Why Writer Yashpal's Feminism Provokes Thought 50 Years On

A new anthology of essays revisits the legacy of the writer, who made ripples in Hindi writing with his depiction of women

- Aditya Mani Jha

The plot of Dada Comrade, the Hindi communist writer Yashpal's (1903-76) debut novel (originally published in 1941), was informed by the events of his own tumultuous youth. As an idealistic young student in Punjab in the 1920s, Yashpal joined the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA) alongside revolutionaries like Chandrashekhar Azad and Bhagat Singh. Some of his colleagues, however, did not appreciate the young Yashpal's romance with the 16-year-old Prakashvati Pal (later his wife) because they viewed marriage and domesticity as obstacles in the road to revolution. After a group of HSRA members unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate Yashpal in 1930, the organization was torn asunder and never really reunited, mirroring the rift between Yashpal and Azad. These events are fictionalized to varying degrees in the book, and the female lead Shailbala is based on aspects of Prakashvati.

In the introduction to her 2022 English translation of Dada Comrade, scholar Simona Sawhney had written, "Today, many readers may question the ways in which Yashpal conceived of equality, revolution and gender. Yashpal's feminism, for instance, is not the same as mine, but that does not prevent me from recognizing it as a feminism: a discourse that wrestled, in its own way, with questions of gender, sexuality, power and equality."

Sawhney's introduction sought to contextualize Yashpal's unique and complex engagement with gender politics. This endeavor is more fully realized in the recently released essay collection, Yashpal: On Gender and Revolutionary Thought, published by Orient BlackSwan and edited by Sawhney alongside Kama McLean.

The 17 essays collected here are based on some of Yashpal's best-known works: novels like Divya (1945), Gita (1946), Manushya Ke Roop (1949), short stories like Holi Ka Mazaak ('The Holi Joke') and