by Premchand
PREMCHAND
Stories on CASTE
Edited with an Introduction by M. Asaduddin
Translated from Hindi and Urdu by M. Asaduddin and others
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
Note on Translators
Introduction
Thakur’s Well
Salvation
Temple
One and a Quarter Ser of Wheat
The Woman Who Sold Grass
The Mantra
The Lashes of Good Fortune
From Both Sides
Witchcraft
A Dhobi’s Honour
Footnotes
Introduction
Notes
Follow Penguin
Copyright
Note on Translators
Shaheen Saba is a PhD student of English at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.
Ranjeeta Dutta has completed an MPhil in English from Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.
Anjum Hasan is the author of the novels The Cosmopolitans, Neti, Neti and Lunatic in My Head. She has also published a collection of stories, Difficult Pleasures, and a book of poems, Street on the Hill. Her books have been nominated for various awards.
Vikas Jain teaches English at Zakir Husain Delhi College (Evening), Delhi University.
Meenakshi F. Paul is a faculty member in the Department of English at Himachal Pradesh University. She is a translator and poet. She has published several articles and books, including a volume on bilingual poetry, Kindling from the Terraced Fields, and a book of translation, Short Stories of Himachal Pradesh.
Moyna Mazumdar has worked with several publishing houses as editor. She also translates from Hindi and Bengali into English.
Introduction
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 fashioned modern prose in both and influenced several generations of writers. The fact that his works were published in more than two dozen Hindi and Urdu journals simultaneously attest to his extraordinary reach to a wide audience that formed his readership. Many of his readers encountered modern Urdu and Hindi novels and short stories, and indeed any literary form, 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—is 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 an inclusive India.
Born Dhanpat Rai (1880–1936) in Lamhi, a few miles from Banaras, Premchand’s childhood was spent in the countryside. Called ‘Nawab’ at home, his early schooling was in Urdu and Persian, much in the Kayastha tradition of the time. He also attended the mission school where he studied English along with other subjects. His father was a postal clerk who moved from place to place. When Premchand was only seven his mother died and his father remarried. His relationship with his stepmother was never cordial. He was married at an early age against his wish to a girl who was totally incompatible and he refused to live with her. His second marriage, to a young widow with literary interests, Shivrani, proved to be a happy one. When he was seventeen his father suddenly died and the responsibility of running the family fell on him. He was forced to discontinue his studies and take up the job of a school teacher. However, after his graduation in 1904 he became a sub-deputy inspector of schools, a job which required substantial travel which did not agree with his frail health. In 1921, he gave up government service at the call of Gandhi during the Non-Cooperation movement.
Premchand began writing in 1905 and contributed articles on literary and other subjects in the Urdu journal Zamana. His first short stories were also published in this journal. In fact, Premchand began his career as a short story writer with the publication of Soz-e-Watan (Lament for the Motherland, 1908), written under his pen name, Nawab Rai. The collection drew the attention of the colonial government because of its alleged radical intent. He was summoned, when he was on an inspection tour, to explain his position. This is how Premchand describes the situation in his own words:
. . . Those days I wrote under the name of Nawab Rai. I already had some information that the intelligence wing of the police was making inquiries to track down the author of the book. I could realize that they have found me out and I had been summoned to defend myself.
The Saheb asked, ‘Have you written this book?’ I admitted that I had.
The Saheb then asked me to explain the subject matter of each story, and finally burst out in anger, ‘Your stories are full of sedition. Thank God that you are a servant of the British Empire. Had this happened during the Mughal rule both your hands would have been chopped off.’1
He was asked to burn all the copies of the book, and henceforth, get prior permission from the administration before sending any writing for publication. Petrified, he abided by the demands of the magistrate and submitted all available copies of the book to his office to be destroyed. Premchand realized that writing under the name Nawab Rai was no longer safe and sustainable, and to circumvent the iron hand of colonial censorship he had to assume a new pseudonym, which was Premchand. Thus, both Dhanpat Rai and Nawab Rai were finally buried and Premchand was born, a name by which generations of readers would know him.
Themes
Caste
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 literatures, had depicted the lives of the underdogs, the untouchables and the marginalized 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 have been priests or zamindars, lawyers or policemen or even doctors, all of whom held the society in their strangle-hold. Rituals pertaining to Hindu marriages and death 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 he continued the tirade in many of his stories. In the story ‘Babaji’s Feast’ ‘Babaji ka Bhog’ he depicts the greed of the Brahmin baba who has no compunction in robbing a poor family of its meagre means, and in ‘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, the 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 law suit for defamation. But he remained undaunted and went on exposing many oppressive customs that were prevalent in society.
But his most trenchant critique was reserved for caste injustice whereby people at the lowest rung of the Hindu caste system were considered untouchables and were compelled to live a life of indignity and humiliation. The upper-caste Hindus treated them as worse than animals and this injustice was institutionalized through social sanction of
the caste system. Stories such as ‘The Well of the Thakur’ ‘Thakur ka Kuan’, ‘Salvation’ ‘Sadgati’, ‘Shroud’ ‘Kafan’, ‘Temple’ ‘Mandir’, ‘The Woman Wh
o Sold Grass’ ‘Ghaaswali’ and ‘One and a Quarter Ser of Wheat’ ‘Sawa Ser Gehun’ constitute a devastating indictment of the way the upper-caste Hindus have treated the Dalits for generations. The stories demonstrate that the Dalits were subjected to daily humiliation by members of the upper castes 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 had developed a vast repertoire of idioms, symbols and gestures of verbal and physical denigration of the Dalits over centuries. Grave injustice and inhuman treatment of the Dalits had become normalized, causing no revulsion against it in society. Despite criticism from some Dalit ideologues levelling some rather irresponsible charges against Premchand for depicting Dalits in a certain way, these stories—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.
Women
A considerable number of his stories deal with the plight of women. Premchand was deeply sensitive to the suffering of women in a patriarchal society where women had no agency and had to live their lives according to the whims and fancies of men on whom they had to depend—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 to the family and their parents were subjected to all kinds of humiliations and indignities while arranging their marriage. 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) too 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 supported divorce in extreme circumstances, backed the wife’s claim to half of the husband’s property in case of divorce and inherit the property in case of the husband’s death. He also wrote in favour of the Sarda Bill which aimed at raising the minimum age of marriage of girls. In a large number of stories, such as ‘Tuliya’ ‘Devi’, ‘Sati’, ‘Goddess from Heaven’ ‘Swarg ki Devi’, ‘Return’ ‘Shanti’, ‘Godavari’s Suicide’ ‘Saut’, ‘Thread of Love’
‘Prem Sutra’, ‘Two Friends’ ‘Do Sakhiyaan’, ‘The Lunatic’ ‘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 the 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’.
The Village and the City
Premchand’s love for the countryside is evident in his fictional and non-fictional writings. He has written several extremely evocative stories such as ‘Panchayat’, ‘Do Bail’, ‘Idgah’, ‘Atma Ram’, depicting 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 ‘The 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. Thus, the apparent binary that seems to work in case of some novels and stories cannot be stretched beyond a point.
Animals
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’ ‘Swatt 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 showing tricks of different kinds and thus looks after the wife of his owner, nurtures her and brings 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.
Premchand’s Style
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.2
In the stories he has written 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.
M. Asaduddin
Thakur’s Well
1
The moment Jokhu put the lota to his lips, the water smelled foul. He asked Gangi, ‘What sort of water is this! It stinks so much. My throat is burning and you give me water that stinks.’
Gangi fetched water every evening. The well was far off; it wasn’t easy to go time and again. The day before when she had fetched wa
ter, there had been no smell in it. How come this stink today? She sniffed the water. It really was stinking. Some animal must have fallen into the well and died. But where would she get water from now?
There was the Thakur’s well, but would anyone let her even step on to it? People would shout at her and shoo her away. The Sahuji’s well was at the other end of the village but even there they wouldn’t allow her to draw water. There was no other well in the village.
Jokhu had been ailing for quite some time. He lay there for a while, controlling his thirst, and then said, ‘I’m so thirsty I can’t stand it. Bring me some water, I’ll hold my breath and drink a little.’
But Gangi didn’t give him the foul water. She knew that it would make him worse. She did not know that boiling the water would make it safe. She said, ‘How can you drink this water? Who knows what kind of beast has died in the well? I’ll go and get some fresh water.’
Surprised, Jokhu stared at her. ‘From where will you get the water?’
‘What about the two wells of the Thakur and the Sahu? Won’t they let me fill just one lota?’
‘You’ll only get your hands and feet broken. Nothing will come of it. Leave it. The Brahmin will curse you, the Thakur will beat you with a stick and the Sahu will charge five for one. Who understands the pain of the poor? Even if we die no one bothers to look in at our door, let alone lend a shoulder to carry the dead. You think they’ll let us draw water from their well?’
This was the bitter truth. What could Gangi say! Yet she didn’t give Jokhu the water.
