In the landscape of modern Indian poetry, few works cut as deeply as Kedarnath Singh’s “Hindi in JNU.” The poem, written by the Jnanpith Award-winning poet who passed away in 2018, is not merely a reflection on a prestigious university campus but a profound meditation on the fractures running through contemporary Indian intellectual life.
Through deceptively simple imagery—stone, sweat, rice, a towel—Singh constructs a devastating critique of how our institutions of higher learning, for all their claims to progressivism, remain fundamentally alien spaces for the very people whose labour sustains them.
The poem opens with an intimate gesture of belonging. “Yes, this is my home,” the poet declares, but immediately complicates this assertion by reaching back to a primordial memory: “and perhaps this is the very stone on which I rested my head to sleep—that first axe / which hunted the very first tree.” This stone carries the smell of sweat, “a smell that perhaps belongs to the body of that first woodcutter— / the smell from which / all the modernity of my campus draws its nourishment.”
In these opening lines, Singh establishes the central paradox that will unfold throughout the work. The gleaming edifice of modern knowledge, with its seminars and theories and intellectual sophistication, rests parasitically on the labour of those it subsequently excludes. The woodcutter’s sweat becomes the invisible foundation upon which the “city of knowledge” is built, yet that same woodcutter, or his modern equivalent, cannot find his way through its corridors.
Singh’s genius lies in how he renders this abstraction through tangible, sensory detail. The campus becomes a “settlement of scholars” where houses stand “like many stones joined to one stone.” The rule governing this space is that “every house remains closed within itself / and open within itself.” Physical proximity coexists with emotional distance; the fragrance of rice cooking in one kitchen drifts into another, yet no conversation passes between them. One person’s silence travels to another’s flower vases, but that silence is never broken.
Most devastatingly, memories have become “washed clean by our individual shares of rain” and grown “so pure and so transparent / that here no one remembers anyone else’s number!” The intimacy of community life, where neighbours knew each other’s names and struggles, has been replaced by the polite amnesia of intellectual life, where we know theories but forget faces.
The poem’s turning point arrives with the appearance of a middle-aged man, “with a towel draped over his shoulder / and a bundle in his hand.” He carries with him a word the poet has not encountered in a long time: “angua cha”—a thin, coarse towel, the kind worn by labouring people. This ordinary object, this piece of cloth that carries the sweat of fieldwork and the dust of village roads, becomes an intruder in the settlement of scholars.
The man is lost, searching for a house number, knocking on doors that remain shut. When he finally gives up and begins walking away “slowly from the city of knowledge,” the poet experiences his departure as something “falling on my back, lash after lash.”
What follows is a moment of desperate outcry. The poet shouts, “Scholars! Open your doors! / He is going away. / He wanted to ask something, / he wanted to know something. / Stop him... stop that man with the angu cha...” But the cry, we learn, was never actually heard. In one of the most powerful self-revelations in modern poetry, the poet confesses: “when I was shouting / in reality I was silent, / just as everyone else was silent. / And in my place / it was my Hindi / that was shouting alone / in the crowded campus...”
This admission cuts to the heart of the intellectual’s predicament. The poet, despite his awareness and his anguish, remains as immobilized as the scholars behind their closed doors. His protest exists only internally; outwardly, he conforms to the same silence that surrounds him. But his language, Hindi—the language of that man with the towel, the language of folk memory and lived experience—refuses to be quiet. It shouts alone, a solitary voice of conscience in a space that has rendered itself deaf to everything outside its own discourse.
The image of the scorpion that appears earlier in the poem now gains its full weight. In this settlement of scholars, “even a flower is a question / and a scorpion merely a word.” The living terror of the scorpion, its sting and the fear it evokes, has been reduced to a linguistic unit, a topic for academic discussion. The intellectuals who theorize about everything from their secure rooms would react very differently if an actual scorpion entered their quarters—all their people-ism and philosophical detachment would collapse into immediate concern for their own safety. This hypocrisy, this stone-heartedness that can feel for humanity in the abstract but not for the human being at the door, is what the poem relentlessly exposes.
Singh’s critique extends beyond any single institution to encompass the entire structure of modern knowledge production. The university becomes an “island of knowledge” where “experience” is exiled and only “words” remain. The man with the towel represents that majority India which possesses the capital of lived experience but lacks the linguistic and cultural keys to enter the fortress of institutional knowledge. When he walks away disappointed, it is not merely one person leaving; it is the exile of authenticity from the realm of learning.
The poem’s relevance only deepens in our contemporary moment. Today’s digital intellectuals, performing their people-ism through hashtags and social media posts, replicate exactly the condition Singh diagnoses. They will photograph the man with the towel and present him as an aesthetic object, but if that same man knocked on their car window or stood at their gate, their response would mirror the closed doors of the poem.
Their sensitivity remains virtual, their activism algorithmic, their connection to the people mediated through screens that allow them to remain safely “closed within themselves and open within themselves.”
What makes “Hindi in JNU” enduring is its refusal to exempt the poet himself from this critique. The admission of silence, of complicity in the very system he mourns, lends the work an honesty that distinguishes it from mere polemic. Singh places himself in the same dock as the scholars he implicitly criticizes, acknowledging that awareness without action, feeling without response, leaves one as stone-hearted as those who never felt at all.
The poem ultimately asks a question that every intellectual must confront: What is knowledge for? If our learning cannot open a door for a lost man, if our language cannot answer the questions of those who carry the smell of sweat on their bodies, if our theories leave us unable to recognize our own neighbours—then that knowledge is merely “a lifeless stone,” devoid of the warmth that makes us human.
The solitary shouting of Hindi, that folk consciousness which refuses to be silenced even in the most sophisticated spaces, remains the poem’s enduring challenge to every closed door and every stone heart that calls itself learned.
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*Professor & former Head (Retd.) Department of Hindi, University of Hyderabad. This is the abridged version of the author's original paper
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