ARTICLE Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh and the Passing of Soviet India Vikrant Dadawala History and Literature, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA ABSTRACT This essay traces the literary afterlife of Hindi writer Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh (1917–64). Like many in his generation, Muktibodh’s life and world-view were transformed by his encoun- ter with communism during the years of World War II. Though much of his poetry remained unpublished while he was alive, Muktibodh was posthumously recognised as one of the most sig- nificant writers of the Nehruvian period and has been a cult fig- ure in the Hindi literary world since the 1970s. By tracking the influence of Muktibodh’s elliptical poetry and prose on modern Hindi literature and cinema, this essay reconstructs the rise and fall of the late colonial vision of a possible ‘Soviet India’. KEYWORDS Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh; Hindi literature; Indian New Wave; Mani Kaul; post-colonial print culture; South Asia and the Cold War; Soviet India Let the friendship between our peoples be as strong as metal from the Bhilai Metallurgical Factory. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, addressing the Indian parliament in 1960 This essay traces the long afterlife of Hindi writer Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh (1917–64). By tracking Muktibodh’s afterlife in modern Hindi literature and cinema, I reconstruct the rise and fall of ‘Soviet India’, a vision of the future that hovered on the horizon of possibility through the first three decades following Indian Independence, tantalisingly close but always just out of reach. I use the phrase Soviet India to describe two distinct but intertwined phenomena that defined the contours of the Indian post- colonial experience during these years: (1) the utopian but ultimately illusory Soviet- inspired vision of a possible future that captivated many Indian radicals at the moment of decolonisation (both within and outside the Communist Party), as well as (2) the real, substantial influence that the Soviet Union exerted on Indian economic policy between 1955 and 1980, the most compelling symbol of which was the giant Indo- Soviet steel plant set up at Bhilai (then in Madhya Pradesh) in 1955. 1 I read the poetry and prose of Muktibodh, whose most productive literary period lay between 1955 and ß 2021 South Asian Studies Association of Australia CONTACT Vikrant Dadawala vikrant.dadawala@gmail.com 1. For more on the Soviet inspirations for the Nehruvian policies of import substitution and public-sector-led industrialisation, see David C. Engerman, The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2021.1989158