Premchand archives Hindu–Muslim relationship in mutually respectable terms that move beyond Aurangzeb and his times into a temporal zone reflecting a more pluralistic Islam . . . By ideologically fracturing religious communities, he undermines the antagonistic communal bifurcation within the colonial milieu that posited Hindu and Muslim as age-old enemies whose scriptures determined their mode of thinking and living. (Hansen and Lelyveld, 2005, 276)Evolution in Premchand’s Art of Storytelling
Premchand’s art of storytelling evolved through his career encompassing three full decades, as did his language and vocabulary. As he evolved from a dastaanesque to a realistic mode, his language also changed in register and vocabulary, and the patches of purple prose likewise dwindled. Moreover, as he slowly moved from Urdu to Hindi, but still continued to write or translate in both languages (or forms or shaili, as some would characterize it), his language underwent visible changes. And later in life, when he became a strong advocate of Hindustani, his endeavour was to craft a language that would be equally intelligible to the votaries of both Hindi and Urdu. He also moved from the earlier dense, lush narrative style incorporating multiple registers and a variety of characters as in ‘Holy Judges’, ‘The Sword of Loyalty’ (‘Khanjar-e Wafa’), ‘Atmaram’, ‘Idgah’, and so on, to a leaner, pared down narrative style focusing on one or two events and involving fewer characters. The earlier expansiveness was replaced by intensity of experience. The idealistic, sometimes even prescriptive, nature of his work evolved into a more robust and mature understanding of life’s pitiless ironies and unpredictability that did not always conform to poetic justice. Amrit Rai’s remark in this context seems the most pertinent:
In the year 1933–34, Premchand wrote several stories such as ‘Manovritti’, ‘Doodh ka Dam’, ‘Balak’, ‘Naya Vivah’ . . . which are entirely new from the point of view of both content and form . . . there isn’t in these later stories . . . a dense and tightly woven web of events as in the stories of an earlier phase. They have, instead, just a single focus of interest, just one little point to make, an unremarkable enough state of mind to describe, the author’s own way of observing a fleeting glimpse of truth or beauty—and this is presented in an informal and conversational manner . . . (Amrit Rai 1982, 311)Language Issues: Urdu versus Hindi
As indicated in the opening paragraph of this Introduction, a comprehensive understanding of Premchand’s stature as a writer demands that the reader is able to access his stories in both versions. One great advantage of this anthology is that it points to differences in the two versions of a story. These differences are sometimes trivial, at other times substantial, and provide added insights into the stories and expand their textuality.15 Premchand began his career writing in Urdu and he produced a substantial volume of work in his first twelve years as a writer (1903–15)—five novels and close to four dozen stories to be precise—before he thought of writing in Hindi. His transition from Urdu to Hindi was gradual, though irreversible, given the social and political circumstances and the publishing scenario of the time.
Now, the question is, are the Hindi and Urdu versions of his stories exact replicas of each other? Not always and not necessarily. Premchand knew this too well, as he was aware of the changes that he made along the way. In a letter to Imtiaz Ali Taj, the dramatist, translator and editor in Urdu, he mentioned that he changed entire scenes while translating the text from one version to the other. As usually happens with writer-translators, whenever they translate their own work, the creative impulse often takes over so that translation often turns into rewriting. In Premchand’s stories one finds many minor changes that were done either for stylistic embellishments, or for the difference in perceived readership, or, quite probably, for the space constraints in the journal in which the stories were going to be published.
There is another dimension to this issue. It was not always Premchand himself who translated his work between Urdu and Hindi. Often, he took help from others, which might have meant he had the time to look over it only cursorily. Several translators, most notably Iqbal Bahadur Verma ‘Saher’, are known to have helped Premchand in preparing versions of stories both in Hindi and Urdu. Their style now passes off as Premchand’s style. His younger son, Amrit Rai, excavated several stories in Urdu of which there were no Hindi versions. Amrit Rai published such stories in a two-volume anthology with the appropriate title Gupt Dhan (Hidden Treasure). In its Introduction he writes about the kind of changes he has effected while transferring the stories from one version to the other:
I thought it unfair to Hindi readers to publish these stories in their original form. So I clothed them in Hindi, in the style of Munshiji, as far as it was possible for me. How far I have succeeded in this effort to not only preserve the soul of the story but the language and style as well will be judged by you. As for me, I feel satisfaction in the thought that I have pulled all my resources in this endeavour.16 (My translation)
It is both significant and debatable why Amrit Rai felt it necessary for the stories to undergo changes for the sake of intelligibility and readability in Hindi. Had the two languages changed so much within twenty-five years of Premchand’s death that they needed to be interfered with? This also brings up the questions of ethics and authorship. Does anyone, be it even the writer’s own son, have the right to tamper with the original works of a writer to make them suitable for a particular readership?
How radical these changes sometimes were can be illustrated through the two versions of his famous story ‘A Night in the Month of Poos’ (‘Poos ki Raat’). The story is about a poor, destitute peasant, Halku, who is in permanent debt to
