Table Of ContentTHE OXFORD INDIA
PREMCHAND
The Oxford India Collection is a series which brings together
writings of enduring value published by OUP.
Other titles include
The Orford India Ghalib
The Orford India Ramanujan
The Orford India Illustrated Corbett
THE OXFORD INDIA
PREMCHAND
with an introduction by
FRANCESCA ORSINI
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
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ISBN 0 19 566501 5
Printed at Pauls Press, Delhi 110 020
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Contents
Introduction by Francesca Orsini vii
Part I: SHORT Stories (translated by David Rubin)
Introduction to The World of Premchand 3
Introduction to Widows, Wives and Other Heroines 10
The Village
The Road to Salvation 19
A Feast for the Holy Man 30
The Power of a Curse 33
A Catastrophe 44
January Night 49
Neyur 55
The Story of Two Bullocks 64
Ramlila 76
The Thakur’s Well 83
A Desperate Case 87
The Town
A Day in the Life of a Debt-Collector 99
A Car-Splashing 107
From Both Sides 111
A Moral Victory 124
Man’s Highest Duty 138
VI Contents
A Lesson in the Holy Life 143
A Little Trick 146
Penalty 153
The Writer 157
A Coward 168
The World
A Servant of the Nation 181
The Chess Players 182
The Road to Hell 193
Miss Padma 200
My Big Brother 206
Intoxication 215
The Price of Milk 223
The Shroud 233
Deliverance 241
Two Autobiographical Sketches 250
A Note on Translation 257
Notes to the Stories 259
Widows, Wives and Other Heroines
Widow with Sons 267
The Secret 285
Second Marriage 298
Wife into Husband 311
Disaffection 321
The Prostitute 330
The Funeral Feast 347
Desire 364
The Actress 370
Sacrifice 380
Light 389
Divided Hearths 400
Part II: Novels
Nirmala (translated by Alok Rai)
Gaban: The Stolen Jewels (translated by Christopher R. King)
Appendix: The Aim of Literature by Francesca Orsini
Introduction
To be labelled a ‘c*lassic can be a double-edged sword. On the one
hand, everybody knows a classic and encounters it at least once in a
lifetime, either at school or elsewhere. On the other hand, a classic
comes packaged with a number of definitions already stamped all over
it. Moreover, readers approach a classic with such high expectations
that more often than not they are disappointed on actually reading it.
Above all, what often gets lost in reading a classic is the sense of
surprise, of bold discovery, of unexpected ideas. All this is true of
Premchand, Hindi and Urdu’s ‘classic’ writer of the early twentieth
century. He comes packaged with all the right definitions: realist,
humanist, secularist, social reformer, politically engaged, etc. And yet
there is often little sense that by reading his novels and stories one will
discover anything new or valuable for oneself now.
Everybody in India reads at least one of Premchand’s stories at
school, but most people never read him again. Why? The story that
one is most likely to encounter in school textbooks is ‘Idgah’, a story
which taps into village and childhood nostalgia, celebrates the victory
of renunciation over selfish temptation, and presents a picture of
communal harmony. Like all other village children, five-year-old
Hamid is looking forward to the Eid fair in town after Ramadan, but
he is an orphan and his old grandmother can only give him three paisas
to spend. When he tours the fair he greedily eyes the stalls selling clay
toys and sweets, but when taunted by his friends he finds fault with
viii Introduction
each and every one of them. Instead, he uses his pocket money to buy
iron tongs for his grandmother so that she will no longer burn her
fingers when picking up chapattis from the ironplate. On the way back,
the children are divided into those who look down upon the humble
tongs—what kind of a plaything is that?—and those who, led by
Hamid, see them as a new and original toy. At the end of the story, the
clay toys are all broken into pieces while only the tongs survive. And
in the emotional climax the old grandmother is moved to tears by
Hamid’s love and his spirit of renunciation. It is a moving story, the
high moral values cleverly offset by Hamid’s sophistry, an obvious
case of sour grapes. But what schoolchild would like the suggestion
that he or she should forfeit toys for something as plain and useful and
boring as a pair of tongs, no matter how much the imagination may
turn them into a plaything? What stays in mind is the moral demand
and the sentimental ending, which makes the story apiece with the
didactic stories that abound in most Hindi school readers. What child
would want to read more Premchand after that?
And yet one only has to read Premchand’s contemporaries to see
how staggeringly different he was from all of them, what an enormous
stretch of ground he covered in his comparatively short life, and how
refreshingly able he was to pick up his pen and create characters who
spoke and felt like human beings. Half of his characters were women,
itself a huge novelty, and they, too, spoke vehemently, powerfully,
convincingly at a time when women were just entering the public
sphere. As Alok Rai has pointed out, Premchand’s apparent ‘organic-
ity’, the way in which he came to crystallize and symbolize an entire
zone of social consciousness in the decades from the 1910s to the 1930s,
masks a remarkable story of self-fashioning as an intellectual and a
teller of tales.
The Extraordinary, Ordinary Man
Dhanpat Rai was born to an ordinary Kayastha family in 1880 in
village Lamhi, a few miles from Bañaras. His early childhood in Lamhi
was perhaps the only sustained experience of village life he had, but the
enduring connection with Lamhi made sure that when he, alone
among the Hindi and Urdu writers of his generation, turned to write
about village life, characters and politics, he did so without the distanced
Introduction ix
objectivity of an urban outsider. His father was a postal clerk and held
one of those transferrable jobs rightly indicated by Benedict Anderson
as contributing to the formation of a supra-regional political con
sciousness. Young Dhanpat, called Nawab at home, began his school
ing in Urdu and Persian in the typical Kayastha mould of the times,
but he also attended Mission and government schools, and soon
developed a taste for reading fiction. His early family life was also
ordinarily tragic: his mother died when he was seven and when his
father remarried the relationship with his stepmother was not affec
tionate; moreover, his first, arranged, marriage proved to be with an
incompatible girl, with whom young Premchand refused to co-habit.
His father’s death in 1897 brought a sudden, but by no means unusual,
burden of responsibilities, and though for a while Premchand tried to
keep studying he had to turn to teaching for a living. Teaching at the
time was a respectable profession but a poorly paid one: Premchand’s
first salary in 1899 was Rs 18 per month. Teacher Training College
seemed a way out of this dead end, and after graduating in 1904 his
career prospects improved. He ended up as a sub-deputy inspector of
schools, in other words, an officer in the education department, a
somewhat powerful position which could command local influence
and a side-income in the form of bribes from headmasters and text
book publishers. The temptations and the gap between the investment
in and high expectations of education, the pitiful salary of a govern
ment clerk or civil servant, and the demands of social status, crop
up regularly in Premchand’s fiction, often leading to disastrous
consequences.
As a matter of fact, about a third of Hindi and Urdu writers in this
period were teachers and, as for them, Premchand’s lifeline to the
world of letters and of public opinion were journals, in his case the
prestigious Urdu journal Zamana^ edited in Kanpur by Munshi
Dayanarayan Nigam. In the period between 1905 and 1920 Premchand
contributed to 7.amana articles on literary and political matters and his
first short stories; in 1915 his stories also started appearing in the
prestigious Hindi journal Sarasvati. Premchand’s first collection of
short stories, Lament for the Motherland (Soz-e vatan^ published in
Urdu in 1908) attracted unfavourable attention from the authorities—
Premchand was reprimanded for its seditious content, changed his
penname from Nawab Rai to Premchand, and started toying with the
X Introduction
idea of leaving his government job to become a full-time editor or to
work in non-government ‘n*ational schools. In 1906 he married Shivram
Devi, a child-widow, who would prove to be the right companion for
him and eventually took up writing herself. By 1918 Premchand
realized that publishing in Hindi gave more opportunities and meant
reaching out to a larger number of readers, and from then on his novels
appeared earlier in Hindi than in Urdu, though he was careful always
to see them in print in Urdu, too. The exact dynamics of the switch are
still slightly unclear; the possibility being that for some time Premchand
continued to write in Urdu shorthand and either himself copied or had
his texts copied out in Devanagari by someone else; this involved also
substituting suitable (Sanskritic) Hindi terms for the abstract Persian
and Arabic words. By the 1920s Premchand’s stories were actively
sought by all the major Hindi literary journals of the day, and in
particular he wrote many of his women-centred stories for the radical
woman’s journal Chand.
In 1921, like other ordinary people answering Gandhi’s call for non
cooperation, Premchand took the plunge and resigned from his gov
ernment job, a 41 year-old man with two young children.. From then
on writing became his only steady source of income while he held a
succession of teaching and editing jobs and invested most of his money
in his own publishing and editing ventures: the Saraswati Press, the
literary monthly Hans (1930) and the political weekly Jagaran (1932).
In the 1930s he even tried scriptwriting for a film company in Bombay
but with little satisfaction. When in 1930, Hindi editor Banarsidas
Chaturvedi asked him in an interview how much he had earned from
his literary writing, Premchand’s reply was between Rs 50 and 80 per
month. This seems like meagre earnings, but actually Premchand was
the most successful Hindi and Urdu writer of his day. For over twenty
years he wrote roughly a story a month and was payed up to Rs 20 per
form; in the 1920s he earned Rs 200 per month as editor of the
prestigious Hindi monthly Madhuri, and in 1925 he received as much
as Rs 1800 for his novel Rangbhumi (The Field of Action). No other
writer in Hindi earned that much. But, as his biographers have pointed
out, all of his earnings went to pay for his journals and printing press.
The aspiration Premchand shared with so many writers of his genera
tion to have his own journal did not automatically entail sound
business know-how, and that, compounded by his preference for
