Obituary: Manager Pandey

Manager Pandey, one of the most significant Marxist literary critics in Hindi, breathed his last on the morning of 6 November 2022 after ailing for a long time. He was 81. What distinguished him from his peers was his firm conviction that criticism of literature per se has to be criticism of the society that produced it. In the true Marxist tradition, while writing about literary works of past and present writers, he explored the interconnections between literature and the society that had produced it. Little wonder that he was the only critic in Hindi who placed the peasant at the centre of the Bhakti movement and analysed Bhakti poetry, especially the oeuvre of Surdas, in the light of the social and economic conditions of rural North India in his days.