Premchand in Three Ideas
the essentialsThe village as the world
Peasants, moneylenders, priests and landlords — the real India, told without romance.
Literature as a torch
“Literature is not the follower of politics but the torch that walks ahead of it.”
Against caste and dowry
His fiction attacked untouchability, child marriage, dowry, the plight of widows and religious hypocrisy.
Premchand (pen name of Dhanpat Rai Srivastava; 31 July 1880 – 8 October 1936) was the founding master of modern Hindi and Urdu fiction. Born in the village of Lamhi near Vārāṇasī to a poor Kāyastha family, he worked as a schoolteacher and inspector, resigned his government post in 1921 in response to Gandhi’s call for non-cooperation, and devoted himself to writing and publishing. In about 300 short stories and a dozen novels, he portrayed the Indian countryside with unsentimental realism: peasants crushed by debt, landlords and moneylenders, Brahmin priests exploiting the poor, untouchables, widows, child brides, petty officials, and the moral struggles of ordinary people under colonial rule. His novels include Sevāsadan (1918), Rangbhūmi (1925), Karmabhūmi (1932) and his masterpiece, Godān (1936). Among his most famous stories are “Kafan” (“The Shroud”) — in which a father and son, too poor and degraded to buy a shroud for the son’s wife who died in childbirth, spend the money collected for it on drink — “Pañc Parmeśvar”, “Īdgāh” (a boy who spends his festival money on tongs for his grandmother, who burns her hands on the stove), “Sadgati” and “Shatranj ke Khilari” (“The Chess Players”). In his 1936 address to the first conference of the Progressive Writers’ Association, he declared that literature must be “the torch that walks ahead of politics”.
Curiosities
did you know?- His first story collection, Soz-e-Watan (1907), was seized and burned by the British; he changed his pen name from Nawab Rai to Premchand.
- He wrote about 300 short stories and a dozen novels, first in Urdu, later in Hindi.
- Satyajit Ray filmed his stories ‘Shatranj ke Khilari’ (The Chess Players, 1977) and ‘Sadgati’ (1981).
Questions to Argue About
debate club →- Should literature serve social reform?
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