explain the following reference to context :
O good soldier,
Know when you're beaten.
And now, that question
Which we just referred to in connection with the so-called language battle,
Let's put it this way:
Were we and those on behalf of whom we fought
The same folk?
Answers
Ans:- Raghuvir Sahay (1928-1990) is among the most significant figures on the modern literary scene in India. A
Hindi poet who belonged to a poliltical current which while calling for decolonisation of Indian cultural world,
did not fall into the dark world of nativism. While his comrades were fighting to dislodge English from its
position of socio cultural power, his poem simply titled Hindi challenged them to think through their Hindi
supremacists biases. The poem was translated from Hindi by Harish Trivedi and Daniel Weissbort
His voice is an expression of much wider concerns in that his work transcends the world of Hindi, the language in
which he wrote even as he belongs to it. Sahay belongs to a tradition of literature that looks forward rather than
to the past for inspiration, for whom the golden age would come when the aspirations of all the millions of
people are fulfilled. His concern for people was not romantic. It expressed itself in the voice of democracy and
scientific temper. The baggage that he carried with him of the past was one of the heritage of composite culture
and a rational expression whose roots lay within the movements for social emancipation in the struggle against
colonialism. Like Tagore, Iqbal and Faiz, his is the voice of the entire subcontinent.
Sahay, like most literary figures of his generation was not merely a significant poet. He was a writer-journalist, a
social commentator, a literary critic and a partisan for secularism. From late 60's till the beginning of 80's he was
editor of Hindi weekly Dinman, whose status as the best political-social journal in Hindi is yet to be surpassed.
He advocated the use of a language that preserved the heritage of Hindustani, the Hindi-Urdu synthesis.