The poet known to the Hindi literary world as ‘Bachchan’ was born as ‘Harivansh Rai’ in 1907 to an Allahabad Kāyasth family. His given name derived from a prescribed recitation of the Harivamśa Purāna that had broken his parents' much-lamented childlessness; the pandit's honorarium for the recitation was 1001 rupees, paid off in monthly instalments over the first ten years of the boy's childhood. The roman spelling of the name varies, the Sanskritic ‘Harivansh’ standing in contrast to the form ‘Harbans’ with which the author's Ph.D. thesis is signed. Such a distinction is not without significance, for underlying the author's cosmopolitan exterior lies an intimately provincial Allahabadi character more fully caught by the ‘Harbans’ spelling than its somehow sanitized, all-India tatsama equivalent. It is a feature that one longs in vain to recapture in English translation many a time, for example to resonate with the semi-tatsama phrase pūrab-pacchim, for ‘East and West’, so much more redolent of the vernacular scene than its Sanskritic parent pūrva-paścim. But in English, East is ‘East’ and West is ‘West’.