addressed.

STATEMENTS ON LITERARY LANGUAGE IN THE INTRODUCTION OF PRIYAPRAVAS

Since Hariaudh's view of modern Hindi was in many ways inseparable from his views on poetic aesthetics, before examining his revisions in linguistic terms, we must first take heed of Hariaudh's own statements about literary language, as presented in his introduction to Priyapravas, an introduction that remained virtually unchanged through the various editions. The introduction does not expound the innovations of the work entirely as they are remembered in literary history and apparent to us now. In its fifty-three pages Hariaudh gives not only the conventional prefatory apologies, (20) but also a preemptive defense of his particular use of meter, language, and subject matter. Throughout his discussion of these various topics, several interrelated concepts remain fundamental to his understanding of poetry: the well-known rasa ('essence' or 'mood'), komalata and kantata ('softness' and 'loveliness') as measures of verbal beauty, and samskar ('inborn faculty', 'instinct', or 'propensity', or 'impress of experience'). (21)...