4 verses · ~1 min
कौन पथ भूले, कि आये! स्नेह मुझसे दूर रहकर कौनसे वरदान पाये?
यह किरन-वेला मिलन-वेला बनी अभिशाप होकर, और जागा जग, सुला अस्तित्व अपना पाप होकर; छलक ही उट्ठे, विशाल! न उर-सदन में तुम समाये।
उठ उसाँसों ने, सजन, अभिमानिनी बन गीत गाये, फूल कब के सूख बीते, शूल थे मैंने बिछाये।
शूल के अमरत्व पर बलि फूल कर मैंने चढ़ाये, तब न आये थे मनाये- कौन पथ भूले, कि आये?
इति
The Poet
माखनलाल चतुर्वेदी
Makhanlal Chaturvedi
1889 · 1968
There is a poem that lives at the absolute center of the Indian literary imagination of sacrifice a poem in which a flower, offered for worship, instead asks to be pressed into the wreath of a martyr, to fall upon a brave man's chest as he marches into the cannon's mouth. That poem is Pushp Ki Abhilasha The Flower's Longing and its author, Makhanlal Chaturvedi, composed it with the hand of a man who had already offered himself in exactly the same spirit. He was imprisoned multiple times by British colonial authorities for his journalism and his poetry. He was the editor of Prabha, one of the luminous literary political journals of the independence era. He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi's very first prize in 1955, and the Padma Bhushan followed. But what no institutional recognition can fully capture is the texture of his moral life the extraordinary combination of burning patriotic fire and absolute personal humility, a man who wrote about martyrdom while quietly being available for it himself. Born in Babai in 1889, he lived to see the independence he had helped dream into existence, and then he wrote on for two decades more, finding in a free India new obligations for the literary conscience. He is the poet of pure sacrifice not sacrifice celebrated from a distance, but sacrifice inhabited, practiced, and offered without expectation of return.
Paired Painting
Echo of Love
In this evocative masterpiece, Hemendranath Mazumdar captures a moment of profound interiority, where the human spirit seems to commune with the silence of nature. The artist, celebrated for his exceptional ability to render the female form with both grace and atmospheric depth, portrays a woman whose posture suggests a gentle hesitation or a lingering memory. Her presence is suffused with a soft, romantic melancholy that defines the signature style of Mazumdar, who navigated the intersection of traditional Indian aesthetics and Western academic techniques. She stands as a bridge between the tangible world and the realm of emotion, her gaze inviting the viewer to contemplate the unspoken echoes of the heart. To behold this painting is to witness the quiet elegance of a bygone era, rendered with a brush that revered the tenderness of the human experience.
Open the viewer →