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

has been invoked to justify an inhumane and unjust act that will leave Hori in ruin; religion has Notes
become corrupted.
In the event, Gobar finally goes to Bhola’s place and gets his bullocks back—but not before promising
Bhola that he will be fairly compensated for his loss. Gobar’s honesty, and his appeal to fair
economic transactions, would appear to offer a better hope for justice than a hopelessly corrupted
concept of dharma. Or perhaps Gobar’s actions and words offer the possibility of a more meaningful
and more tangible type of dharma—one that does not discriminate by caste or class, and one that
is equally at home in the temple or the marketplace.

21.7 The End of Nationalism and the Origins of the Awakened Self

The hollowness, hypocrisy, and opportunism that have undermined the grand ideologies competing
to draw the map of India’s utopian and independent future help explain the palpable sense of
disillusionment in Godan. It is in this respect that I suggest that Premchand’s novel may be the
finest Indian literary work that sets out to capture the mood of its time.
By the mid-1930s, the pessimism and disillusionment that was adrift in the political air began to
settle into Premchand’s prose. All this frustration, pessimism, and disillusionment find their voice
in Godan. Although no longer a cultural nationalist (having watched cultural nationalism decay
into cultural chauvinism and then blind communalism), Premchand remains too much of a Marxist
to go in for the elite politics of most nationalist leaders, and too much of a Gandhian to go in for
the violence advocated by the Marxists. Nationalism, which had once called to him powerfully,
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now seemed a hollow and spent force, smothered by orthodoxy. Also, Premchand began to
perceive that nationalism could never provide an adequate or fulfilling answer for the injustices of
imperialism because the injustices that saturated the worlds of most ‘ordinary’ Indians—the people
who provide the inspiration for his fictional world in Godan—were not imposed from the outside
but cultivated from within. In 1934, for instance, Premchand could write despairingly: ‘we merely
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shout “nation! nation!” but our hearts are still plunged into the darkness of caste distinctions’. 36
With no ideology holding sway over him, with no simplistic remedies to provide a cure for the
many social ailments he saw around him, Premchand wrote Godan to describe everyday life and
its diurnal struggles not as others imagined it could, or should, be, butmerely as it was. Lacking
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the ideological filter or political melodrama of his earlier works, Godan brings to life the local
history of late-colonial India with a complexity that vastly transcends the once-dominant master
narrative of heroic nationalism. The book offers an unflinchingly honest and uncompromising
testament to the gritty, brutal, and often inhumane existence of India’s subalterns.

34. Some of Premchand’s stories that deal with his earlier optimism regarding the promise of nationalism are:
‘Duniya ka Sabse Anmol Ratan’ (The Most Priceless Jewel in the World) (1908), Prem. Rac. 11: 18–24; and
‘Samar Yatra’ (A Pilgrimage to Battle) (1930), Prem. Rac. 14: 341–50.
35. Perhaps the greatest story explaining why Gandhian nationalism would never work is also Premchand’s
shortest: ‘Rashtra ka Sevak’ (Servant Of the Nation) (1930), Prem. Rac. 14: 403–4, is roughly half a page in
length. In the course of a short dialogue between father and daughter, the father, the ‘servant of the nation’,
extols caste equality, until her daughter says she wants to marry one of the lower caste men. Suddenly the
‘servant of nation’ cannot even bear to look at her, and turns away in disgust.
36. Quoted in Govind Narain, Premchand: Novelist and Thinker (Delhi: Pragati Publications, 1999), p.133.
37. Indar Nath Madan, Premchand: An Interpretation (Lahore: Minerva Bookshop, 1946), argues that the excessive
attempt by Premchand to fit ideology and ‘message’ into his fiction greatly reduced its quality and literary
potential: ‘The main reason why he could not, in spite of his undoubted talents, create an immortal character
lies in his wrong conception of the function of art’ (p.98). For Madan, Hori is Premchand’s first and only
‘immortal character’.

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