The Complete Short Stories

a story was first published, and in the great majority of the cases it is clear that the version first published was also the first to be written. But this priority may not always indicate primacy, for if the second, translated version turns out to be different in significant respects, it would be inept to reject it altogether. Though the early translations from Urdu into Hindi were mostly done by Premchand himself, we have firm evidence, for example, that the final manuscript of the Hindi Rangbhumi was translated into Urdu by another person who demanded a rate that Premchand thought to be exorbitant. In any case, all his works throughout his life in both Hindi and Urdu were published under Premchand’s own name with no mention of a translator and are treated by the common reader as being equally original.

A good English translation then must take both the Hindi and the Urdu versions into account and in the case of each notable variation, reconcile them if possible or at least opt for whichever seems more apt. As I have argued elsewhere, it must be one translation rendered out of two originals. The issues involved here may be quickly illustrated through the one story that I have myself contributed to these volumes, ‘A Special Holi’ (Volume 2). Its title in Hindi is ‘Vichitra Holi’ (published in 1921) and in Urdu ‘Ajeeb Holi’ (1928), which may look quite similar but have different connotations, especially when we read the story. It depicts all the servants of a British sahib staging a rebellion against him on the carnivalesque day of Holi when he is out hunting, and they indulge in riotous merriment by drinking his wine, dancing on his dining table and singing lusty Holi songs. They are punished and slink away when Mr Hunter returns, but they have had their day of glorious liberation. Now this, as Premchand narrates, is more a special Holi, in a positive sense, than a strange Holi, in a quizzical or suspicious sense, and the Hindi title is closer to the mark. Elsewhere in the story, Hindi words seem more apt in some places but Urdu words in some other places, and in this transitional phase of his career from Urdu to Hindi, Premchand even seems to waver here and there between Hindi usage and Urdu usage, mixing up, for example, the verbs that would go with arpan (dedication) and qurbani (sacrifice).¹²The Present Volumes

In this respect, a major new beginning is made with the translations in these four volumes, for the translators had access to both the Hindi and the Urdu versions. Besides, the notes at the end indicate the major variations between the two texts and provide the publishing details of both the versions. The Introduction by M. Asaduddin, a multilingual scholar, provides an erudite and comprehensive overview of Premchand’s career, and his thematic and stylistic range. His archival researches have resulted in the discovery of two whole stories which were so far known to have been published but could not be traced, and also of sections 2 and 3 of a third story of which only the first section was available. This edition of translations of Premchand thus goes a bit beyond even the most comprehensive editions of his works so far published in either Hindi or Urdu and gives a new meaning to the phrase ‘Found in Translation’!

But the outstanding feature of these volumes is, of course, the fact that they present in English translation close to 300 stories that Premchand wrote. Such an enormous project must have initially seemed audacious, and then been full of difficulties, problems and heartaches during its long gestation. But a team of sixty translators, occasionally interacting together in workshops, finally realized the plan with Professor Asaduddin himself leading from the front by translating, I am given to understand, no less than 100 stories all by himself.

So far as I know, this is an unprecedented project of its kind and scale in the history of translations into English in India, for not even the great Rabindranath Tagore has had all his short stories (which number seventy-nine, as collected in the three volumes of his Galpa-Guchchha, that is, ‘Bunch of Stories’) translated into English, much less in a uniform edition like this one. As this fleet of four ships, this argosy laden with some of the best writing produced in India in the modern period and now made available in a global language, is launched by a major international publisher upon the seven seas, one hopes that it will succeed in flying the flag of Indian literature far and wide and win for it a new and wider circulation.

November 2017

Harish Trivedi

Introduction

‘Premchand stands supreme as the iconic fiction writer of Urdu and Hindi, and to read and re-read him over and over again is to understand better ourselves and our society’¹—Harish Trivedi

Premchand is generally regarded as the greatest writer in Urdu and Hindi, both in terms of his popularity and the range and depth of his corpus. His enduring appeal cuts across class, caste and social groups. He was not only a creative writer in Urdu and Hindi, but he also fashioned modern prose in both languages and influenced several generations of writers. The fact that his works were published in more than two dozen Hindi and Urdu journals² simultaneously attests to his extraordinary reach to the wide audience that formed his readership. Many of his readers encountered modern Urdu and Hindi novels and short stories, and indeed any literary forms, for the first time through his writings. Premchand’s unique contribution to the formation of a readership—and, in turn, to shaping the taste of that readership—has yet to be assessed fully. Few or none of his contemporaries in Urdu–Hindi have remained as relevant today as he is in the contexts of the Woman Question (Stree Vimarsh), Dalit Discourse (Dalit Vimarsh), Gandhian Nationalism, Hindu–Muslim relations and the current debates about the idea of India that is inclusive of all groups and denominations,