ebook img

The Oxford India Premchand PDF

1006 Pages·2004·20.718 MB·English
Save to my drive
Quick download
Download
Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.

Preview The Oxford India Premchand

THE OXFORD INDIA PREMCHAND The Oxford India Collection is a series which brings together writings of enduring value published by OUP. Other titles include The Orford India Ghalib The Orford India Ramanujan The Orford India Illustrated Corbett THE OXFORD INDIA PREMCHAND with an introduction by FRANCESCA ORSINI OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS YMCA Libraiy Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 110 001 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Sao Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in India by Oxford University Press, New Delhi © Oxford University Press 2004 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2004 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer ISBN 0 19 566501 5 Printed at Pauls Press, Delhi 110 020 Published by Manzar Khan, Oxford University Press YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 110 001 Contents Introduction by Francesca Orsini vii Part I: SHORT Stories (translated by David Rubin) Introduction to The World of Premchand 3 Introduction to Widows, Wives and Other Heroines 10 The Village The Road to Salvation 19 A Feast for the Holy Man 30 The Power of a Curse 33 A Catastrophe 44 January Night 49 Neyur 55 The Story of Two Bullocks 64 Ramlila 76 The Thakur’s Well 83 A Desperate Case 87 The Town A Day in the Life of a Debt-Collector 99 A Car-Splashing 107 From Both Sides 111 A Moral Victory 124 Man’s Highest Duty 138 VI Contents A Lesson in the Holy Life 143 A Little Trick 146 Penalty 153 The Writer 157 A Coward 168 The World A Servant of the Nation 181 The Chess Players 182 The Road to Hell 193 Miss Padma 200 My Big Brother 206 Intoxication 215 The Price of Milk 223 The Shroud 233 Deliverance 241 Two Autobiographical Sketches 250 A Note on Translation 257 Notes to the Stories 259 Widows, Wives and Other Heroines Widow with Sons 267 The Secret 285 Second Marriage 298 Wife into Husband 311 Disaffection 321 The Prostitute 330 The Funeral Feast 347 Desire 364 The Actress 370 Sacrifice 380 Light 389 Divided Hearths 400 Part II: Novels Nirmala (translated by Alok Rai) Gaban: The Stolen Jewels (translated by Christopher R. King) Appendix: The Aim of Literature by Francesca Orsini Introduction To be labelled a ‘c*lassic can be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, everybody knows a classic and encounters it at least once in a lifetime, either at school or elsewhere. On the other hand, a classic comes packaged with a number of definitions already stamped all over it. Moreover, readers approach a classic with such high expectations that more often than not they are disappointed on actually reading it. Above all, what often gets lost in reading a classic is the sense of surprise, of bold discovery, of unexpected ideas. All this is true of Premchand, Hindi and Urdu’s ‘classic’ writer of the early twentieth century. He comes packaged with all the right definitions: realist, humanist, secularist, social reformer, politically engaged, etc. And yet there is often little sense that by reading his novels and stories one will discover anything new or valuable for oneself now. Everybody in India reads at least one of Premchand’s stories at school, but most people never read him again. Why? The story that one is most likely to encounter in school textbooks is ‘Idgah’, a story which taps into village and childhood nostalgia, celebrates the victory of renunciation over selfish temptation, and presents a picture of communal harmony. Like all other village children, five-year-old Hamid is looking forward to the Eid fair in town after Ramadan, but he is an orphan and his old grandmother can only give him three paisas to spend. When he tours the fair he greedily eyes the stalls selling clay toys and sweets, but when taunted by his friends he finds fault with viii Introduction each and every one of them. Instead, he uses his pocket money to buy iron tongs for his grandmother so that she will no longer burn her fingers when picking up chapattis from the ironplate. On the way back, the children are divided into those who look down upon the humble tongs—what kind of a plaything is that?—and those who, led by Hamid, see them as a new and original toy. At the end of the story, the clay toys are all broken into pieces while only the tongs survive. And in the emotional climax the old grandmother is moved to tears by Hamid’s love and his spirit of renunciation. It is a moving story, the high moral values cleverly offset by Hamid’s sophistry, an obvious case of sour grapes. But what schoolchild would like the suggestion that he or she should forfeit toys for something as plain and useful and boring as a pair of tongs, no matter how much the imagination may turn them into a plaything? What stays in mind is the moral demand and the sentimental ending, which makes the story apiece with the didactic stories that abound in most Hindi school readers. What child would want to read more Premchand after that? And yet one only has to read Premchand’s contemporaries to see how staggeringly different he was from all of them, what an enormous stretch of ground he covered in his comparatively short life, and how refreshingly able he was to pick up his pen and create characters who spoke and felt like human beings. Half of his characters were women, itself a huge novelty, and they, too, spoke vehemently, powerfully, convincingly at a time when women were just entering the public sphere. As Alok Rai has pointed out, Premchand’s apparent ‘organic- ity’, the way in which he came to crystallize and symbolize an entire zone of social consciousness in the decades from the 1910s to the 1930s, masks a remarkable story of self-fashioning as an intellectual and a teller of tales. The Extraordinary, Ordinary Man Dhanpat Rai was born to an ordinary Kayastha family in 1880 in village Lamhi, a few miles from Bañaras. His early childhood in Lamhi was perhaps the only sustained experience of village life he had, but the enduring connection with Lamhi made sure that when he, alone among the Hindi and Urdu writers of his generation, turned to write about village life, characters and politics, he did so without the distanced Introduction ix objectivity of an urban outsider. His father was a postal clerk and held one of those transferrable jobs rightly indicated by Benedict Anderson as contributing to the formation of a supra-regional political con­ sciousness. Young Dhanpat, called Nawab at home, began his school­ ing in Urdu and Persian in the typical Kayastha mould of the times, but he also attended Mission and government schools, and soon developed a taste for reading fiction. His early family life was also ordinarily tragic: his mother died when he was seven and when his father remarried the relationship with his stepmother was not affec­ tionate; moreover, his first, arranged, marriage proved to be with an incompatible girl, with whom young Premchand refused to co-habit. His father’s death in 1897 brought a sudden, but by no means unusual, burden of responsibilities, and though for a while Premchand tried to keep studying he had to turn to teaching for a living. Teaching at the time was a respectable profession but a poorly paid one: Premchand’s first salary in 1899 was Rs 18 per month. Teacher Training College seemed a way out of this dead end, and after graduating in 1904 his career prospects improved. He ended up as a sub-deputy inspector of schools, in other words, an officer in the education department, a somewhat powerful position which could command local influence and a side-income in the form of bribes from headmasters and text­ book publishers. The temptations and the gap between the investment in and high expectations of education, the pitiful salary of a govern­ ment clerk or civil servant, and the demands of social status, crop up regularly in Premchand’s fiction, often leading to disastrous consequences. As a matter of fact, about a third of Hindi and Urdu writers in this period were teachers and, as for them, Premchand’s lifeline to the world of letters and of public opinion were journals, in his case the prestigious Urdu journal Zamana^ edited in Kanpur by Munshi Dayanarayan Nigam. In the period between 1905 and 1920 Premchand contributed to 7.amana articles on literary and political matters and his first short stories; in 1915 his stories also started appearing in the prestigious Hindi journal Sarasvati. Premchand’s first collection of short stories, Lament for the Motherland (Soz-e vatan^ published in Urdu in 1908) attracted unfavourable attention from the authorities— Premchand was reprimanded for its seditious content, changed his penname from Nawab Rai to Premchand, and started toying with the X Introduction idea of leaving his government job to become a full-time editor or to work in non-government ‘n*ational schools. In 1906 he married Shivram Devi, a child-widow, who would prove to be the right companion for him and eventually took up writing herself. By 1918 Premchand realized that publishing in Hindi gave more opportunities and meant reaching out to a larger number of readers, and from then on his novels appeared earlier in Hindi than in Urdu, though he was careful always to see them in print in Urdu, too. The exact dynamics of the switch are still slightly unclear; the possibility being that for some time Premchand continued to write in Urdu shorthand and either himself copied or had his texts copied out in Devanagari by someone else; this involved also substituting suitable (Sanskritic) Hindi terms for the abstract Persian and Arabic words. By the 1920s Premchand’s stories were actively sought by all the major Hindi literary journals of the day, and in particular he wrote many of his women-centred stories for the radical woman’s journal Chand. In 1921, like other ordinary people answering Gandhi’s call for non­ cooperation, Premchand took the plunge and resigned from his gov­ ernment job, a 41 year-old man with two young children.. From then on writing became his only steady source of income while he held a succession of teaching and editing jobs and invested most of his money in his own publishing and editing ventures: the Saraswati Press, the literary monthly Hans (1930) and the political weekly Jagaran (1932). In the 1930s he even tried scriptwriting for a film company in Bombay but with little satisfaction. When in 1930, Hindi editor Banarsidas Chaturvedi asked him in an interview how much he had earned from his literary writing, Premchand’s reply was between Rs 50 and 80 per month. This seems like meagre earnings, but actually Premchand was the most successful Hindi and Urdu writer of his day. For over twenty years he wrote roughly a story a month and was payed up to Rs 20 per form; in the 1920s he earned Rs 200 per month as editor of the prestigious Hindi monthly Madhuri, and in 1925 he received as much as Rs 1800 for his novel Rangbhumi (The Field of Action). No other writer in Hindi earned that much. But, as his biographers have pointed out, all of his earnings went to pay for his journals and printing press. The aspiration Premchand shared with so many writers of his genera­ tion to have his own journal did not automatically entail sound business know-how, and that, compounded by his preference for

See more

The list of books you might like

Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.