The Complete Short Stories Page 3

  Themes

  Premchand began his career as a short story writer with the publication of Soz-e Watan (The Dirge of the Nation, 1908), written under his pen name, Nawab Rai. It is a collection of five stories wherein he wrote on patriotism in a mode that can be called revivalist or revisionist, much in the vein of Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, whom he imitated in matters of style as well.6 The patriotism and the hatred against invaders displayed in these stories made the colonial government ban the book, and Premchand barely escaped with a sharp reprimand from the magistrate. This was his first encounter with colonial censorship but not his last. He had to battle with censorship that tried to cripple him both as a writer and an editor of magazines later in life, without much help from anyone. What is pertinent to note here is that a strain of patriotism ran through stories such as ‘The Rarest Pearl in the World’ (‘Duniya ka Sab se Anmol Ratan’), ‘Sheikh Makhmoor’, ‘Rani Sarandha’, and ‘Raja Hardaul’, which were written either in the dastaanesque mode or in the mode of historical romances, sometimes both. He continued to write in this vein for some time before he moved gradually to the realist mode, which was preferred by writers in many other Indian languages.

  ‘A Well-bred Daughter’ (‘Bade Ghar ki Beti’) is the first story to depict the family drama of an average, middle-class Indian family written in the realistic mode. He wrote a large number of stories throughout his career in this mode and on this theme. This and ‘Family Break-up’ (‘Algojhya’) are two classic stories about the Indian joint family that is held together by the ideal of sacrifice, where individual aspirations are subordinated to what is good for the family. A joint family in a village provides an ideal for Premchand whereby peasants can avoid dividing their landholding into smaller units. The breaking up of a family is an immensely painful affair in Premchand’s stories, bringing social disgrace and opprobrium to those involved. However, between the two stories mentioned above, Premchand wrote a large number of stories about the daily life of smaller families in villages and small towns where he dealt with different aspects of family life: conjugal tiffs and strife, domestic cruelty, struggle for survival amidst limited means and penury, polygamy, rivalry between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law for domination in the house, the phenomenon of co-wives and the plight of stepchildren, conflict between legitimate aspirations and meanness of opportunities, the cycle of debt that ruins families, and so on.

  Premchand felt a deep affinity with the common man and his natural sympathy was towards the oppressed and deprived sections of society. No writer before him in Urdu or Hindi, and possibly other Indian languages, had depicted the lives of underdogs, untouchables and marginalized sections with such depth and empathy. Throughout his life, ‘Premchand did not let go of his unsentimental awareness of the grim realities of rural life, of life at the bottom of the economic scale’ (Amrit Rai 1982, ix). The oppressors and oppression came in many forms—they may be priests or zamindars, lawyers or policemen, or even doctors, all of whom held society in their stranglehold. Rituals pertaining to Hindu marriages and deaths were so exploitative and oppressive that these events were often robbed of their dignity and joy and spelt the ruin of families. Premchand began his career by exposing the corruption of the Hindu priestly class in his novel Asraar-e Muavid (Mysteries of the House of Worship, 1903–05), and then continued the tirade in many of his stories. In the story ‘Babaji’s Feast’ (‘Babaji ka Bhog’) he depicts the greed of a Brahmin who has no compunction in robbing a poor family of its meagre means, and in ‘The Funeral Feast’ (‘Mritak Bhoj’) he showed how the predatory and parasitical Brahmins drive another Brahmin woman to destitution and her daughter to suicide. In a series of stories where the central character is Moteram, a Brahmin priest, Premchand exposes with rare courage the rapacity, hollowness and hypocrisy of the Hindu priestly class, which earned him the ire and venom of a section of high-caste Hindus, even culminating in a lawsuit for defamation. But he remained undaunted and went on exposing the many oppressive customs prevalent in society.

  But his most trenchant critique was reserved for caste injustice, whereby people on the lowest rung of the Hindu caste system, and beyond the pale of the caste system, were considered untouchable and were compelled to live a life of indignity and humiliation. The upper-caste Hindus treated them worse than animals and this injustice was institutionalized through the social sanction of the caste system. Stories such as ‘Thakur’s Well’ (‘Thakur ka Kuan’), ‘Salvation’ (‘Sadgati’), ‘The Shroud’ (‘Kafan’), ‘Temple’ (‘Mandir’), ‘The Woman Who Sold Grass’ (‘Ghaaswali’) and ‘One and a Quarter Ser of Wheat’ (‘Sawa Ser Gehun’) constitute a devastating indictment of the way upper-caste Hindus have treated Dalits for generations. They demonstrate that Dalits were subjected to daily humiliation and this humiliation stemmed from the fact that Dalit inferiority had become embedded in the psyche of the members of the Hindu upper castes, who have developed a vast repertoire of idioms, symbols and gestures of the verbal and physical denigration of Dalits over centuries. Grave injustice and the inhuman treatment of Dalits have become normalized, and cause no revulsion in society. Despite criticism from a few Dalit ideologues who level some rather irresponsible charges against Premchand for depicting Dalits in a certain way, the stories above—some of which have been rendered into films—have contributed significantly in raising awareness about the injustice perpetrated against the most vulnerable section of society. In this respect, as Vasudha Dalmia suggests, Premchand was much ahead of his time: ‘In his fiction, written over the three decades in the early century, Premchand presented what academic scholarship was to face squarely only towards the close of that century.’7

  A considerable number of his stories deals with the plight of women. Premchand was deeply sensitive to the suffering of women in a patriarchal society where they had no agency and lived their lives according to the whims and fancies of the men on whom they were dependent—husbands, fathers, brothers or even close or distant male relatives. Women were expected to be docile, submissive and self-effacing, sacrificing their lives for the well-being of the family. Girls were treated as a curse on the family and the parents of girls were subjected to all kinds of humiliation and indignities while their marriages were arranged. Parents were sometimes compelled to marry off their nubile and very young daughters to old men just to unburden themselves of the responsibility and shame of being saddled with an unmarried daughter. The practices of kanya vikray (sale of a daughter in marriage), even kanya vadh (killing of a girl child), were prevalent. In his essays and editorials, Premchand made a strong plea for the abolition of the evil practices that made the life of women unbearable. He advocated divorce in extreme circumstances, and supported the wife’s claim to own half the husband’s property in case of divorce and inherit the property in case of the husband’s death.8 He also wrote in favour of the Sarda Bill which aimed at raising the minimum marriage age for girls. In a large number of stories, such as ‘Tuliya’ (‘Devi’), ‘Sati’, ‘The Goddess from Heaven’ (‘Swarg ki Devi’), ‘Return’ (‘Shanti’), ‘Godavari’s Suicide’ (‘Saut’), ‘The Thread of Love’ (‘Prem Sutra’), ‘Two Friends’ (‘Do Sakhiyaan’), ‘The Lunatic Lover’ (‘Unmaad’), and so on, he sheds light on the plight of women in an oppressive, patriarchal system. Through the immortal characters of old women like Chachi in ‘Holy Judges’, the old aunt in the eponymous story, and Bhungi in ‘A Positive Change’ (‘Vidhwans’), he shows how difficult life was for old women in a society that was known to respect its elderly members. The fate of widows, who were considered inauspicious and were expected to renounce all joys of life, was even worse, as shown in ‘Compulsion’ (‘Nairashya Leela’), ‘The Condemned’ (‘Dhikkar’) and ‘A Widow with Sons’ (‘Betonwali Vidhva’).

  However, there is a certain ambivalence in his depiction of women and their status as equal partners in marriage.9 Some of the stories were radical for his time, yet he was unable to imagine a fully independent and empowered woman with her ow
n agency and subjectivity, as Tagore did, for example, in ‘Wife’s Letter’ or ‘Chitra’.10 In the entire Premchand oeuvre of short stories there are only three single women—Miss Padma of the eponymous story, Miss Khurshed of ‘Disgrace’ (‘Laanchan’) and Miss Joshi of ‘Faith’ (‘Vishwas’). While Miss Padma, despite her education and economic independence, seems inadequate as a woman, deprived of a family life and bereft and regretful after a failed live-in relationship, Miss Khurshed is depicted as enjoying to the hilt her single status as a woman, and even sharing a deeply emotional relationship with another woman, Dr Leela. Miss Joshi starts off as a social butterfly, with the high and mighty kowtowing to her, but after several years of a live-in relationship with Mr Johri, pines for the bliss of domestic life with Mr Apte. However, there are so many female characters in Premchand’s stories, portrayed from different points of view, that any kind of generalization will be undesirable. The labels ‘pro-feminist’ and ‘anti-feminist’ are not very helpful in understanding Premchand’s stories either, as these labels inevitably carry the elements of reductionism inherent in them. To some, the very fact that Premchand could imagine women outside the marriage bond and as capable of finding fulfilment in a career was radical enough, if not too radical, for his time. Similarly, despite his sympathy with widows and his support for widow remarriage, there is a certain uneasiness in depicting a widow who has an equal claim to bodily pleasures and comforts. Widows in Premchand’s stories seem to find fulfilment only in the ideals of service, devotion and self-effacement. Indeed, in the entire corpus of his short fiction there are no more than two widow marriages11 and both of them end disastrously.

  As stated earlier, Premchand began his career as a short story writer by writing stories of patriotism in a somewhat revivalist mode. Later in life when he came under Gandhi’s influence and showed deep involvement in India’s struggle for independence, to the extent of giving up his government job, he wrote a string of nationalist stories dealing with the adoption of indigenous or swadeshi products, the boycott or even burning of foreign goods, picketing outside alcohol shops, giving up government jobs and embracing a life of social service, among other things. Some of them, like ‘A Strange Holi’ (‘Ajeeb Holi’) and ‘Resignation’ (‘Isteefa’), show the discomfiture of British colonial officials at the hands of Indians and the sudden conversion of Indian loyalists or servants of the British Raj into patriotic Indians who jealously protect their honour and are devoted to the cause of Independence. Some of these stories, as also some others, have been criticized for a kind of contrived and easy plot resolution through the ‘change of heart’ device. Apart from the above two, there are stories like ‘The Wine Shop’ (‘Sharab ki Dukaan’), ‘Maiku and the Congress Volunteer’ (‘Maiku’), ‘An Audacious Act’ (‘Dussahas’), ‘Role Reversal’ (‘Patni se Pati’), ‘The Night of the New Moon’ (‘Amavas12 He also uses suicide as a device for plot resolution for women faced with social opprobrium, something which might seem melodramatic and an easy way to arrive at a denouement but on closer analysis seems to be historically accurate. In Indian society, this kind of honour suicide is quite rampant even now, as newspapers and television channels will testify.

  Premchand’s love for the countryside is evident in his fictional and non-fictional writings. He has written several extremely evocative stories such as ‘Holy Judges’, ‘The Story of Two Bullocks’ (‘Do Bailon ki Katha’), ‘Idgah’ and ‘Atmaram’, which depict the pristine village life of simplicity, honesty and quiet contentment. In fact, his fictional corpus, if read uncritically, would lend itself to an easy binary between country life and city life, one good and the other almost irredeemably evil. Yet, we have to recognize that he does not depict country life as an idyll shorn of all evils. There are stories such as ‘A Positive Change’ (‘Vidhwans’), ‘A Home for an Orphan’ (‘Grihdaah’) and ‘Road to Salvation’ (‘Mukti Marg’) that de-romanticize and demystify village life and depict the author’s awareness of the imperfections and blind spots in the supposed idyll.13 Thus, the apparent binary that seems to work in the case of some novels and stories cannot be stretched beyond a point.

  Premchand’s deep interest in the simple life of peasants extended to his love for animals, particularly draught animals, treated most cruelly in India. Very few writers have depicted such an intimate bond between animals and human beings. Premchand depicts animals as endowed with emotions just as human beings are, responding to love and affection just as human beings do, and are fully deserving of human compassion. Often, the duplicity, cruelty and betrayal in the human world is contrasted with the unconditional love and loyalty displayed by animals towards their masters and those who care for them. It is a heart-wrenching moment, as shown in ‘Money for Deliverance’ (‘Muktidhan’) and ‘Sacrifice’ (‘Qurbani’), when a peasant has to part with his animals because of want and destitution. The deep compassion with which animal life has been depicted in ‘Holy Judges’ (‘Panchayat’), ‘Reincarnation’ (‘Purva Sanskar’), ‘The Story of Two Bullocks’ (‘Do Bailon ki Katha’) and ‘The Roaming Monkey’ (‘Salilani Bandar’) are treasures of world literature. Stories such as ‘Turf War’ (‘Adhikar Chinta’) and ‘Defending One’s Liberty’ (‘Swatva Raksha’), written in a humorous and symbolic vein, show how a dog fiercely protects his turf and how a horse defeats all the machinations of human beings to make him work on a Sunday, which is his day of rest, rightfully earned after working for six days of the week! In ‘The Roaming Monkey’ the author shows how a monkey earns money by performing tricks of different kinds and thus looks after the wife of his owner, nurturing her and bringing her back from the brink of lunacy. In ‘The Price of Milk’ (‘Doodh ki Qeemat’) we have the spectacle of goats feeding a baby with milk from their own udders, thereby saving its life. The baby has been denied milk by its own mother because she considers it a tentar, an ‘evil’ child destined to be the cause of death of one of her parents or another member of the family, and wishes it dead. In ‘A Daughter’s Possessions’ (‘Beti ka Dhan’) Sakkhu Choudhury finds tears streaming down the eyes of his oxen in his moments of grief when the zamindar is going to evict him from his home, and when his own sons are totally indifferent to his plight. In the story ‘Two Brothers’ (‘Do Bhai’) the narrator contrasts the greed and lack of empathy of the elder brother, Krishna, for his younger brother, Balaram, whose property he wants to grab, with the deep bond between two bullocks, one of whom refuses to touch any food for three days when the other is separated from it.

  Several very popular stories of Premchand deal with Hindu–Muslim relations. He was deeply interested and invested in a cordial relationship between Hindus and Muslims, a fact which is evident in both his fictional and non-fictional writings. He had no doubt that the independence and progress of the country depended substantially on the harmonious relationship between these two dominant religious groups in India. Early in his life he was introduced to Muslim culture and Islam through his study of Persian and Urdu and the maulvi who taught him. He was also familiar with the ideals of Hinduism, the orthodox variety as well as the reformist trend of the Arya Samaj to which his family owed allegiance. This, coupled with his inherently secular temperament, provided him a unique vantage point from which he could write fairly and fearlessly about both communities in an even-handed way. In fact, he was the only writer of his generation in any Indian language, not excepting Tagore, to write about the external and internal lives of the members of both communities with an insight, empathy and intimacy that have not been matched since. I cannot think of any other Indian writer who possessed that kind of vision. During his lifetime, the relationship between Hindus and Muslims went through particularly volatile and turbulent phases, but he was always unwavering in his belief in pluralism and kept the faith. Stories like ‘Holy Judges’, ‘Idgah’, ‘The Greater Pilgrimage’ (‘Hajj-e Akbar’), ‘Temple and Mosque’ (‘Mandir aur Masjid’), ‘The Prophet’s Justice’ (‘Nabi ka Niti Nirvaah’), ‘Forgiveness’ (‘Kshama’) and
essays such as ‘Islamic Civilization’ (‘Islami Sabhyata’14) demonstrate his deep knowledge of Islamic culture and the intimate lives of Muslim families, and how the daily lives of Hindus and Muslims were intertwined, particularly in the countryside. Towards the end of the second decade of the twentieth century when Hindu–Muslim relations were at their lowest ebb, Premchand wrote the play Karbala, on a deeply emotional subject for Muslims, to cement the bonds of Hindu–Muslim unity.

  Premchand seems immensely relevant in today’s India when history is being sought to be rewritten and Muslims are constantly cast in the role of the ‘other’ and held accountable for all the real and imagined atrocities of Muslim rulers of the past. In his own time, he saw with bewilderment how ‘Whenever a Muslim king is remembered, we evoke Aurangzeb’ (Premchand 1985:5), a remark that reverberates with contemporary resonance, indicating the agenda of some people who always sought to frustrate any attempt at a broader understanding and reconciliation between these two communities. He was opposed to religious sectarianism and orthodoxy in any form. This will be evident if one reads his stories in the Moteram series and a story like ‘Holy War’ (‘Jihad’) where he anticipates what goes today by the misleading and erroneous name of ‘Islamic’ terror. In this context, Syed Akbar Hyder’s comments seem particularly apt: