Aahvaan

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.