Bharatendu Harishchandra

The Story

Born in 1850 in Varanasi, Harishchandra was a boy genius who began writing in his teens and whose talent for language was extraordinary. He took up the cause of Hindi — at that time overshadowed by Urdu and English — and through his writings and his journals he made it the language of the educated people of the north.

He wrote in every form: plays that satirised the follies of his age, essays on history and culture, poems of devotion and patriotism, and journalism that stirred the public. His magazine, the Kavi Vachan Sudha, and his other journals were the cradle of the new Hindi literature, and his slogan — 'Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan' — became the cry of the age.

He died in 1885, at just thirty-five, but the movement he began — the Bharatendu era — had already transformed the language. He is honoured as the father of modern Hindi, the man who gave the millions of the north a language of literature and of nationhood.