Useful absences and the nature of the modern: Ayodhyasimh Upadhyay 'Hariaudh' (1865--1947), his 'Priyapravas' (1914), and Hindi poetry

This dissertation is a study of the life and works of Ayodhyasim˙h Upadhyay "Hariaudh" (1865--1947), and an analysis of the language and content of Priyapravas ( The Sojourn of the Beloved) (1914), his most famous literary work. Priyapravas was the first original epic-length poem in modern Hindi, well known for its Sanskritized diction and its revisionist content. It is based upon the Radha-Krishna story, but alters the content such that Krishna is a civic leader gone to Mathura to work for the people. Radha, conventionally Krishna's lover-consort, is re-invented as a chaste altruist, who reinterprets the meaning of bhakti as social service to the world after having an epiphanous vision of Krishna in nature. Despite the unorthodox nature of its content and its modern language, the work is steeped in classical form and metaphor, and centered around the experience of viraha (pain in the absence of the beloved), a theme of South Asian poetry generally.; I present the full complexity of Hariaudh's ouevre and personal identity as a litterateur in a survey of his life and works. I then analyze Hariaudh's avowed linguistic and canonical agenda in Priyapravas and the revelations of the variant editions for the history of the development of Modern Standard Hindi. The character of Radha and the function of nature are then analyzed at length. My analysis of Priyapravas reveals two central tropes that facilitated Hariaudh's goal of crafting a modern rendering of his story, while still within the domain of traditional poetics: the figure of the nayika (heroine), embodied in Radha, and "nature poetry." Both were utilized multivalently, to express both precolonial and also "modern" or "western" literary values at once. Both were fundamentally expressions of the literary category srn˙gara rasa, then being rejected in favor of the literary goals of usefulness, realism, and Victorian propriety. Absence emerges as a uniting theme of the work, in regard to the nature of its language, its revisionist content, and its plot structure. Through particular and consciously executed elisions, Hariaudh effected the "modernity" of his text.