Mahadevi’s Viraha : Gender, Longing and the Nation

This paper explores the theme of viraha and the persona of the virahini in the writings of Mahadevi Varma, a prominent Hindi woman writer of the mid twentieth century. Varma’s poetry focuses on the persona of a virahini—a woman in love, solitary and ready to surrender herself to the intensity of her feelings for her lover. This emotional matrix has earned her the epithet of the ‘modern Mira’. A careful exploration of the indomitable self of Varma’s virahini not only marks her difference from the virahini of the Bhakti poets but also places the persona in the historical moment of India’s anti-colonial struggle, particularly Gandhian nationalism. This connects to Varma’s prose writings, which reflect upon various forms of longing and pain, focusing especially on feminine subjects in a colonised and patriarchal society. Here she records the stories of virahinis around her—the widows, child brides and abandoned women. In her essays and editorials, this pain and longing are transformed into logical and succinct arguments in favour of women and the need for social reform as a part of the movement for freedom. The article ends with deliberations on the persistent strains of viraha in Varma’s writing as the discourse of women and social reform is circumscribed by the benign paternalism of Gandhian thought that celebrates and limits the feminine subject within the folds of domesticity and tradition—the very limits that Varma’s virahini longs to overcome.