PHILIPPE BENOÎT
Sanskritist and professor of Bengali, National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations, Paris
‘Premchand is one of the most famous—perhaps the most famous—Hindi authors. Many of his short stories have been translated into a wide array of languages. And yet, when one looks at these selections it appears that the translators tended to choose a particular set of stories regarded as Premchand’s masterpieces, ignoring the rest. The present collection aims to present the full picture, displaying Premchand at different stages of his life, in different moods, displaying changing attitudes with regard to the functionality of literature. For the first time, readers of English will be able to appreciate Premchand’s story-telling in all its facets and fullness’
CHRISTINA OESTERHELD
professor of Urdu, University of Heidelberg, Germany
‘Premchand was greatly popular with an earlier generation of Russian readers. This anthology will certainly enhance his visibility to an international audience and make him popular with the new generation of Russian readers and scholars of Indian literature’
GUZEL STRELKOVA
professor of Hindi, Moscow State University, Moscow
For
Jamia Millia Islamia,
a university that has nurtured composite culture,
secular nationalism and pluralism for 100 years
Foreword
During the birth centenary celebrations of Premchand (1880–1936), he was described as one of the panch devata, that is, one of the five gods, or (to put it more plausibly in English and also perhaps a bit more secularly!) one of the five iconic figures of modern Indian literature.1 This was high praise indeed, for each one of the twenty-four languages of India which are recognized and honoured by the Sahitya Akademi can boast of several outstanding writers in the modern period. The foremost of these probably still is Rabindranath Tagore, best known for his lyrical and transcendentally spiritual poetical works and, of course, for being the first, and so far the only, Indian to win the Nobel Prize for literature. But of those following behind him, Premchand stands as tall as any other writer.
Premchand wrote in both Urdu and Hindi, which made him an inheritor of two distinct literary traditions and also gave him a far wider readership than writers in other languages could aspire to. He wrote in the popular genres of the novel and the short story, and he practised a simple and candid style which had a direct emotive effect. He set his fiction in both cities and villages, often bringing the two Indias into poignant juxtaposition, most pointedly in his last novel, Godaan (1936), and in other novels and numerous short stories too throughout his career. After experimenting early in his career with a few short stories set in the historical past (which he used allegorically for a present patriotic purpose), he wrote as a rule on contemporary themes of immediate social and political relevance. He marched with the times, responding to successive waves of public events and movements with a creative openness that wasn’t bound by blind allegiance to any ideology. The scope of his understanding and the range of his sympathies were wide enough to encompass each aspect of the impact of colonial rule and of the nationalist movement for freedom in its many dimensions. His heart beat with the heart of the nation. As the Marxist Hindi critic Namwar Singh says:
Premchand was the unique epic-chronicler [maha-gathakar] of our struggle for freedom and it will be no exaggeration to say that he occupies in this regard an unrivalled place in the whole of Indian literature. If one wanted to find in any one Indian writer the very pulse of Indian life, its struggles and its setbacks, its sorrows and its anguish, in all their depth and all their wide scope, over a period of three decades right from the Partition of Bengal in 1905–06 up to 1936, when he passed away, then, notwithstanding the fact that we have Rabindranath Tagore, we have Sarat Chandra, we have Subrahmanya Bharati, we have V.S. Khandelkar, we have Kanhaiyalal Maniklal Munshi, and we have as well Dr Mohammad Iqbal, I would like to name Premchand, for he is the one writer we have in whose works the immortal saga of our struggle for independence has been narrated in all its fullness.2
And yet, it would be to underestimate Premchand to think of him only, or even primarily, as a chronicler of what was perhaps the most vitally transformative phase in the history of modern India. For he was, like a true artist, concerned first and foremost with human beings and the daily, ordinary lives they led. If these lives were impacted by larger historical forces, as indeed they inescapably were, Premchand’s focus remained on the human characters rather more than on the forces shaping them, and it was in this indirectness that the greatness of his achievement lies. His eventful narratives of the nation were above all else compassionate tales of humanity.Life and Times: Sedition and ‘Premchand’
Premchand was born in Lamahi, a village which now stands virtually on the outskirts of Benares, of Kayastha parents, which meant that he would culturally be more inclined to Urdu than Hindi. His mother died when he was eight, his father remarried shortly afterwards, and Premchand first went to school in Gorakhpur where his father, a postal clerk, was then posted. Premchand’s real name was Dhanpat Rai Shrivastav, but he was fondly called Nawab, a prince, and he published his early writings under the name ‘Nawab Rai’. In his early teens he read voraciously Tilism Hoshruba (in Urdu, published from 1883 onwards in numerous volumes amounting to thousands of pages) and similar dastaan tales of what may now be called the old school of Arabian magic realism.
Premchand passed his matriculation examination (class 10) in 1898, and began a long career as a teacher and school administrator, during which he passed as a ‘private’ or non-formal candidate the Intermediate examination (class 12) in
