Namwar Slngb
Kavita Ice Naye Pratiman
(Rajkamal Prakashan, New Delhi; 1968)
(Sahitya Academy Awardee-Hindi-1971)
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"Dr. Namwar Singh (born 1927) is a distinguished author and critic in Hindi. Born in a peasant family at Jiwanpur (Dist. Varanasi), Dr. Namwar Singh was educated at the Banaras Hindu University, obtaining the degree of Ph. D. in Hindi Literature in 1953. He then taught at Banaras and Sagar Universities. At present he is working as Professor and Head of the Hindi Department, Jodhpur University.
Dr. Namwar Singh wrote poetry during his student days. Soon he was influenced by Marxist thought, and joined the Progressive Writers movement. He published his first book of essays, Bakalam Khud, in 1951. Later he turned to literary criticism, and has published a number of works. He also edits the Hindi quarterly Alochana.
The Award book, Kavita ke Naye Pratiman, is his latest work of literary criticism first published in 1968. It is a comprehensive study of the New Poetry movement in Hindi emphasising the necessity for a new criteria to evaluate poetry. For its clarity of vision and analytic acumen, the work has been hailed as an outstanding contribution to contemporary Hindi literature." (Citation)
The new criteria springing up in the Hindi poetry after the Chhayavad have been marked by Namwar Singh, a noted Hindi critic, in his widely discussed critical work Kavita ke Naye Pratiman. The criteria are those of Realistic poetry: for example, poetic diction, ‘plainness of statement’, dramatic poetic structure, absurdity and irony, complexity and tension of experience, and honesty. These are related to both the form and content of poetry. The criteria concerning poetic diction, 'plainness of statement', and structure are related to the form while the other criteria are related to the content of poetry. What characterises Singh's approach is that he analyses neither of the two sets of criteria as independent in itself. He analyses the formal criteria in relation to the content and vice-versa. .
As Singh is a Marxist critic, there has been a long continued debate on his book since its publication; and it has been said that he has been influenced by American New-Criticism which is formalistic criticism. The charge is baseless, as he has not only discussed the new criteria relatively, but also established, referring to Muktibodh, the foremost Marxist poet of Hindi, that the value of poetry is ultimately determined by a consideration of the extent to which the world of poetry, created out of the dialectical relationship between form and content, is real, and to what extent it deepens and enriches our understanding of reality. Though Marxist literary criticism of Hindi has been successful in explaining the social contexts of poetry, it has failed in revealing the world that poetry creates. To establish the relative freedom of poetry and to analyse the new criteria coming into existence in the Realistic poetry i.e. Nayee Kavita of Hindi were the two tasks before Marxist literary criticism. Singh has done the job in a scholarly manner and thus placed the Hindi Marxist literary criticism on more sophisticated plane
Nand Kishore Nawal
(Source: Sahitya Academy Awards – Books and Writers – 1955-1978
Published by Sahitya Academy. ISBN 81 7201 014 1)
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