Navan Dashak : Naven Dashak Ki Hindi Kavita Par Ekagra

This book by the young poet, novelist, and critic, Avinash Mishra, presents his systematic reflections on nine poets of the 1990s. In these articles, his approach to the poetry and poets of the 1990s, departing from the accepted and prevalent conventions of contemporary criticism, fills a significant void in Hindi criticism and offers reassurance about the future of both poetry and criticism. In his own words: The 1990s is a time of a storm-like pursuit of the new. In this era, much is doomed to become irrelevant, becoming part of the past. Here, one situation is rapidly replacing another. This is a time for redefining cultural pulsations, human relationships, and the world. This is a time for reflections on ideology. This is a time of globalization, of losing its roots and ancient interests and becoming muddled in the marketplace. The literature of this era, while living within the market, is essentially a literature of anti-market, or more logically, anti-marketism. In this grand landscape, Hindi poetry expanded its scope considerably. It began to look beyond its own boundaries. It cast its gaze back at itself and the people passing by, thus identifying its true enemies. Its work ceased to be limited. It expanded to the margins. It kept pace with the pace and reality. It remained truly contemporary, and it also prioritized the task of appearing very different from the poetry that immediately preceded it. In these articles, Avinash Mishra has captured this crucial poetic time in the totality required for this task. As a preface, he has written a long article specifically for this book, offering a birds-eye view of the poets who emerged in the last years of the twentieth century. Again, in his own words, Hindi criticism is criticized for often valorizing the established and neglecting the present. In this sense, this book of criticism is entirely addressed to the present.