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Aahvaan: This book presents a poetic conversation and ref lective thoughts exchanged between a traveller and a poor farmer, portraying the plight of f
Paperback
Publisher: Notion Press
Published: Jun 19 2026
Pages: 36
Weight: 0.13
Height: 0.09 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: Hindi
Aahvaan - The Call is a powerful narrative poem by Gopal Prasad, written between 1974 and 1976 and rooted in the poet's first-hand witness of the devastating famine that struck rural Bihar in 1966-67.
Through the journey of a lone traveler (pathik) who walks across the Indian countryside, the poem unfolds as a series of heartbreaking encounters - a starving beggar feeding peepal-fruit to dying children, a debt-trapped farmer who toils day and night yet can never repay his loans, and a thinker who diagnoses the nation's true crisis.
Set in the early decades of Independence, the poem holds up a mirror to a young nation: lofty five-year plans and grand slogans on one side, and on the other, hunger, corruption, black-marketeering, bribe-laden bank loans, electioneering, casteism, communalism, and the slow forgetting of India's own cultural roots.
Yet Aahvaan is not a poem of despair. After the traveler is tempted by escape into renunciation (sanyas), the poet rejects retreat and instead issues a stirring call to action - summoning the youth of every village to awaken, to build rural industry and irrigation, to establish Panchayati Raj and justice, to forge worker-partnership and economic equality, and above all to rekindle love for the nation.
A moving blend of social realism and patriotic idealism, Aahvaan speaks to anyone who cares about rural India, social justice, and the unfinished work of nation-building.
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