A pioneer of a renaissance in Hindi Literature, Acharya Shivpujan Sahai was born on August 9, 1893, at Unwans, a village in the Buxar district of Bihar. He came from a middle-class family with some landed property.
He received his early schooling in the village pathshala and matriculated from Kayastha Jubilee Academy, Arrah in 1912. Under the influence of his brother-in-law, a poet of Brajbhasha, Shivpujan Sahai, began his long and impressive association with poetry and journalism, an association that was to prove immensely beneficial and enriching. Pt. Ishwari Prasad Sharma, dramatist, and journalist, and Surya Kant Tripathi Nirala and Jaishankar Prasad, two great Hindi poets influenced him deeply. Other notable influences were Bal Gangadhar Tilak‘s Geeta Rahasya and the political philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi.
Shivpujan Sahai made his greatest contribution to the nationalist movement between 1921 and 1947. He supported the nationalist program of Congress and encouraged self-confidence among the people. He was liberal in social matters, deprecating the seclusion of women and advocating for female education and remarriage of young widows. However, he opposed the introduction of western education in India, advocating instead a national education with a grounding in the Vedic and Puranic history of India.
A pioneer of Hindi literary journalism in India, Shivpujan Sahai edited and published numerous Hindi journals like ‘Marwari Sudhar‘, ‘Samanwaya‘, ‘Adarsh‘, ‘Matwala‘, etc. As an eminent Hindi story writer, novelist and biographer, he wrote about 400 short stories, 67 biographies, and over 150 literary articles. He became so famous as an editor of the Hindi language that most of the Hindi writers of the time right from Nirala, Prasad, and Premchand to upcoming writers got their works edited by him. His novel ‘Dehati Dunia‘ has been acclaimed as the first regional novel in Hindi. Some of his other prominent publications were Bhisma, Arjuna, Maa Ke Sapoot, Adarsh Parichay, etc. He was a nationalist and reformist writer, criticizing the British Government as well as the social evils like the dowry system, the parda, etc. His clever allegories flayed the British Raj without even giving it any legal pretext to hit back.
During the decade 1939-49 when he was a Lecturer in Hindi in the Rajendra College, Chapra, he presided over the seventeenth session of the Bihar Hindi Sahitya Sammelan (1941) and later over the All India Hindi Sahitya Sammelan (1944). He also served as the Director of the Bihar Rashtra Bhasha Parishad from 1950 to 1959. He was honoured several times for his literary achievements and was awarded the “Padma Bhushan“ in 1960.
Acharya Shivpujan Sahai was a pioneer of Hindi literary journalism, the last of the prose stylists of the Dwivedi age, and a formulator of plans for a theatre movement, literary memorials, and specialized museums of classified research materials for a lingua Indica. Paying tribute to his epoch-making service to the cause of Hindi, Dr. Rajendra Prasad said, ‘Service to Hindi is in itself a great national service. Acharya Shivji was dedicated to a silent service to Hindi’. He passed away on 21 January 1963.
Source: Information Brochure of Commemorative Postage Stamp issued by Department of Posts.