His father served as the manager of a local tea garden, and was also a landholder, so Pant was never in want financially growing up. He grew up in the same village and always cherished a love for the beauty and flavor of rural India, which is evident in all his major works. Pant enrolled in Queens College in Banaras in 1918. There he began reading the works of
Sarojini Naidu and
Rabindranath Tagore, as well as English Romantic poets. These figures would all have a powerful influence on his writing. In 1919 he moved to
Allahabad to study at Muir College. As an anti-British gesture he only attended for two years. He then focused more on poetry, publishing
Pallav in 1926. This collection established him as a literary giant of the Hindi renaissance that had begun with
Jaishankar Prasad. In the introduction to the book, Pant expressed dissatisfaction that Hindi speakers "think in one language and express themselves in another." He felt that
Braj was out of date and sought to help usher in a new national language. Pant moved to
Kalakankar in 1931. For nine years he lived a secluded life close to nature. Simultaneously he grew enamored with the works and thinking of
Karl Marx and
Mahatma Gandhi, dedicating several verses to them in the poetry he produced during this time. Pant returned to Almora in 1941 where he attended drama classes at the Uday Shankar Cultural Centre. He also read
Sri Aurobindo's
The Life Divine, which heavily influenced him. Three years later he moved to
Madras and then to
Pondicherry, attending Aurobindo's ashram. In 1946 he returned to Allahabad to resume his role among the country's other leading writers. ==Literary career==