Page 177 - DENG503_INDIAN_WRITINGS_IN_LITERATURE

Unit 21: Premchand: Godan: Detailed Study of the Text

and communities as being morally superior to wealthier elites. There is a strong sense of sarcasm Notes
12
and satire when Premchand speaks of Hori’s tendency to deceive moneylenders and merchants:
‘Even if he had several rupees at home, he would swear before the moneylender that he didn’t
have even a paisa. And it was perfectly valid by his code of ethics to increase the weight of jute by
13
adding water to it, or of cotton by adding the seeds to it’ (15/20). Also, peasant life is often
portrayed as a realm bereft of any sense of mutual trust: as soon as Hori turns his head for just a
moment, for example, thieves make off with his potatoes, forcing him to take on yet another debt
to make ends meet. And though Hori and other marginal farmers bemoan the continual injustices
of indebtedness, as soon as any of them comes into even a small amount of money—ten or twenty
rupees even—they immediately set themselves up as moneylenders to exploit their fellow villagers. 14
It would seem that there is little ‘subaltern’ unity here. In fact, Hori admits as much to Gobar: ‘We
can’t even stand the sight of each other. There is no unity here’ (27/36). The goal of the subaltern
classes, at least in the world of Godan, is apparently not to dismantle the structures of injustice
that pit oppressor against oppressed, but rather to join the ranks of, or at least to emulate, the very
groups responsible for their subordination.
Yet Gobar defies the deterministic explanations from his father. Although at one point he chides
a local landowner, Jhinguri Singh, that ‘it isn’t knowledge [ilam] that counts in the world, but
honesty [iman]’ (196/260), Gobar is also something of a capitalist entrepreneur. Thus the ‘traditional’
rural economy of India, so often trumpeted by Gandhi and his followers as the as the blueprint for
India’s future, is here shown to be just as exploitative as modern capitalism. In contrast to Gobar’s
entrepreneurial success and new-found independence and self-respect, Hori and Jhinguri Singh
(who has also used his transport service to make as many people indebted to him as possible)
proclaim that what counts in economic relations is not honesty and trust but ‘authority and
pressure’. Indeed there is a strong sense in Godan that structural economic injustice is inherent in
the pre-colonial, or non-colonial world of the traditional economy. As the Rai Sahib protests
righteously, the system ‘forces’ him to extort tenants and pay bribes; that is the way it has ‘always
been’.
Gobar appears to have been somewhat successful in the city. Yet Premchand makes it clear that
this does not mean that the urban capitalist economy is the answer to India’s economic ills. Gobar
may represent the ‘good’ capitalist, but there are others who clearly show the pejorative tendencies
of capitalist economic relations. When a strike breaks out among workers at the sugar mill in town
owned and operated by Khanna, the latter comes out against the strike and defends his stance
with some interesting logic: while he had earlier ‘been arrested’ to prove he was a good nationalist,
now this was business and the shareholders (who are also ‘good’ nationalists for investing in

12. Over time, Premchand gradually moves away from moral sympathy with abstract groups and classes and
towards moral sympathy with ‘awakened’ individuals—a point that is, as I argue below, central to an
understanding of Godan. While many a zamindar character is portrayed as harsh and selfish, in stories like
‘Updesh’ (The Lesson) (1917), Prem. Rac. 12: 33–47, one role model of a ‘good’ enlightened zamindar is
presented (albeit in heavily moralistic, Tolstoyan and Gandhian fashion). Similarly, in Premchand’s f1amous
short story ‘Kafan’ (The Shroud) (1936), Prem Rac. 15: 401–7 (published in Urdu as ‘Jamiya’ in 1935), the two
central untouchable characters, poor as they are, are portrayed individually as lazy and unprincipled.
13. One could see in this also the type of ‘resistance from below’ as interpreted by James C. Scott, Weapons of
the Weak: Everyday Forms Of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). It is unlikely
Premchand would have seen it this way.
14. On a side note, in my own fieldwork in rural Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Karnataka (1995–6, 1998), I witnessed
the same phenomenon over and over again. There were at the time a handful of local non-governmental
organisations trying to establish alternatives (such as rotating credit societies), but their reception by local
villagers was often lukewarm. Premchand spent considerable literary energy attacking various exploitative
aspects of the ‘traditional’ system of moneylending. His short story ‘Tagada’ (Demands) (1932), Prem. Rac.
15: 106–12, for instance, details the way in which a ‘typical’ debt-collector spends his time continually
pilfering from his many debtors, and the pointless but avoidable suffering and hardship that this engenders.

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