By Tabsassum Begum*
Despite the immense popularity enjoyed by the poetry of Kabirdas and Tulsidas in Hindi society as well as world literature, modern Hindi public discourse and criticism have often viewed "popularity" with suspicion. Especially in the realm of poetry, elitist critics have generally considered refinement to be synonymous with obscurity. As a result, even though enlightened critics engage in critical encounters with a text and manage to extract multiple meanings, the possibility of the work acquiring new meanings remains open for an infinite time.
This tension is captured perfectly by Ghalib: "The pompous claim of dignity / Despite its meaninglessness / What shall we call / The beloved's style of feigned indifference!" Senior critic Ravi Ranjan’s book, "The Sociology of Popular Hindi Poetry", breaks this inertia by proposing to discuss the popularity of poetry not merely as a matter of numbers or applause statistics, but as a complex cultural process. This intervention becomes essential at the point where elitist criticism dismisses simplicity as superficiality.
Leo Lowenthal, in "Literature and Mass Culture", established that popular art forms serve as documents of a society's psychological history. On the same ground, this book regards popularity as a historical and ideological construct. For Ravi Ranjan, Antonio Gramsci's theory of "cultural hegemony" and his reflections on popular literature serve as a guiding thread. According to Gramsci, power operates not merely through coercion, but through the construction of consent.
Ravi Ranjan argues that popular poetry takes shape in this cultural battlefield of consent—sometimes nourishing the system, while at other times creating cracks within it, generating a potential consciousness. The book establishes that the sociology of popular poetry is the study of the continuous struggle between the poet's sensibility and society's structure. It views popularity as a historical, social, and intellectual practice rather than a self-evident aesthetic achievement.
In the introduction, the author makes it clear that the relationship between literature and society cannot be understood through simple reflection theory. Marx's statement that "Men make their own history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing" applies fully here. Poetry is neither a direct imitation of society nor a completely autonomous structure. Gramsci's concept of cultural hegemony becomes the ideological backbone, establishing that hegemony penetrates society's common sense through consent.
Ravi Ranjan attempts to grasp this dialectic from both ends, though gaps remain. For example, there is no discussion regarding the increasing practice of writing ghazals for the stage or mushairas, despite the existence of masterful collections like Trilochana’s "Gulab aur Bulbul" or Shamshher’s ghazals. Furthermore, the absence of deep analysis concerning Harivansh Rai Bachchan’s "Madhushala" or the works of Gopal Singh Nepali is a missed opportunity for a scholar of his mastery.
Despite this, the book’s success lies in its compiling of theoretical reflections on popular literature to present an insightful analysis of Hindi poetry. Raymond Williams’s concept of the "structure of feeling" is particularly important here. Williams argues that literary pieces express not only established ideologies but emerging feelings that have not yet fully formed. Popular poetry often gives voice to these incomplete, unpolished feelings.
The author challenges the tendency to equate complexity with seriousness and simplicity with superficiality, noting that simplicity can contain astonishing depth. The book also shatters the illusion that "popular" and "folk" are synonymous. As Shishir Kumar Das notes in the appendix, "Popular Literature and Reading Public", "folk" is a historically changing world of experience. Popularity sometimes stems from the folk, but is often constructed by the market and digital media.
The chapter on the popularity of Ramdhari Singh Dinkar’s "Rashmirathi" is a decisive turning point. The author confronts stereotypes that confine Dinkar to sentimental nationalism, instead reading the character Karna as a symbol of caste-based humiliation and social exclusion. Linking this to Dr. Ambedkar’s statement that caste is a division of laborers, the author connects the popularity of "Rashmirathi" to its political significance.
A contemporary focus of the book is poetry emerging through social media, taking Marshall McLuhan’s "the medium is the message" seriously. The term "Facebook poetry" describes a genre where popularity is determined by visuality, immediacy, and algorithmic spread. Often appearing as an immediate moral response to events, this poetry sometimes lacks the creative "aura" Walter Benjamin spoke of in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction".
The book transitions into sociological depth by analyzing serious poets like Ashok Vajpeyi and Arun Kamal on digital portals. For poets ranging from Nagarjun to Anamika, the question of popularity recedes in favor of how they give voice to the inconsistencies of their era. This section proves that Ravi Ranjan treats the sociology of literature as a living discourse connected to poetic sensibility rather than a mechanical literary discipline.
The analysis of Arun Kamal serves as a powerful example of how popularity connects to anti-establishment morality. In poems like "Bulḍojara kī gāthā", Gramsci’s "potential consciousness" operates directly. The author shows how Arun Kamal’s poems witness the changing reality of Indian society, pulling literature out of drawing-room luxury and placing it on the ground of the life experiences and struggles of common people.
A theoretical achievement of the book is its view of popularity as a cultural condition operating at the levels of production, distribution, and reception. Pierre Bourdieu's concept of "cultural capital" explains why elitist criticism views popular poetry with suspicion; it reaches those who do not possess "legitimate" cultural capital. This connects popularity to the question of democracy: is literature only for the highly educated, or is it for those whose life experiences find words for the first time?
Ultimately, "The Sociology of Popular Hindi Poetry" establishes that popularity and value are not opposed but bound in a complex, conflictual relation. Poetry is a form of social labor and memory, keeping alive experiences overlooked by formal history. It identifies cracks in the language of power, offering a "competitive equilibrium" between intellect and emotion that transcends flat sloganeering.
The book challenges critics to move beyond the binary of elitism and populism. It asserts that poetry’s significance lies in its preservation of human dignity and social justice. While technology causes the decay of "aura," it also prepares the ground for the democratization of art. This book does not remain limited to interpretation but emerges as a profound ideological manifesto for poetry’s responsibility in building a justice-loving society.
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*Academic Consultant, Centre for Distance Education, Maulana Azad National Urdu University, Hyderabad. This is the abridged version on the author's original paper
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