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Elective English–II

Notes anthology was Duniya ka Sabse Anmol Ratan (The Most Precious Jewel in the World), which
according to him was “the last drop of bloodshed in the cause of the country’s freedom”. All
the copies of Soz-e-Watan were confiscated and burnt. Initially Premchand wrote in Urdu
under the name of Nawabrai. However, after the confiscation of Soz-e-Watan he started writing
under the pseudonym Premchand. Before Premchand, Hindi literature consisted mainly of
fantasy or religious works. Premchand brought realism to Hindi literature. He wrote over 300
stories, a dozen novels and two plays. The stories have been compiled and published as
Maansarovar.
In 1921, he answered Mahatma Gandhi’s call and resigned from his government job. Then he
worked as the proprietor of a printing press, editor of literary and political journals (Jagaran
and Hans). Briefly, he also worked as the script writer for the Bombay film world. He didn’t
think much of the film world and once remarked about film Mazdoor (The Labourer)- “The
director is the all in all in cinema. The writer may be the king of his pen, but he is an ordinary
subject in the director’s empire...Idealism creeps into the plots I conceive and I am told there
is no entertainment value in them.”
Premchand’s first marriage was a disaster. The second time, he married a child widow, Shivarani
Devi, which was considered a taboo in India at that time. Premchand had three children -
Sripat Rai, Amrit Rai and Kamla Devi Srivastava.

Premchand lived a life of financial struggle. Once he took a loan of two-and-a-half rupees to
buy some clothes. He had to struggle for three years to pay it back.
When asked why he doesn’t write anything about himself, he answered: “What greatness do
I have that I have to tell anyone about? I live just like millions of people in this country; I am
ordinary. My life is also ordinary. I am a poor school teacher suffering family travails. During
my whole lifetime, I have been grinding away with the hope that I could become free of my
sufferings. But I have not been able to free myself from sufferings. What is so special about
this life that needs to be told to anybody?”.
Premchand chaired the first all-India conference of the Indian Progressive Writers’ Association
in April 1936 at Lucknow.
During his last years, he became terribly ill. The money his wife used to give for his treatment
was used in running his press “The Saraswati”. He was also writing a book “Mangalsutra”
which would never be completed. All this had serious impact on his health leading to his early
death on 8th October 1936, at the age of 56.
The main characteristic of Premchand’s writings is his interesting story-telling and use of
simple language. His novels describe the problems of the rural peasant classes. He avoided the
use of highly Sanskritized Hindi (as was the common practice among Hindi writers), but
rather he used the dialect of the common people.
Premchand called literature a work that expresses the truths and experiences of life impressively.
Presiding over the Progressive Writers’ Conference in Lucknow in 1936, he said that attaching
the word “Progressive” to a writer was redundant, because “A writer or an artist is progressive
by nature, if this was not his/her nature, he/she would not be a writer at all.”
Before Premchand, Hindi literature was confined to the raja-rani (king and queen) tales, the
stories of magical powers and other such escapist fantasies. It was flying in the sky of fantasy,
until Premchand brought it on the grounds of reality. Premchand wrote on the realistic issues
of the day - communalism, corruption, zamindari, debt, poverty, colonialism etc.
Some criticise Premchand’s writings as full of too many deaths and too much of misery. They
believe Premchand does not stand anywhere near contemporary literary giants of India—
Sharat Chandra Chattopadhyay and Rabindranath Tagore. But it should be noted, that many

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