Dr.
Tariq Rahman
Book Review
Amrit Rai, Premchand: His Life and Times. Translated from Hindi by Harish Trivedi. (1st edition 1962: New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002 edition), pp. 413. Price Rs. 491.
Premchand (1880-1936), born Munshi Dhampad Rai, is arguably the greatest name in modern Urdu and Hindi fiction. His short stories and novels are still widely read in India and Pakistan and, indeed, wherever there are people who understand these two languages. His biographer, Amrit Rai, is not only his son but a scholar who has made his mark as the author of an excellent study (The House Divided, 1984) how Urdu and Hindi became separate literary languages. This book has been known to readers of Hindi since 1962 but it needs to be known even more widely and this should be possible now through the several English editions of it out of which the most recent is under review.
Premchand was a remarkable man; a rare genius but he lived a very ordinary life. He was born in the village Lamahi near Banaras. He became a low paid schoolmaster after having read some Urdu and Persian from a maulvi. As he was a kyesth, this was what was expected from a child of his caste. He then studied in a school where English was taught as a subject. However, it was not the school which gave him his tremendous grasp over both Urdu and Hindi. The boy was a genius and one manifestation of this was his tremendous love for reading. Thus he read the classics of Urdu fiction, which fell more or less all in the fairytale mode of fantastic and preternatural writing, in those days. This kind of fiction gratified his imagination but what he himself wrote was very different from it. Indeed, he came to be the pioneer of realistic fiction in South Asia.
But this was to come in the future. In 1896 a traumatic experience occurred. It was his marriage; but marriage with a woman so utterly incompatible as to make his life a living hell. Next year his father died leaving him to fend for himself. He was, after all, a postal clerk and but for his ancestral house in the village left no property to his son. In 1899 he became a schoolmaster at a salary of Rs. 18 and kept teaching, except for a short interlude of inspecting schools, till 1921. After this he set up a press, was a headmaster for a brief period, edited magazines and started his own journals. Unfortunately, none of these engagements brought him much money so that he never achieved his major dream in life---to write without financial worries! And yet he kept writing. Never in the midst of dreary school teaching; in checking proofs for publication; in fighting with ill health (he had chronic dysentary) and trying to make ends meet---never in all this did he cease scribbling at a furious rate. The children played around him and his second wife Shivarani Davi, the one who bore him children and was his real life partner, subjected him to many a tirade but he never ceased creating that magic world of fictional characters which is the quintessence of Premchand at his best.
Premchand first wrote under the pseudonym ‘Nawab Rai’ till 1998. In 1960 he adopted the nom de plume of Premchand because the British Deputy Collector felt that the five short stories in Soz-e-Vatan were seditious and banned them. He was inspired by contemporary events and social problems in his writings. Indeed, he was the first major literary artist to be so committed to the solution of social, political and economic problems which faced India at that time. That is why his books like Bazar-e-Husn investigate the conditions which create the discarded woman rather than the aesthetic or erotic realities attendant upon that condition. With such interests it was natural that he would become an inspiration for the Marxist school of writing which came to be known as the Progressive Writers’ Movement. However, Premchand himself remained too preoccupied with the problem of his own life to become too active a part of any movement. He did write, however, purely political journalistic pieces in his own journal Hans which was closed down but resumed publication. Premchand was an opponent of British colonialism and a supporter of the Congress on many issues. Such was the family’s engagement with anti-colonial politics that in 1930 even his wife, Shivarani, went to jail for two months.
Premchand was also interested in promoting Hindustani, a neutral alternative to Hindi and Urdu, so as to promote Indian (rather than Hindu and Muslim) nationalism. He made many efforts to achieve these ends but, of course, the opposing forces were too powerful and beyond anyones’ control.
In his last years Premchand was widely acclaimed as the great writer which he was. However, he never became pompous or snobbish. He remained so humble that he was often mistaken for an ordinary traveller when organizers of functions came to greet him at railway stations. Above all, he kept struggling to find some peace and be free of financial problems. But this was not to be. He died on the 8th of October 1936 while his wife was helping him wash in the morning. According to custom he was cremated in Lamahi by villagers who thought he was nothing more than ‘some schoolmaster’.
This biography brings out the ordinariness of the living conditions of an extraordinary man---a man who commands respect only because of his genius. In a world of power where the murderers of millions are celebrated as conquerors and those whose only virtue is to control lives are called heroes, it is a rare achievement that an artist should be so outstanding as to be celebrated. Human beings need role models as we are all impressed by power, money and genius. Let our role models be those of geniuses, philanthropists and savers of lives rather than manipulators, takers of lives and appropriators of wealth. For this reason alone this biography is worth reading.
Secondly, the biography has been written in a very simple, effective, powerful style. It is detached and without that tendency to heap encomiums and indulge in fulsome praise which make hagiographies of biographies. This is all the more remarkable as the author is Premchand’s son---a circumstance which must have made neutrality of tone difficult.
Thirdly, Premchand emerges as a good human being: a simple, kindly, unassuming man with a dignity which, in some cases, great cognitive abilities confer upon an individual. And yet, since he was poor and powerless, it is good to take him as a role model if one feels that in a world of powerful elitist individuals and groups it is impossible for all others to be dignified.
I would like end at a note of protest against the kind of social system we have in South Asia. As noted above, all Premchand wanted was a steady income to write in peace. Incidentally, that is exactly what Ghalib also wanted. One was probably the greatest master of the short story of his time; the other was, and remains, the greatest poet of Urdu in the world. Yet, so callous and short sighted is South Asian society that both were left in near poverty and suffered as a consequence. When one thinks of how many parasites survived from Ghalib’s days till now; of the hundreds of thousands of rupees wasted on foolish ventures to promote literature alone in all these years; of the huge bureaucracy eating up wealth to encourage writing---one is appalled! That the creative geniuses of a land be left to starve while lip service is paid to creativity and millions are wasted upon that lip service is so profoundly saddening that one does not want to think about it. One can only hope that things will change. However, despite all the talk about research and creativity, the Ghalibs and Premchands of South Asia can either compromise their dignity or starve. This was the condition of the artist yesterday; this remains the condition of the artist today.
The biography of Premchand should also be read in order to understand the social and economic conditions of the production of the works of the intellect in South Asia.