However, despite his pioneering and iconic status, studies on Premchand have remained woefully inadequate because his entire corpus was or is still not available in either Hindi or Urdu, not to speak of English. Researchers had to remain content with only one of the corpuses (either Urdu or Hindi) accessible to them. This is also true of his short stories. Till today, the entire corpus of his short stories is not to be found in any of the versions. Fortunately, it is now being made available in English by combining and assimilating both the archives. Moreover, some new materials not accessible so far either in Hindi or Urdu are being made available for the first time in English. These twin advantages—in addition to the fact that the entire corpus is now being made available in English in a reliable chronological order3—should make the reading of Premchand more fruitful, exciting and enjoyable and give a new fillip to Premchand studies. There is a need to revisit Premchand in the light of the new materials that have been discovered, mainly, though not exclusively, through the efforts of Kamal Kishore Goyanka, and some more new materials that are presented in this anthology.Premchand as a Short Story Writer: Beginnings
Premchand pioneered modern short story writing in Urdu and Hindi. The Urdu short story, or afsana (sometimes called mukhtasar afsana to distinguish it from longer fictional works), can be seen as a continuity of the fictional tradition that existed in Urdu for several centuries—that is, literature consisting of qissa, hikayah, dastaan, and so on, which drew upon the Perso-Arabic narrative tradition on the one hand and the Indian tradition of storytelling as one finds in works like the Panchatantra, Hitopadesha and the Jataka tales on the other. The short story proper in Urdu, however, emerged only in the opening decade of the twentieth century. By that time, novels and short stories were familiar conventions, having already been established in Bengali at the hands of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Rabindranath Tagore and Sarat Chandra Chatterjee. These Bengali writers are being invoked here because Premchand had read all of them in translation and drew inspiration from them. In fact, he began his writing career by translating Tagore. Of course, his staple readings were the medieval-style romances in Urdu and Persian popular at the time, particularly the writings of Ratan Nath Dhar Sarshar and Abdul Halim Sharar.
The atmosphere of dastaan and historical romances hangs heavy on Premchand’s early stories. But he soon grew out of that phase and made his work more socially relevant by giving it the hard, gritty texture of realism. His art of storytelling became a vehicle for his socially engaged agenda of social reform and ameliorating the condition of the deprived and oppressed sections of society. However, that does not mean he was mainly concerned with the content and external circumstances of his characters and not with their inner worlds. Like all great writers, he took interest in unravelling the mental processes of his characters and the psychological motivations of their actions. As he says:
My stories are usually based on some observations or personal experience. I try to introduce some dramatic elements in them. I do not write stories merely to describe an event. I try to express some philosophical/emotional reality through them. As long as I do not find any such basis I cannot put my pen to paper. When this is settled, I conceive characters. Sometimes, studying history brings some plots to mind. An event does not form a story, as long as it does not express a psychological view of reality.4 (My translation)
In the stories he has written—which number close to 300—one finds different modes and points of view, which he adopted by employing an array of narrative devices. An overwhelming number of his stories are written in the third person or omniscient narrative mode and a far lesser number in the first person. He makes extensive use of dialogue, using different registers of Urdu and Hindi in addition to dialects, colloquialisms, idioms and speech patterns specific to a caste, class or community. He also uses the technique of interior monologue and multiple points of view in quite a few stories. The salient point is that even though Premchand was mainly concerned with the content of his stories, to the extent of sometimes making them formulaic and predictable, he certainly did engage with the stylistic aspects too. And in this respect, he was influenced by both Indian—specifically Bengali—and foreign writers.Sources
The subject matter of Premchand’s stories has been taken from Indian history and mythology, Indo-Muslim cultural history, contemporary society, and his own wide readings of literature from across the world, particularly English, Russian and French literature, from which he translated into Urdu and Hindi. The early decades of the twentieth century in India were exciting times, marked by the stirrings of change in society, particularly in its transition from a predominantly feudal and patriarchal society to a more democratic and modern one. From the third decade, the movement for independence gained momentum. Premchand had a journalist’s curiosity of the quotidian and the contemporary. He was extraordinarily alive to the goings-on around him and made the events and issues the subject matter of his stories.5 There is hardly any issue relevant to the India of that time that he did not touch in his fiction. From a reading of his short stories it is quite possible to recreate the society of that time, with all its quirks, contradictions and superstitions, as well as the prevalent reformist and intellectual climate, particularly in the northern part of the country.Themes
Premchand began his career as a short story writer with
