Chittadhar Hridaya

Chittadhar Hridaya (चित्तधर हृदय; born Chittadhar Tuladhar; 19 May 1906 – 9 June 1982) was a Nepalese poet.

He is regarded as one of the greatest literary figures from Nepal in the 20th century.

In 1920, he was married to Gyan Prabha Kansakar.

Hridaya was a member of the Nepal Bhasa renaissance.

He began his literary career when the Ranas did not permit writing in Nepal Bhasa, so authors published their works from abroad.

Hridaya wrote his first poem Buddhopasakya Pap Deshana which was printed in 1925 in Buddha Dharma magazine and published in Kolkata, India.

In 1930, he signed a petition to open a public library, and was arrested and fined along with the rest of the signers.

In 1933, an anthology of poems by Hridaya entitled Padya Nikunja was published in Kalimpong, India by SP and DP Upasak.

He wrote under the pen name Hridaya to avoid harassment by the government.

The government did not like his literary activities, and all the copies were confiscated by customs at Chisapani Gadhi before they could reach Kathmandu.

The anthology contained a poem entitled Mother which he had written while mourning his mother's death.

He had signed the poem "Motherless child" which the government took to mean that it had deprived the Newars of their mother tongue.

For this reason, the poem was deemed subversive; and in 1940, he was sentenced to six years in jail.

In 1941, he was jailed for five years by the Rana regime for writing a poem in Nepal Bhasa in a crackdown against the language.

Hridaya was born Chittadhar Tuladhar at Nyata Tunchhen (Nepal Bhasa: न्यत तुंछें) in Kathmandu to a family of hereditary Lhasa Newar traders.

His father was Drabya Dhar Tuladhar and his mother was Gyan Laxmi Tuladhar.

His sister Moti Laxmi Upasika was also a writer.

The family owned a business house in Lhasa, Tibet.

Hridaya did not join the ancestral occupation but worked to develop Nepal Bhasa literature.

Hridaya began his sentence on January 20, 1941.

His fellow inmate poets Siddhicharan Shrestha and Phatte Bahadur Singh had also been imprisoned for producing works in Nepal Bhasa.

While in jail, Hridaya produced his greatest work Sugata Saurabha, an epic poem on the life of the Buddha.

He had to write in secret in prison, and his sister Moti Laxmi Upasika smuggled out the scraps of paper on which he had scribbled the verses when she brought him his food.

While in jail from 1941 to 1945, Hridaya came into contact with artist Chandra Man Singh Maskey.

Hridaya trained under Maskey in secret, as he hid his writings from the prison guards.

He has produced a number of paintings in watercolor, pencil, and ink.

They depict Buddhist and Hindu deities and genre scenes.

The color illustrations in Sugata Saurabha were done by Maskey.

Following his release from prison on 11 November 1945, Hridaya produced a flurry of works in different genres.

He was a pioneer in writing modern short stories.

It was completed in 1946 after his release from prison, and published from Kolkata in 1949.

The epic has been described as providing an aesthetically pleasing and doctrinally sound comprehensive account of the Buddha's life, and also a magnum opus in Nepal Bhasa literature.

His Six Short Stories published in 1947 was a landmark in contemporary Nepal Bhasa literature.

In 1951, Hridaya got together with other prominent poets and writers and established Nepal Bhasa Parishad (Nepal Bhasa Council) to promote the institutional development of Nepal Bhasa.

It was inaugurated on 7 June 1953 by Buddha Maya Kansakar, the wife of poet Yogbir Singh Kansakar, amid a ceremony at the home of Tara Bir Singh at Chhatrapati.

Its office was later moved to his own home at Nyata Tunchhen.

Hridaya subsequently bequeathed the property to the council.

The title of Kavi Keshari (Lion among Poets) was conferred on him by King Mahendra of Nepal in 1956.

He wrote primarily in Nepal Bhasa but has created works in Nepali and Hindi too.

Hridaya dedicated his life to serving his mother tongue, rejecting a flourishing ancestral business and suffering imprisonment by an autocratic government.