Sumitranandan Pant
सुमित्रानंदन पंत1900-1977 · Writers & Chroniclers · Kausani village, Garur, Bageshwar
Sumitranandan Pant turned the landscape of Kumaon into the music of modern Hindi poetry. Born at Kausani with its wall of snow peaks, he became the gentlest of the four pillars of Chhayavad and won the Jnanpith, India's highest literary honour.
He was born on 20 May 1900 in Kausani, the ridge village in Bageshwar district that looks across the valley at Trisul and Nanda Devi. Motherless from infancy, he wrote that nature raised him, and the deodar forests, mists and snowlines of that childhood became the substance of his verse.
Pant was one of the four founding poets of Chhayavad, the romantic movement of Hindi poetry, alongside Nirala, Prasad and Mahadevi Verma. From Pallav (1926) onward his work moved from pure nature lyric through progressive and philosophical phases, ending in the Aurobindo-tinged spirituality of his later books.
He received the Sahitya Akademi award, the Padma Bhushan in 1961 and the Jnanpith in 1968 for Chidambara. He died in 1977. His childhood home in Kausani is kept as a museum and gallery, and for readers of Hindi his name and his village are inseparable.