Czy hindi jest językiem biednych? : głód i język w dramacie Kriszny Baldewa Waida

The article analyses the literary image of hunger in Krishna Baldev Vaid’s (1927-2020) drama Bhūkh āg hai (1998) with a view to determine the sense of this writer’s grasp of the problem of poverty in India. As he suggested in 1963, this problem as a subject of literature belonged to the core of his professional ethos. A bitter satire on the middle class’ members who consider English their language of power (and Hindi others’ language or language of the poor) is not a fulfilment of the old ideals of the progressive writers. A reading of the dialogues in the drama reveals a surprising dichotomy in possible understandings of Hindi noun bhūkh. First, I argue that this dichotomy is justified in terms of its semantics, etymology, and testified in the literary practice. Further, I enhance our view on socially disparate perspectives on hunger, present withing the image of Madras famine (1876–8) in a scholarly work by David Arnold, one of the members of the Indian Subaltern Studies group. This allows us to read the drama as a product of the postcolonial thought and theory, and possibly even writer’s dialogue with it, rather than a vehicle of idealist and paternalistic progressivist ideas.