Editing Nagarjun (section)

=== Career ===
He started his literary career with [[Maithili language|Maithili]] poems by the pen-name of '''Yatri''' (यात्री) in the early 1930s. By the mid-1930s, he started writing poetry in Hindi. His first permanent job of a full-time teacher, took him to [[Saharanpur]] ([[Uttar Pradesh]]), though he didn't stay there for long as his urge to delve deeper into Buddhist scriptures, took him to the Buddhist monastery at [[Kelaniya]], [[Sri Lanka]], where in 1935, he became a [[bhikkhu|Buddhist monk]], entered the [[vihara|monastery]] and studied the scriptures, just as his mentor, [[Rahul Sankrityayan]] had done earlier, and hence took upon the name "Nagarjun".<ref>{{Cite book |last=Prasad |first=Amar Nath |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=dQfnNcwgQgsC&pg=PA228 |title=Indian Poetry In English: Roots And Blossoms (part-I) |date=2007 |publisher=Sarup & Sons |isbn=978-81-7625-741-1 |pages=228 |language=en}}</ref> While at the monastery, he also studied [[Leninism]] and [[Marxism]] ideologies, before returning to India in 1938 to join 'Summer School of Politics' organised by noted peasant leader, [[Sahajanand Saraswati]], founder of [[All India Kisan Sabha|Kisan Sabha]].<ref>[https://web.archive.org/web/20040814041633/http://cc.domaindlx.com/aapanmithila/poet.htm#Nagarjun Poets of Mithila – Nagarjun]</ref> A wanderer by nature, Nagarjun spent a considerable amount of his time in the 1930s and the 1940s travelling across India.

He also participated in many mass-awakening movements before and after independence. Between 1939 and 1942, He was jailed by the British courts for leading a farmer's agitation in Bihar. For a long time after independence he was involved with journalism.

He played an active role in [[Jayaprakash Narayan]]'s movement prior to the [[The Emergency (India)|Emergency period]] (1975–1977), and therefore was jailed for eleven months, during the emergency period. He was strongly influenced by Leninist-Marxist ideology.{{citation needed|date=September 2020}} This was one of the reasons that he never found patronage from the mainstream political establishments.

He died in 1998 at the age of 87 in [[Darbhanga]].