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Why read Premchand in Modi era?
Why read classics? A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say. Premchand, considered one of the greatest fiction writers in Hindi, remains presciently relevant today. His 300-odd short stories are classics in their own fashion, for they tell us about love, compassion, cruelty and deception and nationalism. To read and re-read Premchand will not only help one understand himself better but his friends and foes as well.
Penguin Books deserves our fulsome praise for bringing out the complete (all 299 of them) short stories of Premchand in four beautiful volumes, edited by eminent critic and translator M Asaduddin. By any measure, these volumes are a valuable addition to a book lover’s collection, priced at Rs 799 each. Premchand wrote in Hindi and Urdu—all his stories are available in both Hindi and Urdu as a result of translation—and most of the stories in these volumes are translated by Asaduddin.
Noted critic Harish Trivedi in his introduction points out that Penguin Books’s effort is an unprecedented project of its kind and scale in the history of translations into English in India, for not even great Rabindranath Tagore had all his short stories translated into English, much less in a uniform edition like this one. And one cannot agree more with Trivedi on this count.
Premchand felt a deep affinity with the common man and his natural sympathy was towards the oppressed and deprived sections of society. Trivedi notes that no writer before him in Urdu or Hindi, and possibly other Indian languages, had depicted the lives of underdogs, untouchables and marginalised sections with such depth and empathy. Another perceptive observer Amrit Rai reminds us that 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.
Premchand quarrelled with the priestly class and remained a trenchant critic of caste injustice. For example, in Babaji’s Feast, he depicts the greed of a Brahmin who has no compunction in robbing a poor family of its means, and in Funeral Feast he showed how predatory and parasitical Brahmins drove another Brahmin woman to destitution and her daughter to suicide.
Stories such as Thakur’s Well, Salvation, The Shroud, Temple, The Woman Who Sold Grass and One and Quarter Ser of Wheat constitute a devastating indictment of the way upper-caste Hindus have treated Dalits for generations. Vasudha Dalmia has pointed out how ahead of time Premchand was: “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.”
Editor and translator Asaduddin points out that a considerable number of Premchand’s stories deals with the plight of women. He was deeply sensitive to the suffering of women in a patriarchal society where they had no agency and lived their lives according to the whims and fancies of the men on whom they were dependent. In a large number of stories such as Tuliya, Sati, The Suicide, The Thread of Love, Two Friends and The Lunatic Lover, he sheds light on the plight of women in an oppressive, patriarchal system.
Not merely a chronicler of human condition, Premchand was fiercely nationalistic and as Marxist critic Namwar Singh says: “If one wanted to find in any one Indian writer the very pulse of Indian life, its struggles and its setbacks, its sorrows and its anguish, in all their depth and all their wide scope, over a period of three decades right from the partition of Bengal in 1905 up to 1936, when he passed away, then, notwithstanding the fact that we have Rabindranath Tagore, we have Sarat Chandra, we have Subrahmanya Bharati, we have V S Khandelkar, we have K M Munshi, and we have as well Mohammad Iqbal, I would like to name Premchand, for he is the one writer we have in those works the immortal saga of our struggle for independence has been narrated in all its fullness.” That explains quite a lot.
While it is important to read Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Pamuk and Kundera to hold the ground beneath your feet, Premchand, too, makes you rooted in the dusty reality of contemporary India. Buy all the four volumes of Premchand: The Collected Short Stories and dip into it to know yourself and renew yourself.