NAIVEDYA (नैवेद्य)

byGanesh Verma

One hundred Hindi devotional poems by Ganesh Verma — an act of total surrender to the divine, in the tradition of classical bhakti verse.

Overview

Ganesh Verma's Naivedya is an offering in the oldest sense of the word — one hundred poems surrendered entirely to the divine. The poet addresses that boundless, beginningless power through names that carry the weight of devotional tradition: Bhuvaneswara, Karunakara, Dineswara, Jagadishwara. The collection does not argue for faith; it enacts it, poem by poem, in the idiom of classical Hindi verse.

Beyond the devotional core, these poems return to an earlier India — a civilisational moment when knowledge was sovereign, contentment was common, and the spirit of renunciation shaped public life. Verma uses this evocation not as nostalgia but as a moral reference point. His voice carries the influence of Rabindranath Tagore, whose Gitanjali — for which Tagore received the Nobel Prize — Verma has also retold in his own work, Gitanjali: Punah Paath.

For readers drawn to Hindi devotional poetry in the classical register, Naivedya offers both lyric beauty and a meditation on what it means to give everything over to something larger than the self.

बहुमुखी प्रतिभा के धनी यशःशेष श्री गणेश वर्मा की ये कृति, नैवेद्य, उस अपौरुषेय, असीम, अनादि, अनंत शक्ति-जिन्हें कवि ने 'भुवनेश्वर', 'करुणाकर', 'दीनेश्वर', 'जगदीश्वर' आदि नामों से सम्बोधित किया है-की भक्ति में सर्वस्व समर्पण करने के लिए प्रेरित करती है। साथ ही छोटी-बड़ी 100 कविताओं में कवि ने भारत के उस कालखण्ड का भी मनन किया है, जब भारत में ज्ञान सर्वोपरि था, संतोष था, त्याग की भावना थी। गुरुदेव रविंद्रनाथ ठाकुर के मनोभावों की छाया "गीतांजलि", जिसके लिए गुरुदेव को नोबेल पुरस्कार से भी सम्मानित किया गया, की पुनः रचना भी श्री वर्मा जो पाठकों के सामने "गीतांजलि-पुनः पाठ" के नाम से उपलब्ध है।

Author

Ganesh Verma photo
Ganesh Verma

About the Author Ganesh Verma is the man behind the famous book " Gitanjali Punah Path ". He is an Indian author who translated the book " Gitanjali " by the legendary Rabindranath Tagore into the Hindi language and thus, Gitanjali Punah Path was born. The book is a collection of the various poems written by Guruji himself that are translated from Bengali into Hindi for the poem enthusiasts. You can get a copy of yours at Garuda Books.

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