The Complete Short Stories

the village moneylender. Halku spends the severe winter nights in the field to save the harvest from marauding beasts. But ultimately, he is unable to save the crop when a horde of wild beasts descends on the field one night and despoils the harvest. In the Hindi version, which was first published in the journal Madhuri (May 1930), the story ends on a note of apparent relief for Halku, who decides to move away from the life of a peasant by becoming a worker in a factory. However, in the Urdu version, which was published later in Prem Chaleesi 2 (1930), Premchand has added a section at the end where Halku ponders over the travails of peasant life but nevertheless decides to stay a peasant. Taking on the job of a day labourer, he thinks, would mean an insult to the land and to his forefathers who were peasants. So he resolves to stay a peasant whatever the challenges. Thus, the two endings of the story admit two radically different interpretations. It is clear that the Urdu version is not simply an expanded version of the Hindi, but it radically alters the perspective of the protagonist. In the Hindi version of the story Halku comes across as yielding to the pressures of being a peasant and surrendering to the fate of a wage-earner, whereas the Urdu version stresses his strong resistance to any such shift in his career. He confronts the challenges of a peasant’s life, standing face-to-face with total ruin as the marauding animals destroy his harvest, but none of it can destroy his spirit. He is convinced that he should continue to be a peasant to carry on the legacy of his forefathers. Thus, while the Urdu version maintains the status quo in Halku’s life, the Hindi version envisages his transformation into a factory worker. Changes of the kind signalled above, with variations and different degrees of emphasis, can be found in a number of Premchand’s short stories.

‘Atmaram’ is a story that presented Premchand with the problem of cultural untranslatability. It was built on the Hindu philosophical concept of maya and moha,¹⁷ and Premchand must have found that these concepts were not easily translatable in Urdu. The story is about a devout village goldsmith, Mahadev, who, disenchanted by his own children, becomes attached to a parrot which he symbolically named Atmaram. The story plays on the popular belief that atma, or the soul, is like a bird which flies out at the time of death. Mahadev’s religious and spiritual inclinations are demonstrated by his constant chanting of two lines of a popular bhajan: Sat gurudutt Shivdutt daata/Ram ke charan mein chitt laaga. The villagers could identify him from a distance hearing the sound of the bhajan. It so happens that one of his sons accidentally opens the cage one day and the parrot flies out. When Mahadev finds the cage empty, his heartbeat stops for a moment. All his attempts to tempt the parrot back into the cage bear no fruit. The parrot sits on the cage and flies about it, but cannot be made to enter the cage. Mahadev continues his effort. The climax of the story shows this tug of war between Mahadev and the parrot effectively:

[The parrot] would come and sit on the top of the cage and now sit at the door of the cage and look at the bowls for food and water, and then fly off. If the old man was moha incarnate, the parrot was incarnate maya. This went on till evening descended. The struggle between maya and moha was lost in darkness.

Hindi: [Tota] kabhi pinjre par aa baithta, kabhi pinjre ke dwar par baith apne daanapani ke piyalion ko dekhta, aur phir urh jata. Buddha agar murtiman moha tha, tau tota murtimayi maya. Yahan tak ki shaam ho gayi. Maya aur moh ka ye sangram andhakar mein vilin ho gaya.

Urdu: [Tota] kabhi pinjre par aata, kabhi pinjre ke darwazey par baith kar apne daanapani ki piyalion ko dekhta, aur phir urh jata, magar joonhi Mahadev uski taraf aata woh phir urh jata. Buddha agar paykar-e hawas tha, tau tota daayre aarzoo. Yahan tak ke shaam-e siyah ne hawas aur arzoo ki is kashmakash par parda dhal diya.

One would understand that Urdu words like hawas and aarzoo cannot adequately represent the philosophical concepts of maya and moha and Premchand must have realized this fact of cultural untranslatability. Similarly, the constant chanting of the bhajan Sat gurudutt Shivdutt daata/Ram ke charan mein chitt laaga would befit the genius of the Hindi language more than Urdu and appeal to someone brought up in the tradition of Hindu religion more than anyone else. That Premchand himself was conscious of this is evidenced by the fact that the story was originally intended for the journal Kahkashan published from Lahore. But as the story got written Premchand realized that it was probably not suitable for the predominantly Muslim readership of Kahkashan. He wrote to the editor, Imtiaz Ali Taj:

I have recently written another story, ‘Atmaram’. I am sending it to Zamana. It has turned out to be so utterly Hindu that it is not suitable for Kahkashan. You may call yourself a Hindu but your readers certainly are not Hindu.¹⁸

This statement, however, appears to be at odds with the entire version of the Urdu story which Premchand seems to have written with far greater relish than the Hindi version. The Urdu version is longer by two dense pages—ten pages compared to the Hindi version’s eight. The rhetorical flourishes, the deployment of metaphor and simile, the idiomatic turns of phrase—all these make the Urdu version more urbane, supple and enjoyable than the Hindi one which seems somewhat stark and dull in comparison. Thus, reading the short stories in both Hindi and Urdu reveals several interesting facts.

In many cases, the Urdu version is longer than the Hindi version, showing the use of traditional rhetorical embellishments. This would encourage us to speculate that: (a) Urdu was Premchand’s first love