ABSTRACT
Sachchidanand Hiranand Vatsyayan is better known by his pseudonym Agyeya, a name he took in jail to escape the censorship of British authorities. Agyeya was able to make Sanskrit sweeter, lighter, and more full of mood by breaking it up. For this he turned to the medieval Sanskrit of Jayadeva's Gita Govinda (1977), not the monolith sonority of much classical Sanskrit poetry. In the 1920s and the 1930s the revolutionaries had their chief interlocutor in Gandhi. By the time of publication, in the historical moment of the Second World War and imminent Partition/Independence, there was no more a single unfragmented interlocutor or even coherent ideology-the War had certainly made nonsense of a dogmatic non-violence. Even the primary binary of the Freedom Movement versus Colonial Authority was breached, as the colonial authority was in the process of disempowering itself. A future that Gaura idealizes as being universal and truly inclusive in its scope.
