Gajānan Mādhav Muktibodh, a Hindi poet, critic, essayist, fiction-writer and astute political commentator, was a key figure in the history of Hindi modernism and more broadly literary modernism in India. He lived between 1917 and 1964, easily the most tumultuous years in world history, and in India’s history as well. Responding deeply and with great literary acumen to the happenings around and within him, Muktibodh created poems of searing intensity and philosophical depth to address the human predicament specific to his times, and yet which remain as relevant and apposite as ever. As he outgrew the Chhāyāvādī poetics of his youth, moved towards Nayī Kavitā and arrived at the shores of Progressivism, he truly belonged to none, and in the process trailed a most creative and sustained engagement with Marxism, which was unique because of his personally felt and visceral relationship to ideas. Muktibodh lived a life of struggle, not only on the personal front, as he incessantly toiled to sustain the life of a writer by moving from one odd job to another, but also on the literary front, by posing significant challenges to accepted notions regarding aesthetics and the socio-political as well as the personal role of a writer.