PREMCHAND

Munshi Premchand, (July 31, 1880 – October 8, 1936) was a writer of modern Hindi
and Urdu literature. In India, he is generally recognized as the foremost writer in both
Hindi and Urdu during the early twentieth century.[1]

Biography
[edit] Early years

Premchand was born on July 31, 1880 in the village Lamhi near Varanasi to Munshi
Ajaib Lal, a clerk in the post office, and his wife Anandi. His parents named him Dhanpat
Rai (master of wealth) while his uncle, Mahabir, a rich landowner, called him Nawab
(Prince), the name Premchand first chose to write under.[2] Premchand's parents died
young - his mother when he was seven and his father while he was sixteen or seventeen
and still a student. Premchand was left responsible for his stepmother and step-siblings.

Premchand was married at fifteen to a girl from a neighboring village but the marriage
was a failure and, when Premchand left the village in 1899, the girl returned to her
village. Several years later, in 1906, in response to an advertisement in a local paper from
a man who wanted to marry off his child-widow daughter, he married a second time to
Shivrani Devi.

The schoolmaster period

In 1899, Premchand left Lamahi to take up the position of a schoolmaster at a mission

school in the town of Chunar at a salary of eighteen rupees a month, with which he had to
support his wife, his stepmother, his half-brother, his stepmother's younger brother and
himself. Times were hard for the young man and they became harder still when he was
fired from the job for being 'too independent'. He returned to Lamahi and soon got a job
as an assistant master at a government school in Benaras, only to be transferred two
months later to Pratapgarh, Uttar Pradesh a town near Allahabad where he first started
writing seriously.[2],[3] After two years at Pratapgarh, in 1902, he was sent to Allahabad to
obtain training as a teacher where he impressed the principal enough to be offered a job
as the headmaster of the Model School attached to the teacher's training college. In 1904,
he passed the special vernacular examination in Hindi and Urdu a[3] and was transferred
to Kanpur as the deputy sub-inspector of schools.

While at Allahabad, Premchand's first novella, Asrar e Ma'abid (The Secrets of the
Sanctum Sanctorum) was serialized in the Urdu weekly Awaz-e-Khalq (first publication
date 8 October 1903),[2] but it was in Kanpur where his writing career really took off with
his association with the Urdu magazine Zamana where he published a regular column,
The March of Time, focusing on national and international affairs. In Kanpur, he became
a part of the literary circle and gained a reputation as a journalist and writer with a social
conscience. His second novel, also in Urdu, Kishna (1907) was written during this period
(the text of this novel has nor survived).[3] He also published a collection of short stories
in Urdu, Soz-e-vatan. In 1910, he was hauled up by the District Magistrate in Gorakhpur
for his anthology of short stories Soz-e-Watan (Dirge of the Nation), which was labeled
seditious. All the copies of Soz-e-Watan were confiscated and burnt.

In 1921, he answered Mahatma Gandhi's call and resigned from his government job. In
the same year his son, Amrit Rai, was born; Rai also became a writer, and wrote a highly
regarded biography of his father. Then Premchand worked as the proprietor of a printing
press, editor of literary and political journals (Jagaran and Hans). Briefly, he also worked
as the script writer for the Bombay film world. He didn't think much of the film world of
his times and once remarked about the film Mazdoor (The Labourer), "The director is the
all in all in cinema."

Premchand lived a life of financial struggle. Once he took a loan of two-and-a-half rupees
to buy some clothes and had to struggle for three years to pay it back.

Writing style
The main characteristic of Premchand's writings is his interesting story-telling and use of
simple language. His novels describe the problems of the rural peasant classes. He
avoided the use of highly Sanskritized Hindi (as was the common practice among Hindi
writers), but rather he used the dialect of the common people.

Premchand called literature a work that expresses the truths and experiences of life
impressively. Presiding over the Progressive Writers' Conference in Lucknow in 1936, he
said that attaching the word "Progressive" to writer was redundant, because "A writer or
an artist is progressive by nature, if this was not his/her nature, he/she would not be a
writer at all."

Before Premchand, Hindi literature was largely confined to raja-rani (king and queen)
tales, stories of magical powers and other such escapist fantasies. It was flying in the sky
of fantasy until Premchand brought it to the ground of reality. Premchand wrote on the
realistic issues of the day - communalism, corruption, zamindari, debt, poverty,
colonialism etc.

Some criticize Premchand's writings as full of too many deaths and too much misery.
They believe Premchand does not stand anywhere near the contemporary literary giants
of India, Sharat Chandra Chattopadhyay and Rabindranath Tagore. But it should be noted
that many of Premchand's stories were influenced by his own experiences with poverty
and misery. His stories represented the ordinary Indian people as they were, without any
embellishments. Unlike many other contemporary writers, his works didn't have any
"hero" or "Mr. Nice" - they described people as they were.

Premchand was a contemporary of some other literary giants of that era like Acharya
Ram Chandra Shukla and Jaishankar Prasad.

Literary works
Premchand wrote about 300 short stories and several novels as well as many essays and
letters. He also wrote plays and did some translations. Many of Premchand's stories have
been translated into English and Russian.

Godaan (The Gift of a Cow), his last novel, is considered one of the finest Hindi novels.[4]
The protagonist, Hori, a poor peasant, desperately longs for a cow, a symbol of wealth
and prestige in rural India. Hori gets a cow but pays with his life for it. After his death,
the village priests demand a cow from his widow to bring his soul to peace.

In Kafan (Shroud), a poor man collects money for the funeral rites of his dead wife, but
spends it on food and drink.