Premchand’s deep interest in the simple life of peasants extended to his love for animals, particularly draught animals, treated most cruelly in India. Very few writers have depicted such an intimate bond between animals and human beings. Premchand depicts animals as endowed with emotions just as human beings are, responding to love and affection just as human beings do, and are fully deserving of human compassion. Often, the duplicity, cruelty and betrayal in the human world is contrasted with the unconditional love and loyalty displayed by animals towards their masters and those who care for them. It is a heart-wrenching moment, as shown in ‘Money for Deliverance’ (‘Muktidhan’) and ‘Sacrifice’ (‘Qurbani’), when a peasant has to part with his animals because of want and destitution. The deep compassion with which animal life has been depicted in ‘Holy Judges’ (‘Panchayat’), ‘Reincarnation’ (‘Purva Sanskar’), ‘The Story of Two Bullocks’ (‘Do Bailon ki Katha’) and ‘The Roaming Monkey’ (‘Salilani Bandar’) are treasures of world literature. Stories such as ‘Turf War’ (‘Adhikar Chinta’) and ‘Defending One’s Liberty’ (‘Swatva Raksha’), written in a humorous and symbolic vein, show how a dog fiercely protects his turf and how a horse defeats all the machinations of human beings to make him work on a Sunday, which is his day of rest, rightfully earned after working for six days of the week! In ‘The Roaming Monkey’ the author shows how a monkey earns money by performing tricks of different kinds and thus looks after the wife of his owner, nurturing her and bringing her back from the brink of lunacy. In ‘The Price of Milk’ (‘Doodh ki Qeemat’) we have the spectacle of goats feeding a baby with milk from their own udders, thereby saving its life. The baby has been denied milk by its own mother because she considers it a tentar, an ‘evil’ child destined to be the cause of death of one of her parents or another member of the family, and wishes it dead. In ‘A Daughter’s Possessions’ (‘Beti ka Dhan’) Sakkhu Choudhury finds tears streaming down the eyes of his oxen in his moments of grief when the zamindar is going to evict him from his home, and when his own sons are totally indifferent to his plight. In the story ‘Two Brothers’ (‘Do Bhai’) the narrator contrasts the greed and lack of empathy of the elder brother, Krishna, for his younger brother, Balaram, whose property he wants to grab, with the deep bond between two bullocks, one of whom refuses to touch any food for three days when the other is separated from it.
Several very popular stories of Premchand deal with Hindu–Muslim relations. He was deeply interested and invested in a cordial relationship between Hindus and Muslims, a fact which is evident in both his fictional and non-fictional writings. He had no doubt that the independence and progress of the country depended substantially on the harmonious relationship between these two dominant religious groups in India. Early in his life he was introduced to Muslim culture and Islam through his study of Persian and Urdu and the maulvi who taught him. He was also familiar with the ideals of Hinduism, the orthodox variety as well as the reformist trend of the Arya Samaj to which his family owed allegiance. This, coupled with his inherently secular temperament, provided him a unique vantage point from which he could write fairly and fearlessly about both communities in an even-handed way. In fact, he was the only writer of his generation in any Indian language, not excepting Tagore, to write about the external and internal lives of the members of both communities with an insight, empathy and intimacy that have not been matched since. I cannot think of any other Indian writer who possessed that kind of vision. During his lifetime, the relationship between Hindus and Muslims went through particularly volatile and turbulent phases, but he was always unwavering in his belief in pluralism and kept the faith. Stories like ‘Holy Judges’, ‘Idgah’, ‘The Greater Pilgrimage’ (‘Hajj-e Akbar’), ‘Temple and Mosque’ (‘Mandir aur Masjid’), ‘The Prophet’s Justice’ (‘Nabi ka Niti Nirvaah’), ‘Forgiveness’ (‘Kshama’) and essays such as ‘Islamic Civilization’ (‘Islami Sabhyata’14) demonstrate his deep knowledge of Islamic culture and the intimate lives of Muslim families, and how the daily lives of Hindus and Muslims were intertwined, particularly in the countryside. Towards the end of the second decade of the twentieth century when Hindu–Muslim relations were at their lowest ebb, Premchand wrote the play Karbala, on a deeply emotional subject for Muslims, to cement the bonds of Hindu–Muslim unity.
Premchand seems immensely relevant in today’s India when history is being sought to be rewritten and Muslims are constantly cast in the role of the ‘other’ and held accountable for all the real and imagined atrocities of Muslim rulers of the past. In his own time, he saw with bewilderment how ‘Whenever a Muslim king is remembered, we evoke Aurangzeb’ (Premchand 1985:5), a remark that reverberates with contemporary resonance, indicating the agenda of some people who always sought to frustrate any attempt at a broader understanding and reconciliation between these two communities. He was opposed to religious sectarianism and orthodoxy in any form. This will be evident if one reads his stories in the Moteram series and a story like ‘Holy War’ (‘Jihad’) where he anticipates what goes today by the misleading and erroneous name of ‘Islamic’ terror. In this context, Syed Akbar Hyder’s comments seem particularly
