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Shrikant Verma (1931–1986) was a central figure in the Nai Kavita movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Born in Bilaspur, he did his Masters in Hindi from Nagpur University in 1956, and then moved to New Delhi, where he worked in journalism and politics. Verma served as special correspondent for Dinman, a major Hindi periodical, from 1966 to 1977. In 1976, he was elected a member of the Rajya Sabha on a Congress ticket, and served as spokesman of the party through the late 1970s to the early 80s. He published two collections of short fiction, a novel, a travelogue, literary interviews, essays and five collections of poetry. Verma was a visitor at the Iowa International Writing Program twice (1970–1971 and 1978), and won the Tulsi Puraskar (1976), the Kumaran Asan Award, and the Sahitya Akademi Award (posthumously, for Magadh, in 1987).
Rahul Soni is a writer, editor and translator based in India. He founded and, from 2008 to 2012, edited Pratilipi, a literary journal, and Pratilipi Books, an independent publishing imprint. He is chief editor at Writer's Side, a literary agency and manuscript assessment service. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Almost Island, Biblio, Dhauli Review, Hindi, Indian Literature, Out of Print Magazine, Poetry International Web, Pratilipi, Recours au Poème, Tehelka, etc. He is currently working on a translation of Geetanjali Shree's novel Tirohit (HarperCollins, 2013) as well as on Shrikant Verma's Magadh (Almost Island Books, 2013). He was a Charles Wallace Visiting Fellow in Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia in 2010, and received the Sangam House Fellowship in 2012.
Shrikant Verma's Magadh invokes names from history, myth and literature – of places (Magadh, Vaishali, Kapilvastu, Amravati, Hastinapur) and of people (Chandragupta, Amrapali, Vasantsena, Rohitashva) – to chronicle the decline of once great empires. In a language that is at once sparse and richly allusive, direct and elliptical, repetitive and paradoxical, he lays bare the confusions and contradictions of an era of decadence.
The 56 poems that make up this collection take on a variety of voices – commoners, wanderers, people close to power (but never in power) – that range in tone from nostalgic to ironic to bitter to outraged. While Cavafy, Borges and Calvino are easy touchstones, it is Verma's keen political eye that sets him apart, and Magadh remains a unique book – one of the most important collections of Hindi poetry, and the masterpiece of one of India's greatest poets.
For immediate context, it is useful to remember that Verma, besides being a poet, was also a politician – a member of the Congress party which stayed in power for 30 years after independence only to taste defeat in 1977 after having forced the country into two years of Emergency, which in effect turned the nation into a police state, and are widely seen as the blackest hours of Indian democracy. Verma was the spokesman of the Congress party then, and had the opportunity to observe at close quarters what the abuse of power could turn a once idealistic government into. The poems are undoubtedly a product of their time, yet remain both historical and timeless.
