Bhartendu Harishchandra

Benares' Moon of India — the father of modern Hindi letters who wrote Urdu ghazals as Rasa. Bhartendu Harishchandra (1850–1885), born on 9 September 1850 at Benares, was the founder of modern Hindi literature and theatre — and a poet of Urdu who wrote under the pen name Rasa. Born into a wealthy family of Benares, he lost both his parents while still young, and his father Gopal Chandra was himself a poet. At fifteen he travelled with his family to the Jagannath temple at Puri, a journey that turned him toward the Bengal Renaissance and a life of writing. In 1880 the scholars of Kashi honoured him with the title Bharatendu — the Moon of India. He wrote in Hindi, Braj, Urdu, Sanskrit, Bengali and English, and he made the stage a mirror of his country: his plays Bharat Durdasha, Satya Harishchandra, Neel Devi and Andher Nagari spoke of a land in chains, while his journals Kavi Vachan Sudha, Harishchandra Magazine and Bala Bodhini carried reform, women's education and the Swadeshi cause. Beneath the public work he wrote Urdu ghazals in the classical manner — love and longing, the festival of Holi, devotion to Krishna, and the shortness of the world that keeps neither Alexander nor Jamshid. He died at Benares on 6 January 1885, aged only 34.