The Complete Short Stories Read online

  Premchand archives Hindu–Muslim relationship in mutually respectable terms that move beyond Aurangzeb and his times into a temporal zone reflecting a more pluralistic Islam . . . By ideologically fracturing religious communities, he undermines the antagonistic communal bifurcation within the colonial milieu that posited Hindu and Muslim as age-old enemies whose scriptures determined their mode of thinking and living. (Hansen and Lelyveld, 2005, 276)

  Evolution in Premchand’s Art of Storytelling

  Premchand’s art of storytelling evolved through his career encompassing three full decades, as did his language and vocabulary. As he evolved from a dastaanesque to a realistic mode, his language also changed in register and vocabulary, and the patches of purple prose likewise dwindled. Moreover, as he slowly moved from Urdu to Hindi, but still continued to write or translate in both languages (or forms or shaili, as some would characterize it), his language underwent visible changes. And later in life, when he became a strong advocate of Hindustani, his endeavour was to craft a language that would be equally intelligible to the votaries of both Hindi and Urdu. He also moved from the earlier dense, lush narrative style incorporating multiple registers and a variety of characters as in ‘Holy Judges’, ‘The Sword of Loyalty’ (‘Khanjar-e Wafa’), ‘Atmaram’, ‘Idgah’, and so on, to a leaner, pared down narrative style focusing on one or two events and involving fewer characters. The earlier expansiveness was replaced by intensity of experience. The idealistic, sometimes even prescriptive, nature of his work evolved into a more robust and mature understanding of life’s pitiless ironies and unpredictability that did not always conform to poetic justice. Amrit Rai’s remark in this context seems the most pertinent:

  In the year 1933–34, Premchand wrote several stories such as ‘Manovritti’, ‘Doodh ka Dam’, ‘Balak’, ‘Naya Vivah’ . . . which are entirely new from the point of view of both content and form . . . there isn’t in these later stories . . . a dense and tightly woven web of events as in the stories of an earlier phase. They have, instead, just a single focus of interest, just one little point to make, an unremarkable enough state of mind to describe, the author’s own way of observing a fleeting glimpse of truth or beauty—and this is presented in an informal and conversational manner . . . (Amrit Rai 1982, 311)

  Language Issues: Urdu versus Hindi

  As indicated in the opening paragraph of this Introduction, a comprehensive understanding of Premchand’s stature as a writer demands that the reader is able to access his stories in both versions. One great advantage of this anthology is that it points to differences in the two versions of a story. These differences are sometimes trivial, at other times substantial, and provide added insights into the stories and expand their textuality.15 Premchand began his career writing in Urdu and he produced a substantial volume of work in his first twelve years as a writer (1903–15)—five novels and close to four dozen stories to be precise—before he thought of writing in Hindi. His transition from Urdu to Hindi was gradual, though irreversible, given the social and political circumstances and the publishing scenario of the time.

  Now, the question is, are the Hindi and Urdu versions of his stories exact replicas of each other? Not always and not necessarily. Premchand knew this too well, as he was aware of the changes that he made along the way. In a letter to Imtiaz Ali Taj, the dramatist, translator and editor in Urdu, he mentioned that he changed entire scenes while translating the text from one version to the other. As usually happens with writer-translators, whenever they translate their own work, the creative impulse often takes over so that translation often turns into rewriting. In Premchand’s stories one finds many minor changes that were done either for stylistic embellishments, or for the difference in perceived readership, or, quite probably, for the space constraints in the journal in which the stories were going to be published.

  There is another dimension to this issue. It was not always Premchand himself who translated his work between Urdu and Hindi. Often, he took help from others, which might have meant he had the time to look over it only cursorily. Several translators, most notably Iqbal Bahadur Verma ‘Saher’, are known to have helped Premchand in preparing versions of stories both in Hindi and Urdu. Their style now passes off as Premchand’s style. His younger son, Amrit Rai, excavated several stories in Urdu of which there were no Hindi versions. Amrit Rai published such stories in a two-volume anthology with the appropriate title Gupt Dhan (Hidden Treasure). In its Introduction he writes about the kind of changes he has effected while transferring the stories from one version to the other:

  I thought it unfair to Hindi readers to publish these stories in their original form. So I clothed them in Hindi, in the style of Munshiji, as far as it was possible for me. How far I have succeeded in this effort to not only preserve the soul of the story but the language and style as well will be judged by you. As for me, I feel satisfaction in the thought that I have pulled all my resources in this endeavour.16 (My translation)

  It is both significant and debatable why Amrit Rai felt it necessary for the stories to undergo changes for the sake of intelligibility and readability in Hindi. Had the two languages changed so much within twenty-five years of Premchand’s death that they needed to be interfered with? This also brings up the questions of ethics and authorship. Does anyone, be it even the writer’s own son, have the right to tamper with the original works of a writer to make them suitable for a particular readership?

  How radical these changes sometimes were can be illustrated through the two versions of his famous story ‘A Night in the Month of Poos’ (‘Poos ki Raat’). The story is about a poor, destitute peasant, Halku, who is in permanent debt to the village moneylender. Halku spends the severe winter nights in the field to save the harvest from marauding beasts. But ultimately, he is unable to save the crop when a horde of wild beasts descends on the field one night and despoils the harvest. In the Hindi version, which was first published in the journal Madhuri (May 1930), the story ends on a note of apparent relief for Halku, who decides to move away from the life of a peasant by becoming a worker in a factory. However, in the Urdu version, which was published later in Prem Chaleesi 2 (1930), Premchand has added a section at the end where Halku ponders over the travails of peasant life but nevertheless decides to stay a peasant. Taking on the job of a day labourer, he thinks, would mean an insult to the land and to his forefathers who were peasants. So he resolves to stay a peasant whatever the challenges. Thus, the two endings of the story admit two radically different interpretations. It is clear that the Urdu version is not simply an expanded version of the Hindi, but it radically alters the perspective of the protagonist. In the Hindi version of the story Halku comes across as yielding to the pressures of being a peasant and surrendering to the fate of a wage-earner, whereas the Urdu version stresses his strong resistance to any such shift in his career. He confronts the challenges of a peasant’s life, standing face-to-face with total ruin as the marauding animals destroy his harvest, but none of it can destroy his spirit. He is convinced that he should continue to be a peasant to carry on the legacy of his forefathers. Thus, while the Urdu version maintains the status quo in Halku’s life, the Hindi version envisages his transformation into a factory worker. Changes of the kind signalled above, with variations and different degrees of emphasis, can be found in a number of Premchand’s short stories.

  ‘Atmaram’ is a story that presented Premchand with the problem of cultural untranslatability. It was built on the Hindu philosophical concept of maya and moha,17 and Premchand must have found that these concepts were not easily translatable in Urdu. The story is about a devout village goldsmith, Mahadev, who, disenchanted by his own children, becomes attached to a parrot which he symbolically named Atmaram. The story plays on the popular belief that atma, or the soul, is like a bird which flies out at the time of death. Mahadev’s religious and spiritual inclinations are demonstrated by his constant chanting of two lines of a popular bhajan: Sat gurudutt Shivdutt daata/Ram ke charan
mein chitt laaga. The villagers could identify him from a distance hearing the sound of the bhajan. It so happens that one of his sons accidentally opens the cage one day and the parrot flies out. When Mahadev finds the cage empty, his heartbeat stops for a moment. All his attempts to tempt the parrot back into the cage bear no fruit. The parrot sits on the cage and flies about it, but cannot be made to enter the cage. Mahadev continues his effort. The climax of the story shows this tug of war between Mahadev and the parrot effectively:

  [The parrot] would come and sit on the top of the cage and now sit at the door of the cage and look at the bowls for food and water, and then fly off. If the old man was moha incarnate, the parrot was incarnate maya. This went on till evening descended. The struggle between maya and moha was lost in darkness.

  Hindi: [Tota] kabhi pinjre par aa baithta, kabhi pinjre ke dwar par baith apne daanapani ke piyalion ko dekhta, aur phir urh jata. Buddha agar murtiman moha tha, tau tota murtimayi maya. Yahan tak ki shaam ho gayi. Maya aur moh ka ye sangram andhakar mein vilin ho gaya.

  Urdu: [Tota] kabhi pinjre par aata, kabhi pinjre ke darwazey par baith kar apne daanapani ki piyalion ko dekhta, aur phir urh jata, magar joonhi Mahadev uski taraf aata woh phir urh jata. Buddha agar paykar-e hawas tha, tau tota daayre aarzoo. Yahan tak ke shaam-e siyah ne hawas aur arzoo ki is kashmakash par parda dhal diya.

  One would understand that Urdu words like hawas and aarzoo cannot adequately represent the philosophical concepts of maya and moha and Premchand must have realized this fact of cultural untranslatability. Similarly, the constant chanting of the bhajan Sat gurudutt Shivdutt daata/Ram ke charan mein chitt laaga would befit the genius of the Hindi language more than Urdu and appeal to someone brought up in the tradition of Hindu religion more than anyone else. That Premchand himself was conscious of this is evidenced by the fact that the story was originally intended for the journal Kahkashan published from Lahore. But as the story got written Premchand realized that it was probably not suitable for the predominantly Muslim readership of Kahkashan. He wrote to the editor, Imtiaz Ali Taj:

  I have recently written another story, ‘Atmaram’. I am sending it to Zamana. It has turned out to be so utterly Hindu that it is not suitable for Kahkashan. You may call yourself a Hindu but your readers certainly are not Hindu.18

  This statement, however, appears to be at odds with the entire version of the Urdu story which Premchand seems to have written with far greater relish than the Hindi version. The Urdu version is longer by two dense pages—ten pages compared to the Hindi version’s eight. The rhetorical flourishes, the deployment of metaphor and simile, the idiomatic turns of phrase—all these make the Urdu version more urbane, supple and enjoyable than the Hindi one which seems somewhat stark and dull in comparison. Thus, reading the short stories in both Hindi and Urdu reveals several interesting facts.

  In many cases, the Urdu version is longer than the Hindi version, showing the use of traditional rhetorical embellishments. This would encourage us to speculate that: (a) Urdu was Premchand’s first love and, as he professes in his essay ‘Sahitya ka Uddeshya’, it came more naturally to him than Hindi. (b) As a language, Urdu lends itself to finer and more intimate shades of feelings and emotions in Premchand’s hand in a way that Hindi does not; in comparison, Hindi is somewhat bare and unadorned. (c) In the Urdu versions one can find virtuoso passages, passages of purple prose designed to dazzle readers into an admission of the author’s full control and command over the language. It is interesting to think about whether there is an organic relationship between theme and language form, whether language determines subject matter and styles or, at least, whether language and themes are intimately connected. Alok Rai says, ‘It seems as though some utterances can be made most felicitously in Hindi and some in Urdu. What lies behind this—history, social and cultural predisposition or literary traditions? This can be a subject for research’19 (Alok Rai and Mushtaq Ali, 2002: ii; my translation). He further says that the communalization of these two languages is evident, as one can see that in Hindi if the characters are given Hindu names, in Urdu they are given Muslim names.20 I would argue that the reasons for the differing versions should be traced in the different readerships that Premchand was addressing. And these two readerships were different not only in their religious practices and cultural traditions and cultural symbols, but also in their class differences, in their reading habits, and the literary traditions they inherited. To quote Alok Rai again: ‘Only a deeper study will reveal what was thought to deserve utterance in what tradition and what was considered redundant. One can see the emerging mental disposition of that period hidden in these differing utterances.’21 (Alok Rai and Mushtaq Ali, op cit., my translation)

  Premchand in English

  In an article, ‘Nirmala Translated: Premchand’s Heroine in English Dress’, Rupert Snell raises the question, ‘Is Premchand translatable?’ and then answers quickly, ‘In a word—no: the subtext of purity borne by the very title “Nirmala” is denied to those who access this novel only through English’ (Snell 2001, 307). Snell rightly underlines the fact that all the linguistic and cultural resonances evoked by a word or phrase cannot be transferred to the target language. But this is the translator’s challenge—not to produce a ‘perfect’ translation, which is an impossibility, but to gesture towards a universe of possibilities, of cultural nuances invested in the original text. Snell further surmises that few readers would be moved by Premchand if they were to read him only in English, a proposition that one finds contestable. After all, the most widely read fiction writers in contemporary times—Orhan Pamuk, Milan Kundera, Haruki Murakami—are read overwhelmingly in their English translations rather than the original languages, and readers are still profoundly moved by them.22

  Snell’s proposition will not hold good for a multilingual country like India, where the richness of literature in many languages is accessed through English. The question one really needs to address concerns the kind of English that is employed to ensure that the voice of the original author is not drowned in what Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak characterizes as ‘. . . a sort of with-it translatese, so that literature by a woman in Palestine begins to resemble, in the feel of its prose, something by a man in Taiwan.’23 Any apparent unevenness and angularity should be retained, and cultural nuances must be preserved and not flattened out. In contemporary India, where the largest archive on Indian literatures and their interrelationships are being created not in any Indian language but in English, the importance of translation in this language cannot be overemphasized. In the multilingual classrooms and literary meets and festivals in India, English often acts as an ice-breaker and a catalyst for entry into the multilingual world, which is the Indian reality. English is also being moulded for this purpose by writers who are writing originally in English and translators who are translating works from Indian languages into English.24

  Premchand has been translated by a number of translators with differing degrees of competence and success. Elsewhere, I have dealt comprehensively with the history of Premchand translations in English and the challenges thereof.25 Most of the challenges articulated in the essay—like the varying registers of the original, irregular punctuation, instability of the meaning of words and phrases in the original, and allusiveness—are valid for this anthology too. Premchand’s world is culturally so rich that any translator will have to grapple with the phenomenon of cultural untranslatability. Not to speak of English, sometimes one finds that the cultural resonances of the phrases even in Hindi and Urdu are not the same. Gregory Rabassa, the famed translator from Spanish, has pointed to this phenomenon succinctly as follows: A ‘language will load a word down with all manner of cultural barnacles . . . bearing it off on a different tangent from a word in another tongue meant to describe the same thing.’ (Rabassa 2005, 6). Attempts have been made to preserve these ‘cultural barnacles’ rather than eliminate them, even if it means straining the idiom in English. Inevitably, it has involved a series of particular, con
tingent judgements and ad hoc decisions that could not always be anticipated. These decisions have also differed from story to story. And that is why there are sentence structures and turns of phrases which might seem infelicitous in English but will give the reader some clue to the linguistic varieties and speech patterns of the characters in the original and the ways in which some ideas are expressed in it. Rather than assimilating the foreignness and cultural specificity of the original in a universalist idiom, attempts have been made to preserve both linguistic and cultural nuances, allowing the English to attain a certain measure of both readability and ‘bi-culturality’.

  Premchand was writing at a time when the protocols of style, including punctuation, in both Urdu and Hindi were not yet settled. The editorial endeavour here has been to bring the text in line with the modern conventions of prose writing in English. That involved changes in the format of dialogue writing, the appropriate use of quotation marks, the use of italics for both interior monologue where characters internalize their thoughts, and emphasis, and splitting or joining paragraphs. Short, choppy sentences that come in a string without subjects or subordinating clauses in Hindi or Urdu have sometimes been joined together to make coherent, intelligible sentences in English. The Roman script has the advantage of having letters in both lower and upper cases and modern computer technology has made it easier to write the script in bold or italics for varying purposes that have been used discreetly. Translators are, after all, interpreters of the text they are translating, and if a certain device of the Roman script was helpful in expressing the intended meaning of the original, they were encouraged to use this device to bring the text in line with modern prose. However, such instances are minimal and have been resorted to only after careful reflection.