Bhartendu Harishchandra

Bhartendu Harishchandra was born on September 9, 1850, in Varanasi, the ancient city on the Ganges that was then part of British India ^[1]. His family belonged to the wealthy Agarwal merchant community, traders and bankers whose fortunes had long been tied to the commerce of Banaras. Literature ran in the household: his father, Gopal Chandra, wrote poetry under the pen name Girdhar Das and completed a devotional work on Krishna before dying young ^[2].

Loss arrived early. Harishchandra's mother died when he was a small child, and his father followed when the boy was about ten, leaving him in the care of relatives and family retainers ^[2]. The inheritance gave him financial independence but little supervision, and his formal schooling at Queen's College in Varanasi was brief and irregular. What the classroom did not supply, the city did. Varanasi in the mid nineteenth century was crowded with Sanskrit pandits, musicians, devotional singers and print shops, and the young heir absorbed languages and literary traditions on his own terms, gaining working knowledge of Sanskrit, Braj Bhasha, Urdu, Bengali and English ^[1].

A journey made in his teens proved decisive. Traveling with his family to the pilgrimage town of Puri in Orissa, he encountered the Bengali literary revival then in full flower, with its new magazines, social criticism and experiments in prose drama ^[3]. The contrast with Hindi, which still lacked a comparable modern literature, struck him forcefully. He returned to Varanasi convinced that Hindi speakers needed books, journals and plays of their own, and he began translating a Bengali drama, Vidyasundar, as a first exercise ^[3].

Journalism became his first instrument. In 1868 Harishchandra launched the magazine Kavivachan Sudha, which printed poetry, essays and commentary and gathered contributors from across the Hindi speaking regions ^[2]. Five years later he founded Harishchandra Magazine, soon renamed Harishchandra Chandrika, a periodical that historians of the language credit with fixing the standards of modern Hindi prose ^[1]. He also started Bala Bodhini in 1874, a journal aimed at women readers, an unusual venture for its time and place ^[2].

These magazines did more than circulate writing. They created a public. Anyone asking who was Bhartendu Harishchandra in the 1870s would have found a man at the center of a growing network of poets, reformers and editors, a circle later remembered as the Bhartendu Mandal, which included writers such as Pratap Narayan Mishra and Badri Narayan Chaudhary Premghan ^[4]. Through his pages he argued for widow remarriage, questioned rigid caste practice, attacked the drain of Indian wealth under colonial rule, and campaigned for Hindi as the language of courts and schools in the North Western Provinces ^[3].

Recognition of his standing came in 1880, when scholars at Kashi, endorsing a proposal in the press, conferred on him the title Bhartendu, meaning moon of India ^[2]. The honorific replaced his given name in common usage, and it is under this title that his biography is written and his era named.

Drama was the field where Harishchandra's originality showed most clearly. Beginning with translations and adaptations from Sanskrit and Bengali, he moved to fully original plays that used the stage to examine his own society. Bharat Durdasha (1875) personified India as a suffering figure and dissected the causes of the country's decline, from internal division to colonial exploitation ^[3]. Andher Nagari (1881), a brisk satire about a city where everything sells at the same price and justice is a lottery, remains one of the most frequently performed Hindi plays, its title now a common idiom for misrule ^[4].

Other works extended his range. Satya Harishchandra (1876) retold the legend of the truthful king, Neel Devi drew on Rajput history, and Prem Jogini turned a sharp eye on the holy city of Banaras itself, including its hypocrisies ^[3]. In these scripts he worked out conventions for a theater that barely existed in Hindi before him: stage directions, prose dialogue in the everyday register, and songs woven into the action. Literary historians conventionally date modern Hindi drama from his career ^[1].

His larger achievement was linguistic. Harishchandra championed Khari Boli, the dialect of the Delhi region, as the proper vehicle for Hindi prose, while continuing to compose much of his poetry in the older literary language of Braj Bhasha ^[1]. The essays, travel accounts and criticism he published in his journals demonstrated that the new prose could handle argument, description and humor. The half century of Hindi writing that his example set in motion, roughly 1868 to 1900, is known to scholarship as the Bharatendu Yug, the age of Bhartendu ^[4]. Among Bhartendu Harishchandra achievements, this founding of a usable modern prose ranks first; contemporaries and successors alike called him the father of modern Hindi literature ^[2].

Harishchandra married Manna Devi when both were young, in keeping with the customs of his community, and the couple had children of whom a son, Brajratna Das, later wrote about his father's life and edited his works ^[2]. Family wealth shaped his habits as much as family literary tradition did. He spent without restraint on books, on the theater, on hospitality for the writers who gathered around him, and on charity, and the fortune he inherited was largely gone well before his death ^[3].

His religious life centered on devotion to Krishna in the Vallabha tradition of Vaishnavism, and a large share of his poetry consists of devotional verse in Braj Bhasha ^[1]. The same man who satirized priestly greed on stage wrote tender bhakti lyrics, a combination that biographers treat not as contradiction but as the normal breadth of a Banaras man of letters. He was also a collector and patron, interested in history, archaeology and old manuscripts, and he corresponded with scholars and reformers well beyond his city ^[4].

Contemporary accounts describe a sociable, quick witted figure, generous to the point of self ruin, equally at ease in a music gathering, a religious assembly or an editorial argument. Among the plainer Bhartendu Harishchandra facts is this: he treated his inheritance as fuel for a literary movement rather than as capital to preserve ^[3].

The final decade of his life was his most productive and his most difficult. Money troubles deepened through the late 1870s as the magazines, the theater ventures and his open handed patronage consumed what the family banking house had built ^[3]. He kept writing at a relentless pace, turning out plays, essays, poems and journalism, and kept his periodicals alive even when they returned nothing.

His politics sharpened in these years. In essays and in a much noted 1884 speech at Ballia on the progress of Hindi, he tied the fate of the language to the economic and moral condition of the country, urging his audience to use their own tongue, examine their own failings and resist the loss of Indian wealth to Britain ^[4]. The phrase he pressed on readers, that one's own language is the root of all progress, became a slogan of the later Hindi movement ^[2].

Tuberculosis, then untreatable, ended the career. Harishchandra died in Varanasi on January 6, 1885, at the age of thirty four ^[1]. He left an unfinished play, Sati Pratap, and a body of work astonishing for so short a life, conventionally counted at well over a hundred titles across drama, poetry, essay, translation and journalism ^[2].

Few writers give their name to an age. The decades after 1868 in Hindi letters are taught as the Bharatendu Yug, and the periodization itself is a measure of how completely his journals, his prose style and his circle defined the field ^[4]. The writers he gathered and encouraged carried the work forward into the twentieth century, when Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi's generation consolidated the Khari Boli prose that Harishchandra had championed ^[1].

Institutional memory has kept pace. The Government of India instituted the Bharatendu Harishchandra Awards in 1983 to honor original writing in Hindi journalism and mass communication ^[5]. A drama school in Lucknow, the Bharatendu Natya Academy, bears his name, as do streets, colleges and literary prizes across the Hindi belt. Andher Nagari continues to be staged by professional and student companies, its satire on arbitrary power finding new targets in every era ^[4].

Scholars continue to argue about him: about the tension between his loyalist gestures toward the Crown and his biting critique of colonial economics, and about his role in binding the Hindi cause to a wider cultural nationalism ^[3]. What no account of the Bhartendu Harishchandra biography disputes is the founding act. He found Hindi a language without a modern literature and left it with drama, journalism, criticism and a reading public, all built in seventeen working years ^[2].