Premchand and the Making of Modern Hindi Fiction

Reference library · 1000 words

Before Premchand, Hindi fiction was largely made of romances, moral tales and improbable adventures. After him it was about tenant farmers, moneylenders, dowry, widow remarriage, village politics and the small humiliations of clerical life. That shift, from the fantastic to the observed, is the single most important event in modern Hindi prose, and one writer is responsible for most of it.

A schoolteacher who became a novelist

He was born Dhanpat Rai Srivastava in 1880 at Lamhi, a village near Benares, into a Kayasth family of modest means. His mother died when he was a child and his father, a post office clerk, soon afterwards; he was married young, studied while working, and supported himself for years as a schoolteacher and then as a deputy inspector of schools in the government education service. Poverty and clerical drudgery are so persistent in his fiction because he lived both.

He began writing in Urdu, which was his first literary language, under the pen name Nawab Rai. In 1908 he published a collection of patriotic stories called Soz e Watan, the lament of the nation, which the colonial authorities judged seditious and confiscated. The episode ended his use of that name and produced the one the world knows. As Premchand he began, gradually, to write in Hindi as well, and much of his mature work exists in both Urdu and Hindi versions, sometimes with different titles and meaningful differences of phrasing. His first significant novel appeared as Bazaar e Husn in Urdu and Sevasadan in Hindi, and concerns a woman pushed by circumstance into a courtesan's quarter and the respectable society that profits from pretending to reform it.

In 1921, after hearing Gandhi speak, he resigned his government post, a decision that cost him financial security for the rest of his life. He edited and largely wrote several journals, including Hans and Jagaran, ran a printing press that repeatedly failed, and in 1934 went to Bombay to write for films. He lasted about a year, contributed a script for a film about mill workers that ran into trouble with censors and industrialists, and went home disgusted by an industry he thought had no interest in anything he cared about.

The books

Premashram and Rangbhoomi took on land relations and the encroachment of industry on village common land; the latter's protagonist is a blind beggar who refuses to give up his patch of ground to a factory. Nirmala is a compact and merciless account of what happens when dowry demands force a young woman into marriage with a much older widower, and remains one of the most effective pieces of social argument in Indian fiction. Gaban follows a clerk driven to embezzlement by his wife's desire for jewellery and by his own vanity, and is unusually clear eyed about how respectability itself generates crime. Karmabhoomi engages directly with the civil disobedience movement.

His last completed novel, Godaan, published in 1936, is the one usually placed at the summit. Its central figure, Hori, is a peasant whose modest ambition is to own a cow, and the novel tracks with terrible patience the way debt, custom, caste obligation and the small vanities of village status grind him down. It works simultaneously as social analysis and as tragedy, and it refuses the consolation of a redemptive ending.

He wrote roughly three hundred short stories, collected under the title Mansarovar, and it is arguable that the stories are where his craft is sharpest. Idgah follows a small orphan boy at the Eid fair who spends his few coins on a pair of tongs so his grandmother will stop burning her fingers. Poos ki Raat puts a farmer and his dog in a field on a freezing night. Namak ka Daroga concerns an honest salt inspector and what honesty costs him. Shatranj ke Khiladi shows two noblemen of Lucknow so absorbed in chess that they barely register the British annexation of their kingdom, a story Satyajit Ray filmed in 1977. Ray also filmed Sadgati, about an untouchable labourer who works himself to death for a Brahmin priest, and Mrinal Sen adapted Kafan as Oka Oori Katha.

Realism, reform and the arguments since

Premchand described his own approach as adarshonmukh yatharthavad, a realism oriented towards the ideal, and the phrase captures a genuine tension in his work. He wanted to show society as it was, and he wanted his readers to change it, and in his earlier novels the reforming impulse sometimes produces endings tidier than the material deserves. In the late work, particularly Godaan and the story Kafan, that tidiness disappears entirely. Kafan, in which a father and son let a woman die in childbirth and then spend the money collected for her shroud on food and drink, is so bleak that critics have never agreed on what it means: an indictment of a system that has hollowed out its victims, or a portrait of moral collapse in the victims themselves.

That argument has become sharper over time. A number of Dalit critics, notably in the decades since the 1990s, have challenged Premchand's authority to represent Dalit lives at all, and have read stories such as Kafan and Sadgati as reproducing upper caste assumptions even while sympathising with the oppressed. Defenders reply that he wrote against caste more directly than almost any contemporary and at real professional cost. The debate is live and worth knowing about, because it is one of the central arguments in contemporary Hindi criticism.

He presided over the founding conference of the Progressive Writers' Association in Lucknow in 1936, delivering a presidential address that redefined literature as something answerable to society rather than to beauty. He died later the same year, in his mid fifties, without money. His shared inheritance across Hindi and Urdu makes him one of the few writers claimed equally on both sides of a language divide that hardened after his death, and that dual citizenship is not the least of his achievements.

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