The socio-political message of mass unity intensified as Mahatma Gandhi, upon his return from South Africa in 1915, launched his anti-colonial campaigns for suffering peasants in Champaran, Bihar, in 1917 and against the zamindars in the Kaira district of Gujarat in 1918. A combination of Gandhi's campaigns and the Swadeshi movement exerted a great influence on Hindi writers and brought forth a new outpouring of nationalistic literature, with Munshi Premchand as the most powerful spokesman of freedom. The writer resigned from his job as inspector of Government schools and increased his active participation in Gandhi's movement to teach the villagers how to spin their own yarn and produce indigenous handmade cloth. The influence of Gandhi's Salt march (1930) and the second non-cooperation movement recast itself in his novel Karmabhumi, which propagates the effectiveness of public demonstrations. An anti-industrial outlook found its way in Premchand's Rangbhumi (1925). In the novel, Premchand interrogates the effects of Western industrialization through a blind beggar's struggles against a cigarette factory owner who establishes his factory next to the beggar's piece of land. Premchand invokes the idea that the consequences of industrialization are brutal: the beggar is killed in his attempts to save his little plot of land that is threatened by the factory. Premchand also expresses the helplessness of the peasants amid rising industrial colonialism by showing the expansion of the factory despite the villagers' protests. Hindu-Muslim dissensions deepened in the 1940s as the movement for a separate Pakistan became stronger. Hence, Hindu-Muslim unity became a popular theme for writers like Pant, Dvivedi, and Harivanshrai Bachchan, who lamented the possibility of the subcontinent's break-up and reconstructed in their poems a nation devoid of religious, class, and caste distinctions. Even the writings echoed modernity which was bathed by the rays of Nationalistic hues. Colonial modernity had indeed ushered an instigated plethora of cultural and political dimensions. The nexus of identity formation of the post colonial country and the formation of an individual tongue apart from the colonial language seemed to be the national fervour. Western influence on Hindi literature had cast its shadow by then. There had been a marked metamorphosis in the form, matter and the way of conglomerating the essence of Nationalism. Apart from the cultural and literary subjugation arose a new language which was influenced by the various "isms": Marxism, Feminism, Freudianism, etc within the framework of national penumbra. |