| Durga Narayan Bhagwat | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1910 |
| Died | 2002 |
| Notable work(s) | Pais, Vyas Parva |
Durga Narayan Bhagwat (1910–2002), popularly known as Durga Bhagwat, was an Indian scholar, socialist and writer. She studied Sanskrit and Buddhist literature, roamed jungles of Madhya Pradesh to study tribal life, later returned to Mumbai as a researcher and wrote books in Marathi. Being a rebel by nature, she highly opposed Government during The Emergency (India) and was subsequently imprisoned. She also had refused to accept literary honors like Padma Shree and Jnanapeeth.
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Durga Bhagwat was born in 1910 in a Karhade Brahmin family settled in the then princely state of Baroda. The veteran Sanskrit scholar and social activist Rajaram Shastri Bhagwat was the brother of her grandmother. Her sister Kamala Sohoni went on to become the first woman scientist of India.
Durga Bhagwat was elected President of the 51st Marathi Sahitya Sammelan, held in Karad, in 1975. She was second woman President of Sammelan, after Kusumavati Deshpande since its inception in 1878. The Indian Government later on jailed her for the speech delivered by her during the Meet and open protest of the Government of India. She campaigned against the ruling Congress Party in 1977 general election, and remained opposed to it for the rest of her life. She decided not to accept any state-sponsored honours and declined an offer of Jnan Peeth, the most prestigious award for Indian writers.
Before chairing Marathi Sahitya Sammelan, she was elected chairperson of Tamasgir Meet (tamaasgeers typically come from among prostitutes), and she was very proud of it, considering it a greater honour between the two. She contented that if she wasn't born in a well-off Brahmin family, and were born to a prostitute, her destiny would be very different. She did social work among downtrodden sections of the society, and wandered jungles to study the nomads.
Durga Bhagwat's notable works include biography of Rajaram Shastri Bhagwat, Pais, a collection of articles based around religions, their literature and practises and Vyas Parva, a book about her study of Mahabharat. She studied religious literature, particularly Buddhist, works of Marathi saints from Dnyaneshwar to Tukaram, major Sanskrit works of Vyas and Adi Shankaracharya. Her book 'RRitu-chakra', detailing the nature (particularly trees and flowers) in each Indian month, is perhaps her most famous work. In early 1940s during her stay in forest, she tried to cook a vegetable which turned out to be poisonous and she was bed-ridden for years. The recovery was slow but it helped her observe the changes in the nature over the 12-month cycle, and spurred her to write articles on each seasons.
Even though good-looking in her young age, Durga Bhagwat never married. The reason according to her as told in a personal interview was that she spent several years of her youth in research, during which she was also the victim of food poisoning and by the time she recovered from it, it was too late.
Her idols throughout her life had been Vyasa, Gautama Buddha, Adi Shankaracharya, Henry David Thoreau, and Shridhar Venkatesh Ketkar.
| Preceded by Purushottam Laxman Deshpande |
Marathi Sahitya Sammelan - President 1975 at Karad |
Succeeded by Purushottam Bhaskar Bhave |