‘A Well-bred Daughter’ (‘Bade Ghar ki Beti’) is the first story to depict the family drama of an average, middle-class Indian family written in the realistic mode. He wrote a large number of stories throughout his career in this mode and on this theme. This and ‘Family Break-up’ (‘Algojhya’) are two classic stories about the Indian joint family that is held together by the ideal of sacrifice, where individual aspirations are subordinated to what is good for the family. A joint family in a village provides an ideal for Premchand whereby peasants can avoid dividing their landholding into smaller units. The breaking up of a family is an immensely painful affair in Premchand’s stories, bringing social disgrace and opprobrium to those involved. However, between the two stories mentioned above, Premchand wrote a large number of stories about the daily life of smaller families in villages and small towns where he dealt with different aspects of family life: conjugal tiffs and strife, domestic cruelty, struggle for survival amidst limited means and penury, polygamy, rivalry between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law for domination in the house, the phenomenon of co-wives and the plight of stepchildren, conflict between legitimate aspirations and meanness of opportunities, the cycle of debt that ruins families, and so on.
Premchand felt a deep affinity with the common man and his natural sympathy was towards the oppressed and deprived sections of society. No writer before him in Urdu or Hindi, and possibly other Indian languages, had depicted the lives of underdogs, untouchables and marginalized sections with such depth and empathy. Throughout his life, ‘Premchand did not let go of his unsentimental awareness of the grim realities of rural life, of life at the bottom of the economic scale’ (Amrit Rai 1982, ix). The oppressors and oppression came in many forms—they may be priests or zamindars, lawyers or policemen, or even doctors, all of whom held society in their stranglehold. Rituals pertaining to Hindu marriages and deaths were so exploitative and oppressive that these events were often robbed of their dignity and joy and spelt the ruin of families. Premchand began his career by exposing the corruption of the Hindu priestly class in his novel Asraar-e Muavid (Mysteries of the House of Worship, 1903–05), and then continued the tirade in many of his stories. In the story ‘Babaji’s Feast’ (‘Babaji ka Bhog’) he depicts the greed of a Brahmin who has no compunction in robbing a poor family of its meagre means, and in ‘The Funeral Feast’ (‘Mritak Bhoj’) he showed how the predatory and parasitical Brahmins drive another Brahmin woman to destitution and her daughter to suicide. In a series of stories where the central character is Moteram, a Brahmin priest, Premchand exposes with rare courage the rapacity, hollowness and hypocrisy of the Hindu priestly class, which earned him the ire and venom of a section of high-caste Hindus, even culminating in a lawsuit for defamation. But he remained undaunted and went on exposing the many oppressive customs prevalent in society.
But his most trenchant critique was reserved for caste injustice, whereby people on the lowest rung of the Hindu caste system, and beyond the pale of the caste system, were considered untouchable and were compelled to live a life of indignity and humiliation. The upper-caste Hindus treated them worse than animals and this injustice was institutionalized through the social sanction of the caste system. Stories such as ‘Thakur’s Well’ (‘Thakur ka Kuan’), ‘Salvation’ (‘Sadgati’), ‘The Shroud’ (‘Kafan’), ‘Temple’ (‘Mandir’), ‘The Woman Who Sold Grass’ (‘Ghaaswali’) and ‘One and a Quarter Ser of Wheat’ (‘Sawa Ser Gehun’) constitute a devastating indictment of the way upper-caste Hindus have treated Dalits for generations. They demonstrate that Dalits were subjected to daily humiliation and this humiliation stemmed from the fact that Dalit inferiority had become embedded in the psyche of the members of the Hindu upper castes, who have developed a vast repertoire of idioms, symbols and gestures of the verbal and physical denigration of Dalits over centuries. Grave injustice and the inhuman treatment of Dalits have become normalized, and cause no revulsion in society. Despite criticism from a few Dalit ideologues who level some rather irresponsible charges against Premchand for depicting Dalits in a certain way, the stories above—some of which have been rendered into films—have contributed significantly in raising awareness about the injustice perpetrated against the most vulnerable section of society. In this respect, as Vasudha Dalmia suggests, Premchand was much ahead of his time: ‘In his fiction, written over the three decades in the early century, Premchand presented what academic scholarship was to face squarely only towards the close of that century.’7
A considerable number of his stories deals with the plight of women. Premchand was deeply sensitive to the suffering of women in a patriarchal society where
