Dushyant Kumar

Bijnor's voice of the common person — the pain must melt, and from this Himalaya a Ganga must flow. Dushyant Kumar (1931–1975), born in September 1931 at Rajpur Navada, a small village in Bijnor district, was the poet who carried the ghazal into Hindi and made it the voice of the common person. He took his MA in Hindi from Allahabad University, where his literary life began, and worked as a scriptwriter at All India Radio in Delhi before moving to Bhopal, where he served at Akashvani and in the state's cultural and language department. He wrote poems, novels and plays — Ek Kanth Vishpayi and Mann Ke Kon among them — but his name rests on the ghazal: in plain, spoken Hindi he gave the old form a new anger and a new hope, writing of hunger, of locked doors, of lamps that never reach the city. His collection Saaye Mein Dhoop — Sunlight in the Shade — appeared in 1975, the year of his death, and its lines were taken up in movements and on the streets, quoted in parliaments and protests alike. He died of a heart attack at Bhopal on 30 December 1975, aged 44; a manuscript museum in Bhopal keeps his papers.