The green shoots of modernity in Hindi literature germinated in the Bharatendu era, a period named after Bharatendu Harishchandra, a towering litterateur of his times. Another epoch-making phase in Hindi literature began at the turn of the twentieth century under the tutelage of Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi, who, as an erudite luminary of literary discourse and as an accomplished editor of the seminal Hindi magazine “Saraswati” guided and shaped the Hindi literary landscape in the early decades of the twentieth century. The success of the communist revolution in Russia under the leadership of Lenin in 1917 had a great impact on countries around the world, including India. The modern Hindi poetry coalesced by the fag end of the second decade of the twentieth century alongside the emergence of Gandhian era in the freedom movement, when it started to unshackle itself from its ornamental yoke. A deep sense of modernity and awakening, together with a penchant for individual as well as national freedom, enthused the whole gamut of Hindi poetry and thus emerged a poetic movement called Chhayavad. The early trends of the progressive stream of Hindi poetry, which would be later called Pragativad, first appeared through Chhayavad, whose forerunners were Suryakant Tripathi “Nirala”, Jaishankar Prasad, Sumitranandan Pant and Mahadevi Verma. Of this quadrumvirate, the one who left a lasting impact on the whole range of progressive Hindi poetry to follow and still guides it like a lighthouse was Suryakant Tripathi “Nirala.” Nirala’s concern and compassion for the downtrodden and the oppressed, and his later evolution as a poet waging a direct, satirical and scathing attack on the capitalist and oppressive forces, set a tone for a new kind of Hindi poetry and inspired a whole lot of progressive poets. Afterwards, the progressive stream of Hindi poetry took greater heights, depicting myriad hues of life in a human-centric, earthly fashion.