ABSTRACT
The Ramcaritmanas of Tulsi Das (late sixteenth/seventeenth century) written in the Avadhi dialect, is generally regarded as the first outstanding work in the Hindi literary tradition. In Hindi, the transition from traditional poetry to the treatm ent of contem porary themes in adequate language, lagged, on the whole, behind parallel developments in Bengali and Urdu. The first genuinely modern w riter of any stature in Hindi was Hariscandra Bhartendu (1850-85). With the advent of Premcand (1880-1936) Hindi prose writing, in the shape of the socio political novel and short story, came of age. During the twentieth century his work was followed by the ahcalik upanyas schoohof novels of social criticism. Through the mid-twentieth century the nayl kavita and nayi kahani - the ‘new poetry’ and the ‘new story’ - movements have flourished, both preoccupied with m an’s predicam ent in a modern society.
