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Indian Writings in Literature

Notes Nevertheless, even a more sanguine reading of the politics of the 1930s would surely see
Premchand’s disillusionment as a powerful voice of dissent. To the extent that one could argue
that Premchand was not necessarily anti-nationalist, his project remained in the mid-1930s to
rescue the ethical self from the ravages of conformist nationalism, or at the very least to advocate
an ethical nationalism where the individual remained consistently responsible for his or her actions
and their consequences. Premchand may have written poignantly of India’s masses, but certainly
by the mid-1930s, he had no use or tolerance for mass-based ideologies that dissolved the responsible
self into the unreflective nationalist crowd.
Understanding the many sources of the palpable sense of injustice that saturated the everyday
lives of so many ‘ordinary’ Indians in the 1930s is the key to understanding Premchand’s
masterpiece. Here I propose to look at several thematic realms of injustice—economic, rural/
urban, gendered, religious, and political—in the novel, with a view to showing that Premchand’s
Godan is actually something of an antinationalist dirge—one, moreover, that held that the problems
confronting colonial India were to a large degree internal, ‘indigenous’, and self-inflicted.
On the other hand, I am conscious of the need to balance this bleak interpretation of Premchand’s
politics with another that recognises the complexity of the novel as a commentary on the human
condition, for Premchand was too passionate and committed a thinker merely to leave his audience
with the bitter taste of pointless toil and endless disillusionment. If the sources of injustice were
internal for India, then so too must be the solutions. Through the character of Hori, Premchand
makes clear his belief that giving up the fight for justice (even in the face of what seem to be
cosmically-cursed odds) would be the worst injustice of all.
The Outrage of Everyday Life
In Godan, Premchand embarks on a project of ideological iconoclasm. The long eloquent polemic
of the novel is driven by the realisation that all of the grand ideologies of the day that claimed to
offer cures to India’s ailments or answers to her many questions, have failed. More than that, they
have failed not because of the overwhelming dominance and hegemony of colonial power, but
rather because they lacked any sense of ethical and moral consistency from within. Premchand
was not merely attacking these ideologies as an outside observer; in many cases he was going
through a painful process of self-reflection and re-evaluating many of the ideologies that had
informed his earlier works. At the time of writing Godan, for instance, Premchand had become
involved with the Progressive Writers’ Association (in early 1936 he was elected its president). But
while Premchand may have still believed that literature could be an important political instrument—
one of the central tenets of the Progressive Writers’ Movement—by the mid- 1930s the aesthetic
confines of ‘socialist realism’ as a school of thought could not adequately express his political
views or creative impulses. Indeed, Premchand was now moving toward the idea of writing
popular and hence marketable literature, struggling to find a way to reconcile artistic integrity
with mass marketability. With Godan, Premchand finally bids farewell to pre-packaged ideological
8
frameworks and focuses his literary craft on the more intricate and complex process of cultivating
self-awakening and self-awareness.
Thus no proponent of any of the grand ideologies that have purported to offer schematic answers
to the troubles of India—Marxist, feminist, Gandhian, nationalist, subalternist—can find true solace
or vindication in this narrative. In Premchand’s world of disillusionment, all grand schemes of
morality are opportunistic. Yet Premchand is too conscientious a writer to merely leave the
ideological landscape full of shattered ruins. His answer to the collapse of all these grand schemes
is to offer a possible alternative in the form of the reconstruction of the internal architecture of the
individual. Premchand’s Godan is a novel about the death of ideology and the rebirth of the self.

8. On this and related ventures, see Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, ‘Writing and Money Making: Munshi Premchand
in the Film Industry, 1934–35’, in Contemporary India, Vol.1, no.1 (Jan.–Mar. 2002), pp.87–98.

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