Mahavir Prasad Dvivedi was born on May 15, 1864 in the village of Daulatpur in Uttar Pradesh. He learnt Urdu and Persian at the village school, and pursued at home the study of Sanskrit and Hindi. He had his English education at Rae Bareli.
The circumstances of his boyhood were hard and challenging, and during this phase he developed the qualities of tolerance, self-reliance and determination. He joined the Railways, but left the service soon for the domain of language and literature, his first love. As a literary critic and writer of Hindi prose and poetry he had a powerful impact on nascent Hindi literature. He freed Hindi poetry from the restrictive influence of Brij Bhasha imparting to it the easy, fluent and lucid style, which it had lacked till then. He edited for about twenty years the monthly journal of the Nagri Pracharni Sabha, ‘Saraswati’. In his time Hindi journalism came of age and ‘Saraswati’ became the guiding star of the literary elite. Later poets and writers like Maithili Saran Gupta, Kashi Prasad Jayaswal and Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi drew inspiration from Acharya Dvivedi. He ushered in the modern school of literary criticism in Hindi, which was to be developed later by Pandit Ram Chandra Shukla.
There is hardly any field of Hindi literature which Acharya Dvivedi has not enriched by his contribution. His essays on a wide variety of subjects are of abiding value. His Hindi translations of Sanskrit classics like Kumarasambhava, Raghuvamsa and the Mahabharata created literary history. He also translated into Hindi Bacon’s essays and Spencer’s philosophical works. His prose writings run into over three scores of books. Blazing a trail in modern Hindi literature, he laid the foundation for its future growth. He passed away on December 29, 1938.
The Indian Posts and Telegraphs Department brings out a special postage stamp on May 15, 1966, to honour the memory of Acharya Mahavir Prasad Dvivedi, one of the outstanding men of letters of modern India.
Source : Information Folder issued by Indian Posts & Telegraph Department, Government of India