Chhayavaad

Chhayavaad, literally shadowism and often translated as Neo-Romanticism, was a Hindi poetry movement that flourished from roughly 1918 to 1938, marking a decisive turn toward mystical, deeply personal, nature-suffused lyric poetry in reaction against the more didactic, nationalistically direct verse of the preceding Dwivedi era in Hindi letters. The movement's four major poets, often called its four pillars, were Jaishankar Prasad, Suryakant Tripathi Nirala, Sumitranandan Pant and the poet Mahadevi Varma, whose work introduced a new emotional interiority, symbolic use of nature and formal lyricism to Hindi poetry, drawing loosely on both classical Sanskrit aesthetic tradition and the individualist sensibility of European Romanticism. Emerging during the height of the Indian independence movement, Chhayavaad's turn toward introspection and symbolic suggestion rather than direct political statement was itself sometimes read as a form of indirect cultural assertion, and the movement is generally regarded as the single most important development in modern Hindi poetry, establishing Hindi as a vehicle for lyric subjectivity on a level with the classical and Sanskritic traditions it drew upon.