Durga Narayan Bhagwat popularly known as Durga Bhagwat, was an India

India

India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...

n scholar, socialist and writer. She studied Sanskrit and Buddhist literature, roamed jungles of Madhya Pradesh

Madhya Pradesh

Madhya Pradesh , often called the Heart of India, is a state in central India. Its capital is Bhopal and Indore is the largest city....

 to study tribal life, later returned to Mumbai

Mumbai

Mumbai , formerly known as Bombay in English, is the capital of the Indian state of Maharashtra. It is the most populous city in India, and the fourth most populous city in the world, with a total metropolitan area population of approximately 20.5 million...

 as a researcher and wrote books in Marathi

Marathi language

Marathi is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by the Marathi people of western and central India. It is the official language of the state of Maharashtra. There are over 68 million fluent speakers worldwide. Marathi has the fourth largest number of native speakers in India and is the fifteenth most...

. Being a rebel by nature, she highly opposed Government during The Emergency (India) and was subsequently imprisoned. She also had refused to accept literary honors like Padma Shree and Jnanapeeth.

Early years

Durga Bhagwat was born in 1910 in a Karhade Brahmin family settled in the then princely state of Baroda. The veteran Sanskrit scholar and social activist Rajaram Shastri Bhagwat was the brother of her grandmother. Her sister Kamala Sohoni went on to become the first woman scientist of India.

Later years

Durga Bhagwat was elected President of the 51st Marathi Sahitya Sammelan

Marathi Sahitya Sammelan

Akhil Bharatiya Marathi Sahitya Sammelan is a conference for literary discussions by Marathi writers. Though the conference has sometimes been held in a town outside the Indian state of Maharashtra, it is typically held annually in one of the towns in Maharashtra where Marathi is the mother tongue...

, held in Karad

Karad

Karad is a town and a municipal council in Satara district in the Indian state of Maharashtra. It lies at the confluence of Koyna River and the Krishna River. The two rivers originate at Mahabaleshwar which is around 100 km from Karad. They diverge at their origin and then meet again in...

, in 1975. She was second woman President of Sammelan, after Kusumavati Deshpande

Kusumavati Deshpande

Kusumavati Deshpande was a Marathi writer from Maharashtra, India.She was born on November 10, 1904 in Amravati, Maharashtra, her maiden having been Kusum Jaywant...

 since its inception in 1878. The Indian Government later on jailed her for the speech delivered by her during the Meet and open protest of the Government of India. She campaigned against the ruling Congress Party in 1977 general election, and remained opposed to it for the rest of her life. She decided not to accept any state-sponsored honours and declined an offer of Jnan Peeth, the most prestigious award for Indian writers.

Before chairing Marathi Sahitya Sammelan, she was elected chairperson of Tamasgir Meet (tamaasgeers typically come from among prostitutes), and she was very proud of it, considering it a greater honour between the two. She contented that if she wasn't born in a well-off Brahmin family, and were born to a prostitute, her destiny would be very different. She did social work among downtrodden sections of the society, and wandered jungles to study the nomads.

Her contribution

Durga Bhagwat's notable works include biography of Rajaram Shastri Bhagwat, Pais, a collection of articles based around religions, their literature and practises and Vyas Parva, a book about her study of Mahabharat. She studied religious literature, particularly Buddhist, works of Marathi saints from Dnyaneshwar to Tukaram, major Sanskrit works of Vyas and Adi Shankaracharya. Her book 'RRitu-chakra', detailing the nature (particularly trees and flowers) in each Indian month, is perhaps her most famous work. In early 1940s during her stay in forest, she tried to cook a vegetable which turned out to be poisonous and she was bed-ridden for years. The recovery was slow but it helped her observe the changes in the nature over the 12-month cycle, and spurred her to write articles on each seasons.

Even though good-looking in her young age, Durga Bhagwat never married. The reason according to her as told in a personal interview was that she spent several years of her youth in research, during which she was also the victim of food poisoning and by the time she recovered from it, it was too late.

Her idols throughout her life had been Vyasa

Vyasa

Vyasa is a central and revered figure in most Hindu traditions. He is also sometimes called Veda Vyasa , or Krishna Dvaipayana...

, Gautama Buddha

Gautama Buddha

Siddhārtha Gautama was a spiritual teacher from the Indian subcontinent, on whose teachings Buddhism was founded. In most Buddhist traditions, he is regarded as the Supreme Buddha Siddhārtha Gautama (Sanskrit: सिद्धार्थ गौतम; Pali: Siddhattha Gotama) was a spiritual teacher from the Indian...

, Adi Shankaracharya, Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist...

, and Shridhar Venkatesh Ketkar

Shridhar Venkatesh Ketkar

Shridhar Venkatesh Ketkar was a sociologist, historian and novelist from Maharashtra, India...

.

Other works

• Loksahityachi ruprekha
• Dharma ani loksahitya
• Vyas parva
• Rupranga
• Pais
• Prasangika
• Doob
• Bhavmudra
• Khamanga
• Satyam Shivam Sundaram
• Ketkari kadambari
• Rajaram Shastri Bhagwat yanche charitra
• Rutuchakra
• Godhadi
• Dupani