The Complete Short Stories Read online

  PREMCHAND

  the complete short stories VOLUME 2

  Edited with an Introduction by M. Asaduddin

  Translated from the Hindi and Urdu by M. Asaduddin and others

  Foreword by Harish Trivedi

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Foreword by Harish Trivedi

  Introduction

  1. Premonition

  2. The Murder of Honour

  3. The Bookbinder

  4. Atmaram

  5. The Correction

  6. The Prime Dharma of Man

  7. Black Face

  8. Banter

  9. The Old Aunt

  10. A Father’s Love

  11. After Death

  12. The Blessed Illness

  13. Life Force

  14. The Problem

  15. A Special Holi

  16. The Hidden Hand

  17. An Audacious Act

  18. The Red Ribbon

  19. When Rivals Became Friends

  20. A Positive Change

  21. A Battle of Ideals

  22. A Philosopher’s Love

  23. The Bridal Sari

  24. Witchcraft

  25. Victory of the Defeated

  26. Defending One’s Liberty

  27. Cobra Worship

  28. Turf War

  29. Hidden Wealth

  30. A Dhobi’s Honour

  31. Hoodwinked

  32. Reincarnation

  33. Test

  34. A Loyal Subject

  35. End of Enmity

  36. The Fool

  37. Compulsion

  38. A Home for an Orphan

  39. Purification

  40. Autobiography

  41. The Ornaments

  42. Revenge

  43. Trickery

  44. Satyagraha

  45. The Roaming Monkey

  46. The Prophet’s Justice

  47. Sudden Downfall

  48. Road to Salvation

  49. Money for Deliverance

  50. Forgiveness

  51. The Lashes of Good Fortune

  52. Banishment

  53. Despair

  54. Ghost

  55. By a Whisker!

  56. Initiation

  57. Rescue

  58. The Game of Chess

  59. One and a Quarter Ser of Wheat

  60. Pleasures of College Life

  61. The Malevolent Baby

  62. Money for the Decree

  63. The Condemned

  64. The Path to Hell

  65. The Secret of Culture

  66. Temple and Mosque

  67. Faith

  68. Man and Woman

  69. A Hired Pony

  70. A Mother’s Heart

  71. Theft

  72. The Goddess from Heaven

  73. Punishment

  74. The Outcaste

  75. Laila

  Footnotes

  Foreword by Harish Trivedi

  Introduction

  1. Premonition

  4. Atmaram

  6. The Prime Dharma of Man

  7. Black Face

  11. After Death

  13. Life Force

  15. A Special Holi

  20. A Positive Change

  44. Satyagraha

  54. Ghost

  58. The Game of Chess

  Notes

  Glossary

  Acknowledgements

  Note on Translators

  Popular Editions

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE COMPLETE SHORT STORIES: VOLUME 2

  Premchand (1880–1936), considered one of the greatest fiction writers in Hindi, was born Dhanpat Rai in Lamahi, a small village near Benares. He wrote in Urdu under the name Nawab Rai and changed it to Premchand when his collection of short stories, Soz-e Watan, was seized for sedition in 1909. In a prolific career spanning three decades, Premchand wrote fourteen novels, two plays, almost 300 short stories and several articles, reviews and editorials. He edited four journals, and also set up his own printing press. Though best known for his stories exposing the horrors of poverty and social injustice, he wrote on a variety of themes with equal felicity—romance, satire, social dramas, nationalist tales, and yarns steeped in folklore.

  M. Asaduddin is an author, critic and translator in several languages. His books include Premchand in World Languages: Translation, Reception and Cinematic Representations; Filming Fiction: Tagore, Premchand and Ray; A Life in Words; The Penguin Book of Classic Urdu Stories; Lifting the Veil: Selected Writings of Ismat Chughtai; For Freedom’s Sake: Manto; and (with Mushirul Hasan) Image and Representation: Stories of Muslim Lives in India. He has been a Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence at Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA, and a Charles Wallace Trust Fellow at the British Centre for Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. He is a regular speaker at literary festivals, and his translations have been recognized with the Sahitya Akademi Award, and the Katha and A.K. Ramanujan awards for translation, as well as the Crossword Book Award.

  Advance Praise for the Volumes

  ‘Not having access to all of Premchand’s stories has always been a cause of frustration to his readers. The publication now of the entire, admittedly huge, corpus of his short stories is very welcome. Premchand—in spite of occasional challenges—remains a true colossus of Indian literature. The sheer variety, with its hypnotic power, and the vastness of his output is staggering. It is impossible to arrive at any kind of assessment of modern Indian literature without taking full account of Premchand. Then, his fiction as a living source and commentary on the social, political and rural India of the early part of the twentieth century is valuable and relevant even today. These four volumes deserve a place on the bookshelf of every lover of modern fiction, in India or elsewhere’

  SHAMSUR RAHMAN FARUQI

  well-known critic, poet and novelist in Urdu

  ‘Premchand’s fiction draws from his vast experience of the conflicts of village life, of caste tensions, of excessive revenue demands and the never-ending chain of debts entailed by these. If these are grim tales, they are both deepened and lightened by his psychological insight, his irony and humour, and the broad canvas on which they are drawn, which links country and city in a manner unknown in Hindi–Urdu fiction writing before him. To present this rich corpus, drawn exhaustively from both Urdu and Hindi originals, the vast majority made available in English for the first time, is a pioneering feat for which the translators are to be congratulated’

  VASUDHA DALMIA

  professor emerita of Hindi and Modern South Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley

  ‘At once an extraordinary feat of scholarship and an immense labour of love, this collection gives us the complete corpus of Premchand’s short stories in English translation for the first time. It thus allows readers without access to either or both of Premchand’s languages of composition, Urdu and Hindi, insight into one of the greatest writers of India’s modernity—indeed, into the making of modern India. Most importantly, as the rich and informative Introduction to this translation states, the stories bear witness to Premchand’s “secular and inclusive” view of the Indian nation. Premchand’s socialism, his realism, his role in the fashioning of a modern prose style in two languages, his searing insights into caste and gender politics, his sympathy for the oppressed, for the labouring poor, even for working animals, make him a writer from whom we still have much to learn. If this remarkable collaborative enterprise brilliantly led by M. Asaduddin helps us to do so, its purpose will be served’

  SUPRIYA CHAUDHURI

  professor emerita, Department of Englis
h, Jadavpur University, Kolkata

  ‘It is a valuable work, especially for foreign readers who cannot read the original text in Hindi or Urdu. This complete translation of Premchand’s short stories must be welcomed as a major contribution to the accessibility to modern Indian literature. Being considered one of the foundational figures of modern Indian literature, Premchand deserves this kind of ambitious work on him, which will find him his rightful place in world literature’

  PHILIPPE BENOÎT

  Sanskritist and professor of Bengali, National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations, Paris

  ‘Premchand is one of the most famous—perhaps the most famous—Hindi authors. Many of his short stories have been translated into a wide array of languages. And yet, when one looks at these selections it appears that the translators tended to choose a particular set of stories regarded as Premchand’s masterpieces, ignoring the rest. The present collection aims to present the full picture, displaying Premchand at different stages of his life, in different moods, displaying changing attitudes with regard to the functionality of literature. For the first time, readers of English will be able to appreciate Premchand’s story-telling in all its facets and fullness’

  CHRISTINA OESTERHELD

  professor of Urdu, University of Heidelberg, Germany

  ‘Premchand was greatly popular with an earlier generation of Russian readers. This anthology will certainly enhance his visibility to an international audience and make him popular with the new generation of Russian readers and scholars of Indian literature’

  GUZEL STRELKOVA

  professor of Hindi, Moscow State University, Moscow

  For

  Jamia Millia Islamia,

  a university that has nurtured composite culture,

  secular nationalism and pluralism for 100 years

  Foreword

  During the birth centenary celebrations of Premchand (1880–1936), he was described as one of the panch devata, that is, one of the five gods, or (to put it more plausibly in English and also perhaps a bit more secularly!) one of the five iconic figures of modern Indian literature.1 This was high praise indeed, for each one of the twenty-four languages of India which are recognized and honoured by the Sahitya Akademi can boast of several outstanding writers in the modern period. The foremost of these probably still is Rabindranath Tagore, best known for his lyrical and transcendentally spiritual poetical works and, of course, for being the first, and so far the only, Indian to win the Nobel Prize for literature. But of those following behind him, Premchand stands as tall as any other writer.

  Premchand wrote in both Urdu and Hindi, which made him an inheritor of two distinct literary traditions and also gave him a far wider readership than writers in other languages could aspire to. He wrote in the popular genres of the novel and the short story, and he practised a simple and candid style which had a direct emotive effect. He set his fiction in both cities and villages, often bringing the two Indias into poignant juxtaposition, most pointedly in his last novel, Godaan (1936), and in other novels and numerous short stories too throughout his career. After experimenting early in his career with a few short stories set in the historical past (which he used allegorically for a present patriotic purpose), he wrote as a rule on contemporary themes of immediate social and political relevance. He marched with the times, responding to successive waves of public events and movements with a creative openness that wasn’t bound by blind allegiance to any ideology. The scope of his understanding and the range of his sympathies were wide enough to encompass each aspect of the impact of colonial rule and of the nationalist movement for freedom in its many dimensions. His heart beat with the heart of the nation. As the Marxist Hindi critic Namwar Singh says:

  Premchand was the unique epic-chronicler [maha-gathakar] of our struggle for freedom and it will be no exaggeration to say that he occupies in this regard an unrivalled place in the whole of Indian literature. 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 1905–06 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 Kanhaiyalal Maniklal Munshi, and we have as well Dr Mohammad Iqbal, I would like to name Premchand, for he is the one writer we have in whose works the immortal saga of our struggle for independence has been narrated in all its fullness.2

  And yet, it would be to underestimate Premchand to think of him only, or even primarily, as a chronicler of what was perhaps the most vitally transformative phase in the history of modern India. For he was, like a true artist, concerned first and foremost with human beings and the daily, ordinary lives they led. If these lives were impacted by larger historical forces, as indeed they inescapably were, Premchand’s focus remained on the human characters rather more than on the forces shaping them, and it was in this indirectness that the greatness of his achievement lies. His eventful narratives of the nation were above all else compassionate tales of humanity.

  Life and Times: Sedition and ‘Premchand’

  Premchand was born in Lamahi, a village which now stands virtually on the outskirts of Benares, of Kayastha parents, which meant that he would culturally be more inclined to Urdu than Hindi. His mother died when he was eight, his father remarried shortly afterwards, and Premchand first went to school in Gorakhpur where his father, a postal clerk, was then posted. Premchand’s real name was Dhanpat Rai Shrivastav, but he was fondly called Nawab, a prince, and he published his early writings under the name ‘Nawab Rai’. In his early teens he read voraciously Tilism Hoshruba (in Urdu, published from 1883 onwards in numerous volumes amounting to thousands of pages) and similar dastaan tales of what may now be called the old school of Arabian magic realism.

  Premchand passed his matriculation examination (class 10) in 1898, and began a long career as a teacher and school administrator, during which he passed as a ‘private’ or non-formal candidate the Intermediate examination (class 12) in 1916 and the BA in 1919, with English literature, Persian and history as his subjects. In 1921, he resigned government service at the call of Gandhi during the Non-Cooperation Movement. He had, between 1915 and 1924, moved away from Urdu to begin writing in Hindi which Gandhi had in 1918 declared to be the rashtra bhasha, the national language. During the salt satyagraha called by Gandhi in 1930, his (second) wife, Shivrani Devi, courted arrest and spent two months in jail. In 1923 Premchand had bought a press and started the publishing house Saraswati Press but in the absence of a regular income, he served two stints as the editor of the Hindi journal Madhuri in Lucknow, in 1924–25 and again from 1927 to 1932. Meanwhile, he started a journal of his own, Hans (The Swan, vehicle of Saraswati, the muse of literature), in 1930, and then taken over another journal, Jagaran (Awakening), in 1932. Premchand returned to Benares to spend the last four years of his life back in Lamahi where he had built a bigger pukka house which still stands, and from where he commuted to his press in Benares. On 8 October 1936, at the age of fifty-six, he died of a stomach ailment that had long afflicted him. He had published in Urdu and Hindi thirteen novels, including one left unfinished, and what are now reckoned to be close to 300 short stories.3

  At least four novels by Premchand are counted as being among the greatest written in Hindi: Sevasadan (1919; The Abode of Service), Rangbhumi (1925; tr. as The Playground), Karmabhumi (1932; Field of Action), and Godaan (1936; tr. as Godaan and also as The Gift of a Cow). It has long been a matter of debate whether Premchand was a greater novelist than a short story writer and, though scholars may prefer the weightier and more complex novels, popular opinion has favoured the more accessible and immediately affective short stories. A brief account is given below of a few highlights and turning points in Premchand’s career as a short story writer.

  Premchand published his first collectio
n of five short stories in 1908, Soz-e Watan (in Urdu: The Dirge of the Nation), and it met with an unexpectedly hot reception. The stories were all patriotic, which the British government promptly interpreted to be seditious, and Premchand, who was then serving as a sub-deputy inspector of schools, was summoned to appear before the district magistrate who asked him to confirm that he was the author of the book which had been published under his pen name ‘Nawab Rai’, told him to burn all the copies and never to write anything like that again. He then added, ‘Thank your stars that you are a servant of the British Empire. Had these been Mughal times, both your hands would have been chopped off.’4 What was chopped off, however, was the name ‘Nawab Rai’, and it was then that the new pen name ‘Premchand’ was born, under the oppressive shadow of British censorship and as a subterfuge against its vigilance. This was only the first of Premchand’s many brushes with authority, for in the 1930s he was required time and again to deposit a security of Rs 1000 at the slightest whiff of sedition in anything that he published in his two journals.

  Urdu and Hindi

  A more significant turning point came when Premchand decided to change his linguistic horses in midstream and cross over from writing in Urdu to writing in Hindi. This profound makeover began in 1914 and, through a long and assiduous process, culminated in 1924, when Premchand revised and rewrote his Urdu novel Chaugan-e Hasti (Life as a Game) in Hindi as Rangbhumi (1925; The Playground). He gave two reasons for making this transformation. Publishers were hard to find in Urdu, while they were plentiful in Hindi and paid substantially more. Besides, Premchand felt out of place in the Urdu cultural milieu; as he asked in a moment of despondency in a letter to an Urdu editor in 1918, ‘Has any Hindu ever made a success of writing in Urdu that I will?’5 The facts seem to support him, for in one count by a British literary historian in 1928, of about 250 writers he treated in his work, only eight were Hindus and none of them was regarded as being of the first rank.