Munshi Premchand was born on 31July 1880 in a small village, Lamhi, near Varanasi. His parents named him Dhanpat Rai. He started writing at a young age. Initially, he wrote in Urdu. Later, he wrote only in Hindi.
Munshi Premchand was the son of a postal clerk. He lost his mother when he was very young. Just 7 years. And his at the age of 14, he lost his father. With his father’s demise, young Premchand took over the responsibility of earning bread for the family. In the face of great economic hardship, he matriculated. He then found employment as a school master in small village schools.
While working, Premchand continued his studies and completed his F.A. and his B.A. He was keen on doing his Masters in Literature, but circumstances in life prevented him from doing so.
In 1921, influenced by Mahatma Gandhi’s call to leave Government jobs, Premchand resigned from his schoolmaster’s job. He was in dire economic straits. Yet, he gave up his 23 year old secure if low-paying Government job. In this decision, his wife willingly supported him.
For a few months after that, he worked for a private school in Kanpur. He could not keep his job, because he was too principled and was the victim of office politics. He resigned from there and left for Varanasi where he taught at the Kashi Vidyapith for a few months, and edited ‘Maryada’. He then left for Lucknow where he edited ‘Madhuri’. Both ‘Maryada’ and ‘Madhuri’ were literary magazines with very low circulation and an uncertain future.
In a few years, he shifted back to Varanasi to launch his own literary magazine, ‘Hans’. Sometime later, he launched ‘Jagaran’ as well. But both magazines were loss-making enterprises. At a certain point in time Premchand was so heavily in debt because of editing these magazines, he had to wind up operations and shift baggage to Mumbai.
He had come to Mumbai to write for the Hindi film industry. But here he was constantly being asked to compromise on his storyline and the integrity of his characters to suit the whims of film producers. Premchand refused to make such manipulations, which would hurt the flow of his story. Hence, deeply disappointed, he made his way back to Varanasi, still struggling against the onset of bankruptcy.
He was given the highest accolade of his time, when he was referred to as ‘Upanyas Samrat’. He wrote novels, short stories, essays and children’s fiction. All that he wrote, has stood the test of time, and nearly seventy after his death, Premchand is still one of India’s best-read authors. His novels, in particular Godan, Nirmala and Gaban are hugely popular. His short stories, brought together under the title Mansarovar enjoy tremendous enthusiasm amongst readers until date.
Premchand has been translated in many languages, there are 100s of Ph.Ds awarded on his works every year. There is no University in India and abroad, where Hindi literature is taught and Premchand is not an important part of the syllabus.
Premchand wrote in a very direct and simple style, and his words made their own magic. His protagonists were always the people he observed around him. His knowledge of the human psychology, and his appreciation of the ironies of life made him a stellar writer.
In keeping with his clean-cut style and lucid manner, reading Premchand is a great pleasure! His prose is precise, his descriptions succinct.
Premchand lived in an era of great social turmoil for India. He saw traditional village independence being destroyed by the colonisers. He saw how the traditional system of the Indian Undivided Family was falling apart with the pressures of increased centralisation of jobs in urban centres. He also noted the fallout of large-scale urbanisation and the consequent materialistic and acquisitional tendencies it triggered off. His stories and novel faithfully record and analyse these tendencies through the trials and tribulations of his protagonists.
Premchand observed keenly the psychology of a child, brought up in poverty. In his short story Eidgah, the hero, a small boy from a poor family, goes with his relatively well-to-do friends. He has a very small amount of money to spare. Instead of blowing it on fun and toys, he buys a ‘chimta’ for his old grandmother, who used to burn her fingers on the hot iron ‘tava’.
His novel ‘Godan’ tells the story of a poor man, bound by the society, exploited by the privileged class and his soul-destroy in travails. His protagonists are often exploited, but never unjust themselves, and retain their humanity. The badi bahuria, in Bade Ghar Ki Bahu, despite longing to eat a halfway decent meal, gives it to the postman, who is actually the bearer of bad news. When the postman tries to decline, she says that she will eat some bathua saag and manage.
Each novel, each story of Premchand reassures us that humanity is alive and well. That circumstances may be grim, but there is a god somewhere, and things are not so bad as they may seem. Premchand sees goodness in every human being, and hence describes people aptly. The most mean and vicious character will suffer the occasional qualm of conscience. And the most naive character is not without heroism. The protagonist of Gaban is out to impress his newly wed wife. His tale of plight is told with understanding and empathy. The reader feels apart of Premchand’s stories. All his fictional characters are real. They are living and breathing.
While in Mumbai, Premchand had fallen ill and soon after getting back to Varanasi, he died on 8 October, 1936.
Had Premchand been born in America or Europe, he would have certainly won the Nobel Prize for Literature and a Knighthood too!
