मैथिलीशरण गुप्त

The title Rashtriya Kavi National Poet was conferred upon Maithili Sharan Gupt by Mahatma Gandhi, and it was the most accurate literary judgment the Mahatma ever made. At a moment in history when Hindi literature stood at a crossroads between a dying classical tradition and an uncertain modern one, Gupt performed a double act of rescue: he saved the dignity of Khari Boli as a medium worthy of serious literary ambition, and he recovered from the mythology of India the voices that centuries of male centered narrative had buried the Urmilas, the Yashodharas, the women who loved and suffered and persisted at the margins of the great epics while their husbands received all of history's attention.

His Bharat Bharati, released in 1912, became the literary proclamation of national self consciousness at a moment when such proclamation was both desperately needed and politically dangerous. He did not write merely about India's past glory he used that past to locate a moral standard against which the present could be measured and found responsible.

Gupt was a man of deep humility who built works of imperial scale. He stands at the very origin point of modern Hindi literature, the patriarch in whose shadow all subsequent poets grew.