The Political Poet

A new edition of Shrikant Verma’s Magadh puts the spotlight back on a classic

- Sopan Joshi

MAGADH By Shrikant Verma EKA (WESTLAND)

The rich folk culture of the Narmada region produced an astonishing array of poets and writers. Vinod Kumar Shukla, currently the toast of Hindi poetry, is from Raipur in Chhattisgarh. Nearby Bilaspur is where Shrikant Verma was born in 1931. His verse had the ready lyricism of the regional idiom.

Verma was an exception, however, in several ways. A successful journalist in the 1960s, he became an MP in 1976, during the Emergency, and was a close advisor to Indira Gandhi. Verma’s catchy slogans helped revive her political career.

Yet, the Narmada inside Verma did not dry up on the banks of the Yamuna. His last major compilation of poems in 1984 was titled Magadh; he died of cancer two years later. The poems are a majestic assault on political power. If the epic form celebrates the state, wars, bravery and classical culture, Magadh is an epic unravelling of these. The dystopic wasteland on the other side of utopia!

The poems are set in ancient cities like Pataliputra and Kashi. But you can never be sure Verma isn’t talking current affairs. Fiction, history, nonfiction...everything mashed up into a timeless depiction of the human condition. The insanity of