The Complete Short Stories

1916 and the BA in 1919, with English literature, Persian and history as his subjects. In 1921, he resigned government service at the call of Gandhi during the Non-Cooperation Movement. He had, between 1915 and 1924, moved away from Urdu to begin writing in Hindi which Gandhi had in 1918 declared to be the rashtra bhasha, the national language. During the salt satyagraha called by Gandhi in 1930, his (second) wife, Shivrani Devi, courted arrest and spent two months in jail. In 1923 Premchand had bought a press and started the publishing house Saraswati Press but in the absence of a regular income, he served two stints as the editor of the Hindi journal Madhuri in Lucknow, in 1924–25 and again from 1927 to 1932. Meanwhile, he started a journal of his own, Hans (The Swan, vehicle of Saraswati, the muse of literature), in 1930, and then taken over another journal, Jagaran (Awakening), in 1932. Premchand returned to Benares to spend the last four years of his life back in Lamahi where he had built a bigger pukka house which still stands, and from where he commuted to his press in Benares. On 8 October 1936, at the age of fifty-six, he died of a stomach ailment that had long afflicted him. He had published in Urdu and Hindi thirteen novels, including one left unfinished, and what are now reckoned to be close to 300 short stories.³

At least four novels by Premchand are counted as being among the greatest written in Hindi: Sevasadan (1919; The Abode of Service), Rangbhumi (1925; tr. as The Playground), Karmabhumi (1932; Field of Action), and Godaan (1936; tr. as Godaan and also as The Gift of a Cow). It has long been a matter of debate whether Premchand was a greater novelist than a short story writer and, though scholars may prefer the weightier and more complex novels, popular opinion has favoured the more accessible and immediately affective short stories. A brief account is given below of a few highlights and turning points in Premchand’s career as a short story writer.

Premchand published his first collection of five short stories in 1908, Soz-e Watan (in Urdu: The Dirge of the Nation), and it met with an unexpectedly hot reception. The stories were all patriotic, which the British government promptly interpreted to be seditious, and Premchand, who was then serving as a sub-deputy inspector of schools, was summoned to appear before the district magistrate who asked him to confirm that he was the author of the book which had been published under his pen name ‘Nawab Rai’, told him to burn all the copies and never to write anything like that again. He then added, ‘Thank your stars that you are a servant of the British Empire. Had these been Mughal times, both your hands would have been chopped off.’⁴ What was chopped off, however, was the name ‘Nawab Rai’, and it was then that the new pen name ‘Premchand’ was born, under the oppressive shadow of British censorship and as a subterfuge against its vigilance. This was only the first of Premchand’s many brushes with authority, for in the 1930s he was required time and again to deposit a security of Rs 1000 at the slightest whiff of sedition in anything that he published in his two journals.Urdu and Hindi

A more significant turning point came when Premchand decided to change his linguistic horses in midstream and cross over from writing in Urdu to writing in Hindi. This profound makeover began in 1914 and, through a long and assiduous process, culminated in 1924, when Premchand revised and rewrote his Urdu novel Chaugan-e Hasti (Life as a Game) in Hindi as Rangbhumi (1925; The Playground). He gave two reasons for making this transformation. Publishers were hard to find in Urdu, while they were plentiful in Hindi and paid substantially more. Besides, Premchand felt out of place in the Urdu cultural milieu; as he asked in a moment of despondency in a letter to an Urdu editor in 1918, ‘Has any Hindu ever made a success of writing in Urdu that I will?’⁵ The facts seem to support him, for in one count by a British literary historian in 1928, of about 250 writers he treated in his work, only eight were Hindus and none of them was regarded as being of the first rank.

Be that as it may, Premchand, by beginning to write in Hindi, entered a wider and apparently more congenial cultural ambience in which even the semantic resonances seemed to conform more closely to his vision of the world. The very titles of several works from this transitional period bear this out. The novel titled Bazar-e Husn (written in 1917 in Urdu; The Market-Place of Beauty) was published first in Hindi as Sevasadan (1919; The Abode of Service). The short story published in Urdu as ‘Panchayat’ (May–June 1916; The Jury of Five Elders) was published in Hindi as ‘Panch Parameshwar’ (June 1916; The Five Elders as [the voice of] God), and ‘Brahm ka Swang’ in Hindi (1920; Pretending to be Brahm or God) was toned down in Urdu to become ‘Nok-Jhonk’ (1923; Banter).⁶ It must be added that Premchand never wholly abandoned Urdu, for till the end he wrote in it a few of his short stories, most notably ‘Kafan’ (1935), and also lectures and essays, including his presidential address to the first conference of the All-India Progressive Writers Association (1936), in which he quoted verse four times, each time in Persian. When his host Sajjad Zaheer remarked that the Urdu in his speech had become a little ponderous (saqeel), Premchand laughed his loud laugh and said he thought he would show everyone that he was a ‘Kayastha ka bachcha’ (son of a Kayastha), implying that his Urdu could be as high-flown as any Muslim’s!Realism and Idealism

Another important development in Premchand’s career is believed to have taken place in the last few years of his life, when he wrote some stories in which his realism was