The Complete Short Stories Read online

  Be that as it may, Premchand, by beginning to write in Hindi, entered a wider and apparently more congenial cultural ambience in which even the semantic resonances seemed to conform more closely to his vision of the world. The very titles of several works from this transitional period bear this out. The novel titled Bazar-e Husn (written in 1917 in Urdu; The Market-Place of Beauty) was published first in Hindi as Sevasadan (1919; The Abode of Service). The short story published in Urdu as ‘Panchayat’ (May–June 1916; The Jury of Five Elders) was published in Hindi as ‘Panch Parameshwar’ (June 1916; The Five Elders as [the voice of] God), and ‘Brahm ka Swang’ in Hindi (1920; Pretending to be Brahm or God) was toned down in Urdu to become ‘Nok-Jhonk’ (1923; Banter).6 It must be added that Premchand never wholly abandoned Urdu, for till the end he wrote in it a few of his short stories, most notably ‘Kafan’ (1935), and also lectures and essays, including his presidential address to the first conference of the All-India Progressive Writers Association (1936), in which he quoted verse four times, each time in Persian. When his host Sajjad Zaheer remarked that the Urdu in his speech had become a little ponderous (saqeel), Premchand laughed his loud laugh and said he thought he would show everyone that he was a ‘Kayastha ka bachcha’ (son of a Kayastha), implying that his Urdu could be as high-flown as any Muslim’s!

  Realism and Idealism

  Another important development in Premchand’s career is believed to have taken place in the last few years of his life, when he wrote some stories in which his realism was not irradiated by his usual optimistic outlook. Throughout his career, in both his novels and his short stories, his protagonists had been inspired by the abiding values of truth, mutual trust, goodwill, cooperation and service to others. In moments of adversity and crisis, they were motivated by an idealism which led them to acts of selfless sacrifice, or to a change of heart involving an admission of past errors and deep repentance in which all conflict and dissonance were dissolved into a compassionate harmony. Premchand seemed to have been a firm believer in what the English poet John Keats, in a memorable phrase, called ‘the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of imagination’.7

  Premchand similarly said that a good short story offered ‘a vivid and heart-touching depiction of an episode, a glimpse of the soul’. In another essay, he described his own mode of writing fiction, or indeed his whole vision of life, as adarshonmukh yatharthvad,8 that is, idealistic realism or, more accurately, ideal-oriented realism. Some of his best-known and best-loved short stories are shining examples of this possibly naive-seeming and sentimental but in fact resolutely principled view of life in which goodness, virtue and self-realization are ultimately bound to prevail over all misunderstanding and temporary ill will.

  Yet, in his last few years, Premchand wrote some stories which seem devoid of such a hopeful tenor and are instead inconclusive or even bleak. To cite just the best known of them, in ‘Poos ki Raat’ (1930; A Winter Night), a farmer falls asleep on his night-long watch over his ripening harvest, wakes up in the morning to find it devoured and destroyed by a herd of nilgai, but as he walks back home, he tells himself that he would at least not have to freeze any more by passing night after night out in the open. In ‘Sadgati’ (1930; Gone to Heaven, made into a film by Satyajit Ray), a poor low-caste man is cruelly worked to death by a Brahmin priest, with the latter excusing himself in the end by saying that after death in a Brahmin’s service, the wretched man would surely go to heaven. And in ‘Kafan’ (1935; The Shroud), a father and son end up in a drinking house in a city, carousing in an only-too-rare carnivalesque moment, quite oblivious of the son’s young wife who has died in childbirth the night before and still lies unmourned and uncremated back in the village.

  These are deeply unsettling works, and commentators on Premchand have been at a loss as to what to make of them. Some have suggested that Premchand was here at last moving out of the shadow of Gandhi and of traditional values to a kind of radical progressive position. As there is not a trace of resistance or rebellion against the system or even the particular oppressor in any of these stories (as there is not in Premchand’s last novel, Godaan, either), some others have suggested that Premchand had in the end grown weary of his own idealism and become a little cynical. Another way of looking at these few stories, which are so striking partly because they go against the grain of the rest of Premchand’s career, may be to suggest that in them, Premchand was experimenting with something new and beginning to develop a ‘late style’ (in Edward Said’s formulation in his late and indeed posthumous book)9 as many other masters had done as they advanced in years. Premchand died at the age of fifty-six, and one can only speculate on what and how he would have gone on to write had he been granted, say, ten more years. We may anyhow note that the last two short stories Premchand published in his lifetime, ‘Do Bahnen’ (August 1936; Two Sisters) and ‘Rahasya’ (September 1936; The Secret), are both as full of Premchand’s signature vocabulary of seva, tyag and daya (service to others, sacrifice and compassion) as anything he wrote at any time in his career.10

  Translating Premchand: The Two Originals

  Premchand’s short stories began to be translated in his own lifetime into other Indian languages, including Gujarati, Bengali, Marathi and Tamil, as well as into English, German and Japanese. The first volume of a selection of his short stories in English translation was published in 1946 by Gurdial Malik and, as M. Asaduddin has shown, about a dozen other selections have been published since then by translators both Indian and American. As most of the translators have gone in for the same ‘best’ stories, the total number of short stories translated into English remains a small fraction of the oeuvre.11

  Translation is sometimes slandered as being a losing game by those who do not pause to reflect on what is gained, for without translation, however inadequate, we would not have access to an alien author or work at all. What comes across especially well in English in the case of Premchand is his irreducibly humane content and his gripping, even enchanting, narrative voice. With the very first sentence of a novel or a story by him, we enter a parallel universe of his creation, which compels utter credibility and full engagement. His diction is simple, especially in the frequent dialogues, his sentences are short—sometimes too short to sound natural in English—and even in those of his tales which have a parable-like ending, the specificity of realistic notation remains undiminished. On the other hand, his authorial passages of both a narrative and discursive kind exploit fully the expressive resources of the language he uses and are so felicitously modulated as to stretch the capabilities of the best translators. Premchand’s penchant for using idiomatic phrases presents a difficulty and so do culture-specific terms, as with translating any writer.

  But a difficulty that may be unique to Premchand arises from the fact that whether one translates him from Hindi or Urdu, the original text may well turn out to be always already translated—from the other language! It is now possible to say with certainty which of the two versions of a story was first published, and in the great majority of the cases it is clear that the version first published was also the first to be written. But this priority may not always indicate primacy, for if the second, translated version turns out to be different in significant respects, it would be inept to reject it altogether. Though the early translations from Urdu into Hindi were mostly done by Premchand himself, we have firm evidence, for example, that the final manuscript of the Hindi Rangbhumi was translated into Urdu by another person who demanded a rate that Premchand thought to be exorbitant. In any case, all his works throughout his life in both Hindi and Urdu were published under Premchand’s own name with no mention of a translator and are treated by the common reader as being equally original.

  A good English translation then must take both the Hindi and the Urdu versions into account and in the case of each notable variation, reconcile them if possible or at least opt for whichever seems more apt. As I have argued elsewhere, it must be one translation rendered ou
t of two originals. The issues involved here may be quickly illustrated through the one story that I have myself contributed to these volumes, ‘A Special Holi’ (Volume 2). Its title in Hindi is ‘Vichitra Holi’ (published in 1921) and in Urdu ‘Ajeeb Holi’ (1928), which may look quite similar but have different connotations, especially when we read the story. It depicts all the servants of a British sahib staging a rebellion against him on the carnivalesque day of Holi when he is out hunting, and they indulge in riotous merriment by drinking his wine, dancing on his dining table and singing lusty Holi songs. They are punished and slink away when Mr Hunter returns, but they have had their day of glorious liberation. Now this, as Premchand narrates, is more a special Holi, in a positive sense, than a strange Holi, in a quizzical or suspicious sense, and the Hindi title is closer to the mark. Elsewhere in the story, Hindi words seem more apt in some places but Urdu words in some other places, and in this transitional phase of his career from Urdu to Hindi, Premchand even seems to waver here and there between Hindi usage and Urdu usage, mixing up, for example, the verbs that would go with arpan (dedication) and qurbani (sacrifice).12

  The Present Volumes

  In this respect, a major new beginning is made with the translations in these four volumes, for the translators had access to both the Hindi and the Urdu versions. Besides, the notes at the end indicate the major variations between the two texts and provide the publishing details of both the versions. The Introduction by M. Asaduddin, a multilingual scholar, provides an erudite and comprehensive overview of Premchand’s career, and his thematic and stylistic range. His archival researches have resulted in the discovery of two whole stories which were so far known to have been published but could not be traced, and also of sections 2 and 3 of a third story of which only the first section was available. This edition of translations of Premchand thus goes a bit beyond even the most comprehensive editions of his works so far published in either Hindi or Urdu and gives a new meaning to the phrase ‘Found in Translation’!

  But the outstanding feature of these volumes is, of course, the fact that they present in English translation close to 300 stories that Premchand wrote. Such an enormous project must have initially seemed audacious, and then been full of difficulties, problems and heartaches during its long gestation. But a team of sixty translators, occasionally interacting together in workshops, finally realized the plan with Professor Asaduddin himself leading from the front by translating, I am given to understand, no less than 100 stories all by himself.

  So far as I know, this is an unprecedented project of its kind and scale in the history of translations into English in India, for not even the great Rabindranath Tagore has had all his short stories (which number seventy-nine, as collected in the three volumes of his Galpa-Guchchha, that is, ‘Bunch of Stories’) translated into English, much less in a uniform edition like this one. As this fleet of four ships, this argosy laden with some of the best writing produced in India in the modern period and now made available in a global language, is launched by a major international publisher upon the seven seas, one hopes that it will succeed in flying the flag of Indian literature far and wide and win for it a new and wider circulation.

  November 2017

  Harish Trivedi

  Introduction

  ‘Premchand stands supreme as the iconic fiction writer of Urdu and Hindi, and to read and re-read him over and over again is to understand better ourselves and our society’1—Harish Trivedi

  Premchand is generally regarded as the greatest writer in Urdu and Hindi, both in terms of his popularity and the range and depth of his corpus. His enduring appeal cuts across class, caste and social groups. He was not only a creative writer in Urdu and Hindi, but he also fashioned modern prose in both languages and influenced several generations of writers. The fact that his works were published in more than two dozen Hindi and Urdu journals2 simultaneously attests to his extraordinary reach to the wide audience that formed his readership. Many of his readers encountered modern Urdu and Hindi novels and short stories, and indeed any literary forms, for the first time through his writings. Premchand’s unique contribution to the formation of a readership—and, in turn, to shaping the taste of that readership—has yet to be assessed fully. Few or none of his contemporaries in Urdu–Hindi have remained as relevant today as he is in the contexts of the Woman Question (Stree Vimarsh), Dalit Discourse (Dalit Vimarsh), Gandhian Nationalism, Hindu–Muslim relations and the current debates about the idea of India that is inclusive of all groups and denominations, irrespective of caste and creed. Francesca Orsini, who has worked on the Hindi public sphere, says pertinently: ‘His strong social conscience and radical politics, which brought him closer and closer to socialism, were rooted in an utterly secular and inclusive view of the Indian nation, which makes him a particularly valuable and rare role model these days.’ (Orsini 2003, xxvi)

  However, despite his pioneering and iconic status, studies on Premchand have remained woefully inadequate because his entire corpus was or is still not available in either Hindi or Urdu, not to speak of English. Researchers had to remain content with only one of the corpuses (either Urdu or Hindi) accessible to them. This is also true of his short stories. Till today, the entire corpus of his short stories is not to be found in any of the versions. Fortunately, it is now being made available in English by combining and assimilating both the archives. Moreover, some new materials not accessible so far either in Hindi or Urdu are being made available for the first time in English. These twin advantages—in addition to the fact that the entire corpus is now being made available in English in a reliable chronological order3—should make the reading of Premchand more fruitful, exciting and enjoyable and give a new fillip to Premchand studies. There is a need to revisit Premchand in the light of the new materials that have been discovered, mainly, though not exclusively, through the efforts of Kamal Kishore Goyanka, and some more new materials that are presented in this anthology.

  Premchand as a Short Story Writer: Beginnings

  Premchand pioneered modern short story writing in Urdu and Hindi. The Urdu short story, or afsana (sometimes called mukhtasar afsana to distinguish it from longer fictional works), can be seen as a continuity of the fictional tradition that existed in Urdu for several centuries—that is, literature consisting of qissa, hikayah, dastaan, and so on, which drew upon the Perso-Arabic narrative tradition on the one hand and the Indian tradition of storytelling as one finds in works like the Panchatantra, Hitopadesha and the Jataka tales on the other. The short story proper in Urdu, however, emerged only in the opening decade of the twentieth century. By that time, novels and short stories were familiar conventions, having already been established in Bengali at the hands of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Rabindranath Tagore and Sarat Chandra Chatterjee. These Bengali writers are being invoked here because Premchand had read all of them in translation and drew inspiration from them. In fact, he began his writing career by translating Tagore. Of course, his staple readings were the medieval-style romances in Urdu and Persian popular at the time, particularly the writings of Ratan Nath Dhar Sarshar and Abdul Halim Sharar.

  The atmosphere of dastaan and historical romances hangs heavy on Premchand’s early stories. But he soon grew out of that phase and made his work more socially relevant by giving it the hard, gritty texture of realism. His art of storytelling became a vehicle for his socially engaged agenda of social reform and ameliorating the condition of the deprived and oppressed sections of society. However, that does not mean he was mainly concerned with the content and external circumstances of his characters and not with their inner worlds. Like all great writers, he took interest in unravelling the mental processes of his characters and the psychological motivations of their actions. As he says:

  My stories are usually based on some observations or personal experience. I try to introduce some dramatic elements in them. I do not write stories merely to describe an event. I try to express some philosophical/emotional reality through them. As long
as I do not find any such basis I cannot put my pen to paper. When this is settled, I conceive characters. Sometimes, studying history brings some plots to mind. An event does not form a story, as long as it does not express a psychological view of reality.4 (My translation)

  In the stories he has written—which number close to 300—one finds different modes and points of view, which he adopted by employing an array of narrative devices. An overwhelming number of his stories are written in the third person or omniscient narrative mode and a far lesser number in the first person. He makes extensive use of dialogue, using different registers of Urdu and Hindi in addition to dialects, colloquialisms, idioms and speech patterns specific to a caste, class or community. He also uses the technique of interior monologue and multiple points of view in quite a few stories. The salient point is that even though Premchand was mainly concerned with the content of his stories, to the extent of sometimes making them formulaic and predictable, he certainly did engage with the stylistic aspects too. And in this respect, he was influenced by both Indian—specifically Bengali—and foreign writers.

  Sources

  The subject matter of Premchand’s stories has been taken from Indian history and mythology, Indo-Muslim cultural history, contemporary society, and his own wide readings of literature from across the world, particularly English, Russian and French literature, from which he translated into Urdu and Hindi. The early decades of the twentieth century in India were exciting times, marked by the stirrings of change in society, particularly in its transition from a predominantly feudal and patriarchal society to a more democratic and modern one. From the third decade, the movement for independence gained momentum. Premchand had a journalist’s curiosity of the quotidian and the contemporary. He was extraordinarily alive to the goings-on around him and made the events and issues the subject matter of his stories.5 There is hardly any issue relevant to the India of that time that he did not touch in his fiction. From a reading of his short stories it is quite possible to recreate the society of that time, with all its quirks, contradictions and superstitions, as well as the prevalent reformist and intellectual climate, particularly in the northern part of the country.