The Complete Short Stories

not irradiated by his usual optimistic outlook. Throughout his career, in both his novels and his short stories, his protagonists had been inspired by the abiding values of truth, mutual trust, goodwill, cooperation and service to others. In moments of adversity and crisis, they were motivated by an idealism which led them to acts of selfless sacrifice, or to a change of heart involving an admission of past errors and deep repentance in which all conflict and dissonance were dissolved into a compassionate harmony. Premchand seemed to have been a firm believer in what the English poet John Keats, in a memorable phrase, called ‘the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of imagination’.⁷

Premchand similarly said that a good short story offered ‘a vivid and heart-touching depiction of an episode, a glimpse of the soul’. In another essay, he described his own mode of writing fiction, or indeed his whole vision of life, as adarshonmukh yatharthvad,⁸ that is, idealistic realism or, more accurately, ideal-oriented realism. Some of his best-known and best-loved short stories are shining examples of this possibly naive-seeming and sentimental but in fact resolutely principled view of life in which goodness, virtue and self-realization are ultimately bound to prevail over all misunderstanding and temporary ill will.

Yet, in his last few years, Premchand wrote some stories which seem devoid of such a hopeful tenor and are instead inconclusive or even bleak. To cite just the best known of them, in ‘Poos ki Raat’ (1930; A Winter Night), a farmer falls asleep on his night-long watch over his ripening harvest, wakes up in the morning to find it devoured and destroyed by a herd of nilgai, but as he walks back home, he tells himself that he would at least not have to freeze any more by passing night after night out in the open. In ‘Sadgati’ (1930; Gone to Heaven, made into a film by Satyajit Ray), a poor low-caste man is cruelly worked to death by a Brahmin priest, with the latter excusing himself in the end by saying that after death in a Brahmin’s service, the wretched man would surely go to heaven. And in ‘Kafan’ (1935; The Shroud), a father and son end up in a drinking house in a city, carousing in an only-too-rare carnivalesque moment, quite oblivious of the son’s young wife who has died in childbirth the night before and still lies unmourned and uncremated back in the village.

These are deeply unsettling works, and commentators on Premchand have been at a loss as to what to make of them. Some have suggested that Premchand was here at last moving out of the shadow of Gandhi and of traditional values to a kind of radical progressive position. As there is not a trace of resistance or rebellion against the system or even the particular oppressor in any of these stories (as there is not in Premchand’s last novel, Godaan, either), some others have suggested that Premchand had in the end grown weary of his own idealism and become a little cynical. Another way of looking at these few stories, which are so striking partly because they go against the grain of the rest of Premchand’s career, may be to suggest that in them, Premchand was experimenting with something new and beginning to develop a ‘late style’ (in Edward Said’s formulation in his late and indeed posthumous book)⁹ as many other masters had done as they advanced in years. Premchand died at the age of fifty-six, and one can only speculate on what and how he would have gone on to write had he been granted, say, ten more years. We may anyhow note that the last two short stories Premchand published in his lifetime, ‘Do Bahnen’ (August 1936; Two Sisters) and ‘Rahasya’ (September 1936; The Secret), are both as full of Premchand’s signature vocabulary of seva, tyag and daya (service to others, sacrifice and compassion) as anything he wrote at any time in his career.¹⁰Translating Premchand: The Two Originals

Premchand’s short stories began to be translated in his own lifetime into other Indian languages, including Gujarati, Bengali, Marathi and Tamil, as well as into English, German and Japanese. The first volume of a selection of his short stories in English translation was published in 1946 by Gurdial Malik and, as M. Asaduddin has shown, about a dozen other selections have been published since then by translators both Indian and American. As most of the translators have gone in for the same ‘best’ stories, the total number of short stories translated into English remains a small fraction of the oeuvre.¹¹

Translation is sometimes slandered as being a losing game by those who do not pause to reflect on what is gained, for without translation, however inadequate, we would not have access to an alien author or work at all. What comes across especially well in English in the case of Premchand is his irreducibly humane content and his gripping, even enchanting, narrative voice. With the very first sentence of a novel or a story by him, we enter a parallel universe of his creation, which compels utter credibility and full engagement. His diction is simple, especially in the frequent dialogues, his sentences are short—sometimes too short to sound natural in English—and even in those of his tales which have a parable-like ending, the specificity of realistic notation remains undiminished. On the other hand, his authorial passages of both a narrative and discursive kind exploit fully the expressive resources of the language he uses and are so felicitously modulated as to stretch the capabilities of the best translators. Premchand’s penchant for using idiomatic phrases presents a difficulty and so do culture-specific terms, as with translating any writer.

But a difficulty that may be unique to Premchand arises from the fact that whether one translates him from Hindi or Urdu, the original text may well turn out to be always already translated—from the other language! It is now possible to say with certainty which of the two versions of