PREMCHAND IN

WORLD LANGUAGES

This volume explores the reception of Premchand’s works and his

influence in the perception of India among Western cultures, especially
Russian, German, French, Spanish and English. The chapters in the col-
lection also take a critical look at multiple translations of the same work
(and examine how each new translation expands the work’s textuality
and annexes new readership for the author) as well as representations
of celluloid adaptations of Premchand’s works.
An important intervention in the field of translation studies, this
book will interest scholars and researchers of comparative literature,
cultural studies and film studies.

M. Asaduddin is Professor of English and Dean, Faculty of Humani-

ties and Languages at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India, and
Director, Jamia Centenary History Project. He writes on literature,
language politics and translation studies. He was a Fulbright Scholar-
in-Residence at Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA (2008–9), and
Visiting Professor/Fellow at several universities in India and outside.
His publications include Filming Fiction: Tagore, Premchand and Ray
(2012), A Life in Words (2012), For Freedom’s Sake: Manto (2002)
and Lifting the Veil: Selected Writings of Ismat Chughtai (2001). He
has received several prizes for his translations including the Katha
Award, the Dr A. K. Ramanujan Award, the Sahitya Akademi (National
Academy of Letters) Award and the Crossword Book Award.
‘The name Premchand inspires affection, a feeling of one’s ownness, more
than anything else. He is, and has been, respected and admired perennially: as
a writer of an India that was in turmoil and transition. More than almost any
other writer, Premchand was aware of both.
Any examination or re-examination of Premchand is always welcome. He
has been translated copiously, sometimes into languages which have little in
common with the Urdu/Hindi that he wrote in. He himself ventured into the
world of films (with scant success) and films based on his fiction have been
made (though with scant success, again).
From all points of view: translation, interpretation, mediation through
performing arts, the instant collection of chapters is a valuable contribution to
Premchand studies.’
Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, Urdu writer,
poet and critic, Allahabad, India

‘World writers become so by fame or through translation – sometimes both.

To what extent is Premchand a world writer? This volume brilliantly opens up
the question by exploring the many dimensions of translation across media and
across languages – English, other European languages, Soviet Russian – as well
as paying attention to Premchand’s own multiple translation practices. A path-
breaking book, meticulously researched, it brings the most famous Hindi–Urdu
writer of the early twentieth century bang into current debates on translation
and world literature. A must for students of translation studies, comparative
literature and world literature.’
Francesca Orsini, Professor of Hindi and
South Asian Literature, School of Oriental
and African Studies, London, UK

‘Premchand in World Languages tells a captivating story about the uneven

fortunes of an Indian vernacular author on the global stage, offering startling
insight into the creation of national literary culture in colonial and post-colonial
India, and the currency of world literature in its many avatars (including in
television and film). M. Asaduddin has assembled a rich array of contribu-
tions that treat translation as a dynamic, multidirectional negotiation. Together
these articles demonstrate how Premchand’s popularity in Russian vs. Spanish,
German or French reveals as much about the shifting ideological commitments
of the home audience itself as the quality of the source text or the translated
versions, and likewise force us to question the terms we should use when the
“translation” is never called that as such but skillfully mediates political dif-
ferences and artistic visions both nationally and internationally. This volume
promises to edify both specialists of South Asia and non-specialists alike, espe-
cially anyone interested in the complex circulations of world literature.’
Christi A. Merrill, Associate Professor of
South Asian Literature and Postcolonial Theory,
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA
 PREMCHAND IN
WORLD LANGUAGES
Translation, reception and
cinematic representations

Edited by M. Asaduddin
First published 2016
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an
informa business
© 2016 M. Asaduddin
The right of M. Asaduddin to be identified as the author of
the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual
chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and
78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be
trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record has been requested for this book
ISBN: 978-1-138-67188-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-61669-8 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
 CONTENTS

About the contributorsviii

Acknowledgementxiii

Introduction 1
M. ASADUDDIN

PART I
Premchand in translations: surveys, histories,
receptions13

1 Premchand in English: one translation, two originals 15

HARISH TRIVEDI

2 Premchand in English translation: the story

of an ‘afterlife’ 40
M. ASADUDDIN

3 Premchand in German language: texts,

paratexts and translations 57
CHRISTINA OESTERHELD

4 Premchand in Russian: translation,

reception, adaptation 76
GUZEL STRELKOVA

v
 C ontents

5 Beyond Orientalism: Premchand in

Spanish translations 94
SONYA SURABHI GUPTA

6 Premchand in French and the French for Premchand 109

SHARAD CHANDRA

7 French translations of Munshi Premchand’s

short stories: a critical enquiry 118
MUHAMMAD FAIZULLAH KHAN

PART II
Premchand on translation: formulations and praxis 127

8 Premchand on/in translation 129

AVADHESH KUMAR SINGH

9 Premchand and the politics of language: on

translation, cultural nationalism and irony 144
SNEHAL SHINGAVI

10 Translation as new aesthetic: Premchand’s translation

of Shab-e-Tar and European modernism 161
MADHU SINGH

11 Experiencing Premchand through translation

of three stories: culture, gender, history 175
BARAN FAROOQI

PART III
Premchand and cinematic adaptation: two stories 193

12 In quest of a comparative poetics: a study of Sadgati195

NISHAT HAIDER

vi
 C ontents

13 Politics of language, cultural representation

and historicity: ‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’ in
(self-)translation and adaptation 212
FATIMA RIZVI

PART IV
Premchand’s thematics 233

14 Kashi as Gandhi’s city: personal and public

lives in Premchand’s Karmabhumi235
VASUDHA DALMIA

15 Demystifying the sanctity of the village council:

‘Ghareeb ki Haye’ as a counter-narrative to
‘Panch Parmeshwar’ 258
SHAILENDRA KUMAR SINGH

Index 281

vii
 CONTRIBUTORS

M. Asaduddin is Professor of English and Dean, Faculty of Humani-

ties and Languages at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, India;
and Director, Jamia Centenary History Project. He writes on lit-
erature, language politics and translation studies. He was a Ful-
bright Scholar-in-Residence at Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA
(2008–9), and Visiting Professor/Fellow at several universities in
India and outside. His publications include Filming Fiction: Tagore,
Premchand and Ray (2012), A Life in Words (2012), For Freedom’s
Sake: Manto (2002) and Lifting the Veil: Selected Writings of Ismat
Chughtai (2001). He has received several prizes for his transla-
tions including the Katha Award, Dr A. K. Ramanujan Award, the
Sahitya Akademi (National Academy of Letters) Award and the
Crossword Book Award.
Sharad Chandra is a full-time writer and author of several books,
poems, short stories, book reviews, columns and articles. Primarily
a Camus scholar and translator of his works into Hindi, she was for-
merly a university faculty member. She has received the Grand Prix
du Rayonnement de la langue française from L’Academie Francaise,
Paris, and the Best Translator’s Award from Translators’ Associa-
tion India. Her recent publications include Albert Camus: Sense of
the Sacred (2008/2015), Albert Camus et L’ Inde (2008), Mutiny
in the Ark, Concrete and Paper (2014/2010) and Marata Shahar,
Paadari Maafi Mango (1996/2009). She has also translated several
authors including Atiq Rahimi, Amin Maalouf, Sartre and Claude
Simon as well as French symbolist poets Baudelaire, Rimbaud,
Mallarme and Verlaine, and the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa.
Vasudha Dalmia is Professor Emerita of Hindi and Modern South Asian
Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. Her research
interests include the politics of religious discourse; transitional

viii
 C ontributors

cultural phenomena of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth

centuries; the politics of the literature of the new nation state, par-
ticularly of modern Indian theatre; and studies of the position of
women in these transitions. Her monograph, The Nationalization
of Hindu Traditions: Bharatendu Harischandra and Nineteenth
Century Banaras (1997), studies the life and writings of a major
Hindi writer of the nineteenth century. She is the author of the semi-
nal work Plays and Performances: The Politics of Modern Indian
Theatre (2006) and has edited The Oxford India Hinduism Reader
(2007), Hindi Modernism: Rethinking Agyeya and His Times (2012)
and Cambridge Companion to Modern Indian Culture (2012).
Baran Farooqi is Professor of English at Jamia Millia Islamia, New
Delhi, India. She is a scholar of Shakespearean drama, gender stud-
ies and women’s literature. Her doctoral thesis focused on early-
nineteenth-century criticism of Shakespeare and its influence on later
approaches. She also translates extensively from Urdu to English. Her
translations of Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s selected poetry are forthcoming.
Sonya Surabhi Gupta is Professor of Latin American Studies at Jamia
Millia Islamia. Her research interests centre on Literary and Cul-
tural Studies in Latin American and Indian contexts. She has lec-
tured estensively in India and abroad (Argentina, Colombia, Spain,
Germany) on themes related to her research. Her publications
include translations from Spanish to Hindi of Cien años de sole-
dad by Gabriel García Márquez (Ekant ke Sau Varsh, Rajkamal,
2003) and La familia de Pascual Duarte (Pascual Duarte ka Parivar,
Rajkamal, 1990), among many others. She has also published an
anthology of stories by Indian women writers translated into Span-
ish: Lihaf: Cuentos de mujeres de la India (Madrid, 2001).
Nishat Haider is Associate Professor of English at the University of
Lucknow, India. She is the author of Tyranny of Silences: Contem-
porary Indian Women’s Poetry (2010). Recipient of C. D. Narasim-
haiah Award (2010) and Isaac Sequeira Memorial Award (2011),
she has presented papers at numerous academic conferences and her
essays have been included in several scholarly journals and books.
Her research interests include popular culture and gender studies.
Muhammad Faizullah Khan is Assistant Professor of French at the
Centre for European and Latin American Studies, Jamia Millia
Islamia, New Delhi, India. He completed his MPhil and PhD from
the Centre for French and Francophone Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru
University, New Delhi, where he received the K. J. Mahale Award

ix
 C ontributors

for Academic Excellence. In 2008, he was awarded the prestigious

UGC–French Government Scholarship which enabled him to pur-
sue his research in France for ten months on the French translations
of Premchand’s writings. He is the author of the book French Made
Easy and has published several translations and articles in journals.
Christina Oesterheld is Senior Lecturer in Urdu at the South Asia Insti-
tute, University of Heidelberg, Germany. Her main research inter-
ests are Urdu fiction from the nineteenth century to the present,
reform movements among North Indian Muslims in the nineteenth
century and Muslim identities in India. Her doctoral thesis was on
three novels by Urdu writer Qurratulain Hyder. She translates Urdu
short stories and poetry into German and English. Her research
articles on Urdu literature and related topics have been published in
the Annual of Urdu Studies and several edited volumes.
Fatima Rizvi is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and
Modern European Languages at the University of Lucknow, India.
Her interests include postcolonial literature and literature in trans-
lation. Her academic papers have been published in national and
international journals and collections of critical essays. She is also
a Hindi and Urdu translator. She is on the board of the Centre for
Cultural Texts, Records and Translation of Indian Literatures, a
project sponsored by the Government of Uttar Pradesh under the
‘Centre of Excellence’ scheme. Her doctoral thesis was on emo-
tional patterns in the poetry of the Brontë Sisters.
Snehal Shingavi is Associate Professor of English at the University
of Texas, Austin, USA, where he teaches South Asian literature
in English, Hindi and Urdu, as well as the literature of the South
Asian diaspora. He received his PhD in English from the Univer-
sity of California, Berkeley, and has taught previously at Notre
Dame de Namur University and the University of Mary Washing-
ton. He is the author of The Mahatma Misunderstood: The Poli-
tics and Forms of Literary Nationalism in India (2013). He has
also translated Premchand’s Sevasadan (2005) and the Urdu short-
story collection Angaaray (2014). He is currently working on a
book-length manuscript entitled ‘The Country and the City, the
Jungle and the Slum: The Neoliberal Landscapes of South Asian
Literature’.
Avadhesh Kumar Singh is former Vice Chancellor, Dr Babasaheb
Ambedkar Open University, Ahmedabad, India; Convener, Knowl-
edge Consortium of Gujarat, Government of Gujarat, India; Director,

x
 C ontributors

School of Translation Studies & Training, Indira Gandhi National

Open University (IGNOU), New Delhi; and Director (i/c) Indian Sign
Language & Research Centre (ISLRTC), Ministry of Social Justice &
Empowerment, IGNOU, New Delhi, India. His research interests
include literature in Indian languages, comparative poetics, contem-
porary literary theory and criticism, translation and interdisciplinary
studies. He has published papers in various anthologies as well as
national and international journals. He has edited Critical Practice, a
biannual journal of literary and critical studies for several years. His
recent publications include Revisiting Literature, Criticism and Aes-
thetics in India (2012) and Ramayana through the Ages: Ramkatha
in Indian Languages (2007).
Madhu Singh is Professor of English in the Department of English and
Modern European Languages at the University of Lucknow, India.
She teaches postgraduate courses on translation studies, compara-
tive literature and colonial and postcolonial literature. Her areas of
research include South Asian literature and culture, contemporary
women’s writing in India, literature for social change, Hindi fic-
tion and archival history. Her publications and translations have
appeared in national and international journals. The most recent
of these is her translation of G. M. Muktibodh’s Hindi story ‘Junc-
tion’ published in Wasafiri (2015). She is currently working on an
anthology of South Asian women poets.
Shailendra Kumar Singh is pursuing his PhD from Jamia Millia Isla-
mia, New Delhi, India, and has a Master’s in English Literature from
Hindu College, University of Delhi. His research interests include
gender studies, Indian literature in English translation, eighteenth-
century literature and Premchand’s literary corpus.
Guzel Strelkova is Associate Professor in the Indian Philology Depart-
ment at the Institute of Asian and African Studies, Moscow State
University, Russia. She completed her PhD in Hindi and Indian lit-
erature from the Institute for Asian and African Studies, MSU. She
has published numerous articles on modern Indian literature and
the poetry of the Namdev and Varkari movements. She has trans-
lated three books from Hindi to Russian: Poems by Kunwar Narain
(2014), Stories and Plays by K. B. Vaid (2008) and Bhakti Poetry
by Namdev (2002). Her translation of Chittcobra by M. Garg is in
the process of publication.
Harish Trivedi is former Professor of English at the University of
Delhi, New Delhi, India. As the chair of the Department of English,

xi
 C ontributors

he pioneered radical changes in the syllabi, expanding the canon of

English Studies. He is also the former chair of the Indian Associa-
tion of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies. He has
been visiting professor at various universities, including London,
Belfast, Istanbul and Chicago. He is the author of Colonial Trans-
actions: English Literature and India (1993), and has co-edited The
Nation across the World (2007), Literature and Nation: Britain
and India 1800–1990 (2000), Post-Colonial Translation: Theory
and Practice (1999) and Interrogating Post-Colonialism: Theory,
Text and Context (1996).

xii
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Many of the chapters, though not all, featuring in this volume were
presented in an international seminar on ‘Premchand in Translation’ in
2012, organised by the UGC-SAP-DRS programme in the Department
of English, Jamia Millia Islamia, with collaboration from National
Council for Promotion of Urdu Language and Sahitya Akademi. I am
beholden to the participants who stayed patiently with me during the
transition and ‘translation’ of the articles from seminar presentations
to the current form. I am equally grateful to the scholars who were
invited to contribute to the volume and who responded positively to
my request, even though they were not part of the seminar. I am thank-
ful to my colleagues and students for making the seminar a memorable
event in the history of the department.
M. Asaduddin

xiii
This page intentionally left blank
 INTRODUCTION

M. Asaduddin

Premchand (1880–1936), the iconic Indian writer, belongs to the liter-

ary culture and tradition of two language literatures, namely, Urdu
and Hindi, and pioneered modern fiction writing in them. He divested
fiction’s preoccupation with romance and fantasy in the two lan-
guages and gave them the hard texture of realism. Further, he etched
the Indian countryside – villages and small towns – on his fiction in
such vivid and arresting details that they became a pioneering mode
of representation of the spaces not represented earlier in Hindi–Urdu
fiction. The peasant characters and the tenor of daily life in villages
and small towns depicted in his novels and short stories still continue
to be the talking point for both writers and historians and sociolo-
gists. The way he represented the life worlds of peasants and their
ethos has still remained unrivalled in the two languages he wrote in,
particularly Urdu. In addition, the practice of a particular brand of
realism which he somewhat tautologically calls ‘idealistic realism’ and
the anti-imperialist thrust of his works provide different axes of entry
into his work attracting both translators and critics alike.

Reading Premchand in two tongues:

the complexity of dual authorial presence
In the history of world literature we have instances of writers who
began writing in one language, mostly their mother tongue, and then
switched over to another. The most celebrated cases that one can
recall are Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov and Milan Kundera. In
each case, the writer chose a different language because of change of
his or her location and the change in perceived readership. To make
a comprehensive or definitive assessment of these writers one must
take their works encompassing both the languages, and assess them
in their totality. One’s understanding of them will remain incomplete

1
 M. ASADUDDIN

if one knows only one version of their work and not the other. In the
case of Premchand, the situation is somewhat complex. The languages
in which he wrote or translated in, that is, Hindi and Urdu are not
entirely separate. They have similar origins, even though they evolved
into two separate languages. Without going into the history of how
one language, because of a peculiar combination of social and political
factors, gradually evolved into two languages and scripts, one has to
acknowledge that Premchand handled both of them ambidextrously
and left his indelible stamp on their fictional literatures. That is why
to understand Premchand’s creative process, it is necessary to look at
both the versions in Hindi and Urdu. Yet, those who read Premchand
only in Hindi hardly acknowledge that Premchand was a Urdu writer
to begin with and his Urdu corpus is as significant as the Hindi corpus,
and those who read Premchand only in Urdu scarcely appreciate the
fact that he moved on to write in Hindi prolifically and profoundly
and that one cannot appreciate him in his totality unless one knows
the extensive body of work he wrote in Hindi as well.
Premchand began writing in Urdu and he produced a substantial
volume of output in the first twelve years of his career (1903–15) –
five novels and about sixty short stories to be precise – before the
thought of writing in Hindi occurred to him. His switchover from
Urdu to Hindi was gradual and painstaking, though irreversible, given
the social and political circumstances prevailing at the time.
Now, the question is, are the Hindi and Urdu versions of his stories
exact replica of each other? No, and Premchand knew it too well, as
he was aware of the changes that he made along the way. In a letter to
Imtiaz Ali Taj, dramatist, translator and editor in Urdu, he mentions
the fact that he changes entire scenes while transcribing the text from
one version to the other.1 As usually happens with writer-translators,
whenever they translate their own work, the creative impulse often
comes to the fore so that translation is often turned into rewriting. In
the case of Premchand, one finds many minor changes that are done
sometimes for stylistic embellishments, and at other times for differ-
ence in perceived readership. There are also some rare cases where
significant and radical changes have been effected in the process of
translation so that the stories could, after the changes, be amenable to
different interpretations altogether.
There is another dimension to this issue. It was not always Prem-
chand himself who translated his work between Urdu and Hindi.
Often he took help from others in this endeavour, and might have
had the time to look over it only cursorily. Still, the entire corpus of
his work was not available in both the versions. The Urdu version of

2
 I ntroduction

his magnum opus Gaudaan first appeared three years after the death
of Premchand in someone else’s translation in 1939. His younger son,
Amrit Rai, excavated several stories in the Urdu version after his death
of which there were no Hindi versions. Amrit Rai published such sto-
ries in a two-volume anthology with the appropriate title Gupt Dhan
(Secret Treasure). In the introduction to this anthology he writes about
the kind of changes he has effected while transferring the stories from
one version to the other:

I thought it unfair to Hindi readers to publish these stories in

their original form. So I clothed them in Hindi, in the style of
Munshiji, as far as it was possible for me. How far I have suc-
ceeded in this effort to not only preserve the soul of the story
but the language and style as well will be judged by you. As
for me, I feel satisfaction in the thought that I have pulled all
my resources in the endeavour.2

It is a clear indication of the fact that Amrit Rai felt that, for the sake
of readability in Hindi, the stories must undergo changes. This also
throws up the question of ethics and authorship, as to whether any-
one, be it the writer’s own son, has the right to change the original
works to make them suitable for a particular readership.
Sometimes, these changes have resulted in radical transforma-
tion of meaning. This can be illustrated through the two versions of
Premchand’s famous story, ‘Poos ki Raat’. The story is about a poor,
destitute peasant, Halku, who, as happened with peasants, was in
permanent debt to the village moneylender. Halku spends the severe
winter nights in the field to save the harvest from marauding wild
beasts. But ultimately he is unable to save the harvest when one night
a horde of wild beasts descends on the field and despoils the harvest.
In the Hindi version which was first published in the Hindi journal
Madhuri (May 1930), the story ends on a note of seeming relief for
Halku who decides to transform his life of a peasant by becoming a
worker in a factory. However, in the Urdu version which was pub-
lished later in Prem Chalisi II (1930), Premchand has added a section
at the end where Halku ponders over the challenges of peasant life but
nevertheless decides to stay a peasant, because turning himself into a
day labourer would mean an insult to the land and to his forefathers
who were peasants. Thus, the two endings of the story admit of two
radically different interpretations.
It is clear that not only the Urdu version is an expanded version of
the Hindi, but also it radically alters the perspective of the protagonist.

3
 M. ASADUDDIN

Halku comes across as giving up the challenges of being a peasant and

surrendering to the fate of a wage earner in the Hindi version, whereas
the Urdu version stresses his resistance to any such shift in his career.
He faces the challenges in a peasant’s life and stands face-to-face with
total ruin as the marauding animals destroy his harvest, but none of it
could destroy his spirit, and he is convinced that he should continue
to be a peasant to carry on the legacy of his forefathers. Thus, while
the Urdu version maintains the status quo in Halku’s life, the Hindi
version envisages his transformation into a factory worker. Changes
of the kind signalled above, with variations and different degrees of
emphasis, can be found in a number of short stories.
As far as the novels are concerned, the most telling illustration of
this difference between the Hindi and the Urdu versions is provided by
the novel Bazaar-e-Husn which has become Sevasadan in Hindi. The
first difference that strikes the reader immediately is the change in the
title and its differing resonances in both the versions. The title ‘Bazaar-
e-Husn’ in Urdu conjures up the image of the mystique and romance
of the courtesans’ lives, in the legacy of Mirza Hadi Rusva’s novel
Umrao Jan Ada written about two decades earlier, whereas ‘Sevasa-
dan’ conjures up the image of a dull and uninspiring house of reform.
If the accent of the Urdu title is on pleasure and passion, the accent
of the Hindi title is on instruction and correction. The Hindi title
also seems to be a calculated response to the prevalent atmosphere
of social reform undertaken at the time by such social organisations
as the Arya Samaj and others. Vasudha Dalmia points out how the
‘sober and uninspiring’ title ‘Sevasadan’ underlines ‘the final redemp-
tion of the heroine . . . rather than focusing on the courtesan’s quarters
itself’. In her opinion, for Hindi readers, it was the most apparent
reading of the title in the Hindi version, ‘the puritanical rather than
that which suggested the lurid, which accounted for the initial appeal
of the novel’. In contrast, when the novel came out in Urdu four years
later with the title ‘Bazaar-e-Husn’, it did not have similar appeal for
the Urdu readers.
It is not simply a matter of the change of title; in fact, throughout
the two versions there are both obvious and subtle differences that
give a particular spin to characters and situations. In the Urdu version
the protagonist Suman comes across as a flirt, out to grab attention to
herself, whereas in the Hindi version, she has been depicted as more
restrained and her actions appear modest and demure. Moreover,
there are several important sections that are present in one but not in
another. For example, Chapter 15 contains an additional paragraph in
the Hindi version in which Premchand himself seems to be speaking

4
 I ntroduction

as the omniscient narrator on an important moral issue. The chapter

begins with the author-narrator writing in a philosophical vein about
the different stages of human life. He reflects on the wisdom of keep-
ing liquor shops and gambling dens outside the city centre but the
brothels in the chauk area at the heart of the city, ready to trap young
men. The first few paragraphs are more or less the same in both the
versions, but there is a paragraph in the Hindi version that is not there
in the Urdu version. The additional paragraph in Hindi reads as fol-
lows in English translation:

That is why it is necessary to keep these venomous serpents

away from the population, in a separate location. Then, we
will have to think twice before going near such loathsome
places. As long as they are kept away from the population and
there are no good excuses to wander off there, fewer shame-
less men will dare to set foot in that relocated Minabazar.3

The language is very strong in its denunciation of the profession of

the prostitutes, and in its strident advocacy of keeping them outside
the pale of civilised and decent habitation. Here Premchand does not
hide behind the mask of a narrator, but comes out in the open to
make his opinion public, which must have gone down very well with
the climate of the prevalent public opinion. In the Hindi version his
urge for reform seems to be paramount while the Urdu version does
not show similar urgency. Further, in Sevasadan, there are indirect
comments on the state of Hindi literature – how it was derivative and
parasitical as it depended on indiscriminate translations from other
literatures, reading habits of people that needed improvement and so
on. In Bazaar-e-Husn, these comments are less urgent or muted.
Thus a combined reading of the short stories and novels in both
the versions reveal several significant facts and assumptions. In many
cases, the Urdu version is larger than the Hindi version, showing the
use of traditional rhetorical embellishments. This would encourage us
to make a couple of speculations: (a) Urdu was Premchand’s first love,
and as he professes in his essay ‘Sahitya ka Uddeshya’, it came more
naturally to him than Hindi and (b) as a language, Urdu, or its more
popular version Hindustani, lends itself to finer and intimate shades of
feelings and emotions in Premchand’s hand in a way that Hindi does
not do; in comparison, Hindi is somewhat stark and unadorned. In the
Urdu versions one can find virtuoso passages, passages of purple prose
designed to dazzle the readers into an admission of the author’s full
control and command over the language. It is interesting to speculate

5
 M. ASADUDDIN

whether language determines themes and styles or, at least, whether

language and themes are intimately connected. Alok Rai says, ‘Aisa
lagta hai ki kai baatein Hindi mein zyada swabhavik dhang se kahi
ja sakti hai, aur kai Urdu mein. Is pratyaksh anubhav ki jad mein kya
kya chhupa hua hai – itihaas, sanskritik-samajik purvagraha, sahityik
parampara – ye shod ka vishay ho sakta hai . . .’.4 He further says that
the communalisation of these two languages is evident, as one could
see that in Hindi if the characters are given Hindu names, in Urdu they
are given Muslim names. But this is not a general rule and from this
one cannot deduce that Premchand had a communal bent of mind.
Nothing could be more rash than such a conclusion. Premchand’s
anti-communalism and anti-sectarianism, despite his admiration for
reformist programmes of the Arya Samaj, are writ large in his stories
and novels, and in his assertions in his essays and addresses and in his
practices in real life. That is why the reasons for the differing versions
must lie elsewhere. It should be traced to the different readership that
Premchand was addressing. And these two groups of readership were
different not only in their religious practices and cultural traditions,
but also in their class differences, in their reading habits and in the
literary tradition they inherited.

Premchand in and through translation

The above section underlines the complexity of translating Premchand.
As the reception and reputation of a writer in the receiving culture
depend on the quality of translation and the version the translator has
chosen from, one needs to be sensitive to this complexity to arrive at
a balanced judgement. The current volume not only addresses Prem-
chand’s reception and translation in world languages and celluloid
versions, but also looks at this complexity from multiple perspectives.
We live in a world where translation plays a crucial role in trans-
national literary transactions and reputations. Writers now are read
more in translation than in their original tongues. In fact, quite
often the number of readers in translation is staggering compared to
the number of readers in the author’s original language. Just think
of writers like Gabriel García Márquez, Milan Kundera, Umberto
Eco, Murakami and Orhan Pamuk. If their readers in their original
languages run in thousands, their readers in translation in world lan-
guages run into millions. Translation also becomes the primary instru-
ment to earn them the highest literary award of the world, the Nobel
Prize. Here, I am thinking of translation not only in interlingual terms
but also in inter-semiotic terms, when literary works are turned into

6
 I ntroduction

films (or indeed, other forms of art), which helps authors reach a still
wider audience. A film based on a literary work can be instrumental in
reviving the work that may have been out of public view and trigger
new interest in it.5
Among all Indian writers writing in the first half of the twentieth
century, Tagore was best served by translators in India and abroad.
He also fashioned himself as a world poet, and a band of dedicated
translators felt that his works had a universal message that needed
translation and dissemination. He himself undertook translation of his
work, mainly poetry, in English. On the contrary, Premchand focused
on Indian countryside and the village populace of North India, and
it was felt that his works were too rooted to travel across cultures.
Hence translation of Premchand’s work was slow to pick up in world
languages, with a single notable exception, which is Russian.
Premchand began writing at a time when prose fiction in Urdu and
Hindi – novels and short stories – was at a formative stage. In fact, he
fashioned both the genre of fiction as well as the language in which
that genre had to be written. Talking in pan-Indian terms, fictional
literature was dominated by translation from Bangla where Bankim
Chandra Chatterjee, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay and Rabindranath
Tagore had honed the art of fiction to a considerable degree, and writ-
ers in other Indian languages grew up reading those writers in transla-
tion and in their own languages and drawing inspiration from them.
Premchand himself started off as a translator before he embarked on
his own creative journey. Of course, later in life, he translated Euro-
pean and Russian writers, as well as reflected on the art and craft of
translation. Avadhesh Kumar Singh’s chapter, ‘Premchand on/in trans-
lation’, deals with the entire gamut of Premchand’s views, contested
and controversial, about this craft and what it meant for him. It also
throws light on Premchand’s unease with the climate of indiscrimi-
nate translation by Hindi translators from all sources rather than try-
ing to produce creative work of merit in Hindi. This latter point has
been expanded and articulated most forcefully by Snehal Shingavi in
his chapter, ‘Premchand and the politics of language: on translation,
cultural nationalism and irony’. Through a rigorous textual analysis
of Sevasadan and Bazaar-e-Husn, he builds the strong argument that
‘Premchand as a writer . . . only makes sense under the sign of transla-
tion, as a writer whose intellectual concerns are only made manifest
by putting his translations (and translations of his works) at the center
of our attention.’
Madhu Singh’s chapter, ‘Translation as new aesthetic: Premchand’s
translation of Shab-e-Tar and European modernism’, shows his actual

7
 M. ASADUDDIN

practice of translation when he had translated Maurice Maeterlinck’s

(1862–1936) symbolist-absurdist play in French Les Aveugles from
the English version. She makes the argument that Indians first came in
contact with modernism through translation of European works in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She also tries to locate
Premchand’s choice of the Maeterlinck text as a possible but camou-
flaged protest against British oppression and censorship, coming as it
did after four months of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.
Baran Farooqi’s chapter, ‘Experiencing Premchand through transla-
tion of three stories: culture, gender, history’, deals with the problem
of cultural translatability when a translator translates a writer in a
historical period different from the author’s, through her experience
of translating three stories by Premchand.

Translation, mediation and reception

Premchand’s revival and reception in contemporary times are largely
propelled by the translation of his work in English, because the bulk
of Premchand translation now is happening in English. Two chapters,
by Harish Trivedi and by M. Asaduddin, address the issues and chal-
lenges involved in the English translation of Premchand most compre-
hensively. Provocatively titled, ‘Premchand in English: one translation,
two originals’, Trivedi’s chapter takes the reader to the history of tex-
tual research in Premchand in order to determine the definitive ver-
sions, signalling the fact that how a scholar of his stature could also
prove inadequate if he depended only on one version of the text. Asad-
uddin’s chapter, ‘Premchand in English translation: the story of
an “afterlife”’, endeavours to chronicle the history of Premchand
translation in English, pointing out milestones along the way. It also
makes a comparative study of those translations where multiple trans-
lations are available.
Translation and reception of a writer may have ideological underpin-
nings, besides the intrinsic merit of the work. There are circumstances
that can make a culture more hospitable to translation. There are cer-
tain historical conjunctures that might propel writers to the gaze of
the world and help them achieve statures that otherwise wouldn’t be
theirs. If we have to look for reasons why Tagore’s reputation eclipsed
outside India after a certain period or why Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s poetry
no longer has the same kind of resonance in Afro-Asian countries that
it once enjoyed, we will have to look at these historical conjunctures.
They will also make it possible to understand why Premchand was
translated so enthusiastically in Russian and published in volumes and

8
 I ntroduction

figures much greater than even in Hindi or Urdu, and much before he
was picked up by translators even in Indian languages. Guzel Strelk-
ova’s chapter, ‘Premchand in Russian: translation, reception, adapta-
tion’, makes a comprehensive survey of Premchand’s translation and
reception in Russian and allied languages from as early as the 1920s
up to the contemporary period.
Often, the reception of a foreign text may depend on, besides histor-
ical and literary conjunctures, how it is introduced to the target audi-
ence. The question that often bothers cultural translators is, what is
the most desirable and effective way of introducing a foreign text that
is culturally remote from the receiving culture? The view that a literary
text must stand alone without surrounding/supporting materials to aid
entry into a culture is a self-defeating one. A particular literary text
is de-contextualised from a tradition not known to the target readers
and requires to be re-contextualised, through what Gerard Gennete
calls paratext, to the receiving tradition to appear in its full plenitude
and textuality.
Christina Oesterheld makes a detailed study of Premchand trans-
lations in German and discusses what kind of paratexts the transla-
tors have used to make Premchand accessible to the German readers.
She makes a comparative study of several Premchand titles in Hindi,
English and German that contains several insights. Then she makes
a comparative study of the several versions of ‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’
sourced from Hindi, Urdu and English, before embarking on an over-
view of all German translations of Premchand’s work up to the pre-
sent. Her chapter, ‘Premchand in German language: texts, paratexts
and translations’, provides a fairly comprehensive view of the nature
of Premchand translation and his reception in German. Sonya Gupta’s
chapter, ‘Beyond orientalism: Premchand in Spanish translations’, is
built around a reading of the paratexts supplied by the translators
in two recent anthologies of Premchand translation in Spanish. She
analyses the contemporary situation in Spain and Latin America that
led to the packaging of these anthologies in a certain way and comes
out with the formulation: ‘translation, whatever be the way in which
you look at it, that is, as a product, a social process, or a semiotic or
hermeneutic act, occurs in certain conditions of knowledge produc-
tion in a given culture and any rewriting or representation of a source
culture into a target culture is closely linked to the episteme of a given
time.’ The chapters by Sharad Chandra and Faizullah Khan chronicle
the history of Premchand translation in French.
Two of Premchand’s stories, ‘Sadgati’ and ‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’,
have been mined by Satyajit Ray, the famed film-maker and director,

9
 M. ASADUDDIN

for films. In their chapters, Nishat Haider and Fatima Rizvi have dealt
with different aspects of this inter-semiotic translation, commonly
known as adaptation. In her chapter, ‘In quest of a comparative poet-
ics: a study of Sadgati’, Nishat Haider evaluates the transformation
of the literary work into its celluloid version for Doordarshan, the
Indian government television channel, through the comparative per-
spectives of literary and film criticism. She also deploys some for-
mulations of Dalit aesthetics and contemporary insights in the field
that lend density to her study. Fatima Rizvi, in her chapter, ‘Poli-
tics of language, cultural representation and historicity: “Shatranj ke
Khiladi” in (self-)translation and adaptation’, takes into account the
three literary versions of the story – in Hindi, Urdu and English – in
the context of the complex linguistic history of the subcontinent, and
then combines the film version by Satyajit Ray, to demonstrate how
these four versions of Premchand’s texts are layered by various politi-
cal considerations surrounding language, cultural representation and
historicity, thereby exhibiting subtle differences and/or lending them-
selves to alternate interpretations.
Two thematic chapters by Vasudha Dalmia and Shailendra Singh
represent translation, in a discursive sense. Dalmia’s ‘Kashi as Gan-
dhi’s city: personal and public lives in Premchand’s Karmabhumi’ com-
bines literary analysis with a sociological study of the city of Banaras
to underline how the characters’ lives are enmeshed in the historical
and political circumstances of the time. Dalmia’s favourite method
of studying fictional texts in conjunction with the dominant histori-
cal and ideological forces of the time is in full display in her chapter,
as she has done earlier through the ‘Introductions’ that she has writ-
ten to the English translation of Sevasadan and Godaan. Shailendra
Singh, in his chapter, ‘Demystifying the sanctity of the village council:
“Ghareeb ki Haye” as a counter-narrative to “Panch Parmeshwar” ’,
makes a study of the two short stories to examine how effective and
just the traditional village council was in the resolution of disputes, as
opposed to modern courts. It suggests that the representation of the
village council as an alternative institutional paradigm of justice in the
latter is already demystified by its counterpart in the former so that
both of them act as counter-narratives to each other. That this happens
much before the more definitive and convincing delineation of the vil-
lage council in Godaan also demonstrates how ‘idealistic realism’ was
not merely a desirable aesthetic category for Premchand but also an
inevitable outcome of the conflict that existed between his chronicler’s
aspiration on the one hand and his reformist impulse on the other. The

10
 I ntroduction

chapter also treats the complex issue of caste, in the context of the
current Dalit discourse on Premchand, and examines whether Prem-
chand’s village council was capable or willing to deal with it in any
meaningful way.

Notes
1 Premchand, Chiththi Patri [Letters], Amrit Rai and Madan Gopal (eds),
vol. II, Allahabad: Hans Prakashan, 1962, p. 105.
2 Amrit Rai (ed.) [in Hindi: ‘prastutakarta’, i.e., presenter], Gupt Dhan
[Hidden Treasure]: Premchand, Allahabad: Hans Prakashan, 1962, p. 6.
3 Premchand, Sevasadan, Snehal Shingavi (trans.), Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2005, p. 65.
4 Alok Rai and Mushtaq Ali (eds), Samaksh: Premchand ki Bees Urdu-Hindi
Kahaniyon ka Samantar Paath, Allahabad: Hans Prakashan, 2002, p. ii.
5 The television serial on Nirmala increased the book’s sale by several fold.
The sale of Premchand’s short stories went up when Gulzar had made a
television serial that was shown on Doordarshan, the national channel.
Bhism Sahni’s Tamas, which readers had barely taken note of earlier, reg-
istered unprecedented sales when an eponymous film based on the novel
made by Govind Nihalani was shown on Doordarshan. There are quite a
few other instances, the most notable of which is perhaps Vikas Swarup’s
novel Q & A which readers barely knew about before the film Slumdog
Millionaire was made on it.

Bibliography
Premchand, Chiththi Patri [Letters], Amrit Rai and Madan Gopal (eds),
2 vols, Allahabad: Hans Prakashan, 1962.
Premchand, Sevasadan, Snehal Shingavi (trans.), Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2005.
Rai, Alok and Ali, Mushtaq (eds), Samaksh: Premchand ki Bees Urdu-Hindi
Kahaniyon ka Samantar Paath, Allahabad: Hans Prakashan, 2002.
Rai, Amrit (ed.), [in Hindi: ‘prastutakarta’, i.e., presenter], Gupt Dhan [Hid-
den Treasure]: Premchand, Allahabad: Hans Prakashan, 1962.

11
This page intentionally left blank
 Part I

PREMCHAND
IN TRANSLATIONS
Surveys, histories, receptions
This page intentionally left blank
 1
PREMCHAND IN ENGLISH
One translation, two originals

Harish Trivedi

Premchand in translation
Perhaps the first thing to say about Premchand (1880–1936) in English
translation is that he appears to be not even a shadow of what he is
in the original. This may sound like blasphemy but it is also a truism,
for the same seems to hold true of most writers of the world. It is said,
for example, that Homer sounds like a fairly ordinary poet in most
languages other than Greek and runs in the rest of the world mainly on
reputation. In the University of Delhi where The Odyssey or The Iliad
have been taught in the Penguin prose translations for the last forty
years or so as part of the BA English (Hons.) syllabus, he does not even
come across as a poet, much less as a great poet; students in examina-
tion scripts routinely refer to either epic as ‘this novel’. Given the less
than level playing field of Orientalism, such diminution in translation
works to even greater detriment of Valmiki, Vyas or Kalidasa.
The question here seems to be: what is one translating, and just how
much can one possibly translate? One translates the text and, through
explication and para-textual supplementation, also something of the
context. But can one ever hope to convey in translation the historical
significance that accrues to a text in the original language over dec-
ades, and in some cases, centuries and even millennia, of constantly
evolving reception? Can one begin to translate the canonisation that a
text earns and sustains through the interplay of complex cultural fac-
tors over a long duration? And – in what is probably the biggest issue
in the slippage between an original and its translation – can one ever
begin to hope to translate ‘addressivity’, that is, the relationship of the
author with his primary, implied readership, with which he shares a
cultural universe and a whole host of assumptions about everything in

15
 H arish T rivedi

the world – but all of which must be laboriously spelt out or simply
and silently lost in translation?
Besides these universal factors, Premchand would seem to suffer
under some further handicaps peculiar to himself and his context.
In common regard, he is still the greatest novelist in Hindi as well as
Urdu, but this double distinction is complicated by the fact that he was
also virtually the first novelist in both these languages. Before Prem-
chand, the major novelists in Urdu were Nazir Ahmad, who wrote
didactic tales of moral conduct; Ratan Nath ‘Sarshar’, whose Fasana-
e Azad is a late example of an older kind of comic episodic narra-
tive; and Abdul Halim ‘Sharar’, whose historical Islamicist romances
encompassed the Crusades and the Muslim conquest of Spain, Africa
and India. And in the case of Hindi, there were some broadly didactic
domestic novels such as Devrani-Jethani ki Kahani by Pandit Gauri
Dutt, Bhagyavati by Shraddharam ‘Phillauri’ and Pariksha-Guru by
Lala Srinivas Das or the detective romances of Devkinandan Khatri,
whose Chandrakanta and its sequels in twenty-four volumes were
perhaps the earliest bestsellers among novels in any Indian language.
Premchand distanced himself from this double and doubly obsolete
inheritance and gradually forged his own path to fashion his favoured
mode of adarshonmukh yatharthavad or ideal-oriented realism,
but even this apparently seems passé to at least some of his English-
language readers now.
Premchand began writing over a century ago, but there are not
many contemporaries of his or ours now among the Indian novelists
who have a greater appeal in English – except, of course, that entirely
different breed of Indian-diasporic novelists who write in English in
the first place and address primarily a reader in London or New York.
It is not as if Bankim and Tagore (as a novelist) have made greater
waves abroad, and Sarat, who was once the one truly pan-Indian nov-
elist at home, has hardly proved viable in any foreign language. I once
complimented U. R. Ananthamurthy on his novel Samskara (trans-
lated into English in 1965 by A. K. Ramanujan, then already a member
of the faculty at the University of Chicago) being prescribed in many
courses in American universities, and he smiled and said ‘But they
teach it in the Departments of Anthropology or Religious Studies!’1
As I found subsequently, Ananthamurthy used Premchand in fact to
illustrate the same point in a broader context in an essay titled ‘What
Does Translation Mean in India?’:

I read Saul Bellow as literature, but Premchand is read in the

universities of the United States of America for sociological

16
 P remchand in E nglish

purposes. That is their problem, not ours. But that may well
become our problem too, if we should also globalise and
become prisoners of the homogenised modern world system.2

To step back and take a longer view of the matter, it may appear that
a foreign literature in English translation has made it big in the West
in only three cases perhaps throughout the twentieth century. The first
instance was that of the Russian novel, which induced what was called
a ‘Russian fever’ in England in the 1910s and the 1920s, with even
D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf coming forward to translate some
works – together with a Russian collaborator, of course, who in both
cases happened to be S. S. Koteliansky. The second such major instance
concerned the ‘magic realist’ fiction from South America which burst
upon the scene in the 1970s with Gabriel García Márquez as its flag
bearer, and the third smaller surge was of fiction from the now vanished
Second World, that is, the Communist countries from Central and East
Europe, with Milan Kundera as its iconic figure. What is notable here is
that all these three literary corpuses come from within the wide umbrella
of the West, with its Christian cultural matrix and shared world view.
No non-Western literary culture has ever gained popular acceptance and
circulation in the West through being translated into English: certainly
not Indian and not Chinese or Japanese or Iranian or Egyptian either.
A random Nobel winner such as our own dear old Tagore or more
recently the Turkish Pamuk or a hopeful winner-in-waiting such as the
Japanese Murakami are single swallows; they do not make a summer.
To try another tack, are there any Hindi novelists who have been
translated into English to greater effect than Premchand? Two names
come immediately to mind. S. H. Vatsyayan ‘Agyeya’ himself trans-
lated two of his three novels into English while leaving alone (as
untranslatable?) his greatest novel Shekhar, but even those that he
translated proved to be virtual non-starters in the sense of winning
him a readership in English. Nirmal Verma has done better, as all of
his five novels were promptly picked up, as they came out, by vari-
ous able translators, all of them Indians, to be rendered into English,
and several collections of his short stories too have been translated
into English, including one published abroad and another comprising
stories entirely set abroad; the latter was translated into English in
a deliberately rough and resistant postcolonial translational style by
an American translator of Indian origin, Prasenjit Gupta. At a rough
estimate, over 90 per cent of Nirmal Verma’s fiction is available in
English translation of a fairly high quality, and though he is hardly
better known abroad than Premchand, reprints of translations of his

17
 H arish T rivedi

works have been issued by Penguin India in 2014, indicating that there
is a continuing readership for them at least within India.
This is vital. All the evidence is that nearly all the translations of writ-
ers from the Indian languages into English are produced within India,
rendered by Indian translators into what by definition must be Indian
English, and consumed (that is, bought and read) predominantly by
Indian readers. This is, so to say, the flip side of the vainglorious Indian
claim that English is an Indian language, a claim made regardless of its
local implications by postcolonial diasporic Indian writers beginning
with Salman Rushdie. Well, if English is an Indian language, let just
Indians read it – especially when it comes to translations of writers
from the Indian languages into English. The native readers of Eng-
lish have their own native writers in English to read; why should they
bother with us? Their English to them; our English to us.
Anyhow, in contrast with a few recent writers such as U. R. Anan-
thamurthy or Nirmal Verma, a great proportion of Premchand’s rather
more voluminous fiction still lies untranslated. Of his thirteen novels,
only six – Bazaar-e-Husn/Sevasadan, Ghaban, Rangabhumi, Nirmala,
Karmabhumi and Godaan – appear to have been translated into Eng-
lish, and four of these have been translated more than once in an exam-
ple of wasteful excess, when the second translators in each case could
have been more gainfully employed perhaps in translating some other
novel of Premchand’s not yet available in English. In the case of his
short stories, the situation is perhaps even worse, for the same twenty
or thirty stories (out of about three hundred) have been translated over
and over again by about ten translators of the various selections of his
short stories published in book form over the last half century. In the
conference from which this book arises, an assiduous scholar presented
a paper in which he analysed fourteen different translations of the same
short story, ‘Kafan’ – which is rather like flogging that story to death by
translation. (To make matters worse, this young colleague, Dr Totaram
Gautam, pronounced almost each one of these translations to be more
unsatisfactory than the other.) The in-progress Jamia Millia transla-
tion of all of Premchand’s short stories will at last redress this lopsided
representation by being wholly inclusive, at least so far as Premchand’s
short stories are concerned.3
So, what may be our agenda now for translating Premchand into
English? One basic service future translators can render is not to trans-
late what has already been translated, especially in the case of his nov-
els. Not all of Premchand’s works may be of equal excellence but it is of
imperative importance to make available as large a proportion of Prem-
chand’s work in English as possible, so as to represent his range and

18
 P remchand in E nglish

trajectory of development, before beginning to attempt hopefully better

translations of texts already translated. Let us present in English all the
numerous wheels that Premchand invented, before trying to reinvent
some of them. Further, given the present climate of receptivity, it may
not be such a bad idea to present in English such works by Premchand
as have some palpable connection with issues of current and continu-
ing concern, such as (to cite just three themes) Gandhian nationalism
and (post)colonialism, issues related to women and Dalit issues. It
is a measure of Premchand’s abiding relevance that he has got a fair
amount to say of some value on all these themes which to some readers
may seem to have been invented but yesterday. A further piquancy is
added to Premchand’s works on these themes by the fact that his kind
of nationalism is in bad odour at least among the radically committed
of our leftist theorists and critics. In this view, in fact, nationalism of
any kind, even when it is anti-imperialist and pro-proletariat, is to be
denounced. Premchand is seen as having been a pre-feminist by chro-
nology as well as an anti-feminist by inclination and personal conduct,
and in one strongly held view, he could not possibly have written any-
thing pro-Dalit because of the fundamental (and caste-ist) exclusion
that he was not born a Dalit himself. Trenchant critiques of Premchand
have been published not only by ‘progressive’ critics in Hindi but even
by critics such as Geetanjali Pandey (1989) in English. In recent years,
Dalit activists have gone so far as to publicly burn his works, includ-
ing Godaan, for his allegedly negative representation of Dalits, and to
publish works of criticism on him characterising him as ‘Samant ka
Munshi’, that is, an agent of feudalism, and as a kayasth conditioned
by birth to be anti-Dalit.4 This is, of course, a view to which few readers
of Premchand subscribe but it does indicate that Premchand remains a
writer of urgent relevance to these burning issues, one way or another.

Which Premchand: Urdu or Hindi?

The first thing we require of all our great writers is to be felicitous.
We expect them not only to offer acute observations of individuals and
society, or to enunciate profound truths about the human condition, but
also to formulate these in the aptest of phrasing and formulations, for
that is what makes them artists as distinct from anthropologists, sociol-
ogists, theorists and social reformers and activists. But here, we run into
a peculiar difficulty with Premchand. He wrote felicitously in not one
language but in two, for he moved in mid-career from writing in Urdu
to begin writing in Hindi, a language fairly identical to Urdu in terms of
grammar, syntax and colloquial usage, but widely different in its ‘higher’

19
 H arish T rivedi

literary and intellectual register. In fact, in terms of cultural matrix and

the higher registers of vocabulary, the two languages are so divergent
from each other as to represent a ‘divide’ which seems unbridgeable. We
thus have not one Premchand to translate but two, or more accurately
one of the two, for nearly all of his works are now available in both
Urdu and Hindi, in editions which are far from identical.
This issue has been documented and discussed several times before,
with widely divergent findings, while there are some critics who have
gone into the question only to come quickly running out of it, advising
caution if not retreat from the whole vexed issue. Following the pub-
lication of the authoritative biography of Premchand by his son Amrit
Rai in 1962 and a collection of his father’s letters co-edited by Amrit
Rai together with Madan Gopal in the same year, the first major inves-
tigation of the issue was undertaken by Jafar Raza, who on the basis
of his doctoral work in the Department of Urdu at the University of
Allahabad published a book, Premchand: Kahani ka Rahnuma (Prem-
chand: Pioneer of the Short Story; 1970), in which he characterised
Premchand as being ‘basically and originally an Urdu writer’, whose
status in Hindi was that of writer in translation.5
Subsequently, after a discussion of his work with a professor of Hindi,
Jafar Raza enrolled for another doctoral degree, this time in the Hindi
department of the same university, in which he studied Premchand’s nov-
els as well, and published his substantially different findings in another
book, written in Hindi this time (while incorporating in translation some
chapters from his earlier Urdu book): Premchand: Urdu-Hindi Kathakar
(Premchand: Urdu-Hindi Fiction-Writer; 1983). Raza’s research trajec-
tory thus happens to mimic in broad outline Premchand’s own develop-
ment as a writer, but it is far from a coincidence that, as seen in his case,
the views commonly prevalent among Urdu scholars were proved to be
diametrically opposed to those held by Hindi scholars.
Raza stated in his latter book that Premchand wrote ‘only in Urdu’
in the first phase of his writing career; that he ‘began to write in Hindi
alongside Urdu’ in the second phase, 1916–30, while his work in each
language was ‘being translated into the other’. For the third and last
phase, 1931–36, Raza offered a ‘comparative study of the Hindi-Urdu
collections’ published by Premchand, while omitting to say which lan-
guage Premchand now wrote in mainly or exclusively.6 In his detailed
discussion of Premchand’s last novel, published as Godaan in Hindi
(1936) and posthumously as Gaudaan in Urdu (1939), Raza stated:
‘Gaudaan was the original novel which was translated into Hindi.’7
He is apparently the only critic of any note in either Hindi or Urdu
to make this claim, which he does against the force of much of the

20
 P remchand in E nglish

evidence he himself cites. In the concluding sentence of this chapter,

Raza states: ‘In our opinion, it will be just to consider the Premchand
of this phase as a writer equally of Hindi-Urdu.’8 This pious asser-
tion is far from being the fact, as will be demonstrated below, but it
still represents a great advance for a scholar who after completing his
doctoral dissertation in Urdu believed that Premchand wrote almost
exclusively in that language throughout his life.
Raza’s preliminary and often self-contradictory work was sought to
be supplemented in an article titled ‘The Hindi Premchand: the Urdu
Premchand’, published the year after his second book came out, in
which the author contextualised the broad circumstances as well as the
specific reasons for Premchand openly rejecting and moving away from
Urdu over a transitional period, extending broadly from 1915 to 1925,
to then begin writing predominantly in Hindi in the last decade of his
life nearly all his major novels and numerous short stories. Confirming
and substantially extending a line of interpretation first suggested in
a proleptic formulation by T. Graham Bailey in his History of Urdu
Literature published in 1928, when Premchand was still in mid-career,
this article now concluded: ‘It is in these novels and short stories [writ-
ten in Hindi in the last phase of his career] . . . that Premchand found
the fulfillment of his true sensibility and genius; it is in these works that
the essence as well as the substance of his achievement lies.’9
But the scholar who has over the last four decades produced the
most extensive works of scholarship on various aspects of Premchand
must be Kamal Kishore Goyanka; he has published twenty-six books
on Premchand over this period, including two volumes of Premchand’s
‘aprapya’ or hitherto unavailable and unpublished works and an ency-
clopedic guide to Premchand, a ‘vishvakosh’, again in two volumes.10
Perhaps because he has published only in Hindi but possibly also
because of certain ideological predilections among some commenta-
tors on Premchand especially those writing in English, his monumen-
tal archival work has been largely ignored, and sometimes dismissed
out of hand without apparently having been read.
In the context of Premchand’s bilingualism, the book of the utmost
relevance produced by Goyanka is Premchand ki Hindi-Urdu Kahani-
yan (Premchand’s Hindi-Urdu Short Stories; 1990). In it, he printed
twenty-five short stories of Premchand in a facing-page edition con-
taining both Hindi and Urdu texts (the latter transcribed into the
Devanagari script with gloss liberally provided for unfamiliar Urdu
words). Of these stories, thirteen had been published in Urdu first
and twelve in Hindi. In his introduction, Goyanka began by acknowl-
edging ‘the highly important work’ done by Jafar Raza, and then

21
 H arish T rivedi

proceeded to offer substantial evidence from Premchand’s own letters

and other writings which Raza had ignored, such as a letter written by
Premchand on 4 September 1914 in which he reported having writ-
ten a story in Hindi, or evidence which Goyanka himself had lately
discovered, such as actually tracking down the special Vijayadashami
(Dashahara) issue (October 1914) of the Hindi journal Pratap in
which this story was published under the title ‘Pariksha’.11 He thus
showed to be ‘entirely untrue’ the assertion by Raza that Premchand
wrote entirely in Urdu until 1916 which date, as Goyanka notes, Raza
extends, in a ‘wholly illogical’ assertion, to 1924 at another point in
his book.12 Altogether, Goyanka presents in his introduction ample
evidence to substantiate a thoroughgoing refutation of Raza’s whole
chronology and argument.
Goyanka’s refutation of Raza has not yet met with any refutation in
turn, even though another book curiously similar to his was brought
out twelve years later. It was edited by Alok Rai and Mushtaq Ali
under the cryptic, highly Sanskritic and somewhat confrontational
title Samaksha (literally, Eye-to-Eye; 2002; a connotation reinforced
by putting on the cover somewhat bizarrely an image of a close-up of
Premchand’s eyes). It contained twenty short stories by Premchand in
a facing-page edition, except that the Hindi versions were all placed
on the left-hand page or verso while the Urdu versions were all placed
on the right or recto. This was to prioritise Hindi ab initio and thus
to queer the pitch of comparison, and was in marked contrast to
Goyanka’s edition in which, in an even-handed practice, the original,
first published version of each story was placed on the verso while the
translated, subsequently published version was placed on the recto, in
what may seem to be more helpful and more equitable arrangement.
But what seriously undermined the value of the Rai–Ali edition was
the fact that as many as eleven of the twenty short stories in their
selection had already been printed in Goyanka’s facing-page edition!
This was too substantial an overlap to be thought a coincidence, so the
only possible explanation for it would be that Rai and Ali were either
ignorant of Goyanka’s work or decided for some reason to willfully
ignore it. Premchand published a total of 301 short stories, of which
a great proportion had been published in both Urdu and Hindi in
his own lifetime and were thus available for selection to Rai and Ali.
Nor did Rai and Ali engage at all with the evidence and arguments
advanced by Goyanka in his edition. Alok Rai’s perfunctory intro-
duction, running to just over three pages, had six endnotes, of which
three referred to Premchand’s letters, already milked dry by both Raza
and Goyanka, and two to Raza’s book, indicating agreement with and

22
 P remchand in E nglish

endorsement of Raza. It was as if Goyanka and his pioneering book,

with a more substantial and cogent introduction, simply did not exist.
(Incidentally, Alok Rai’s translation of Premchand’s novel Nirmala,
published by the Oxford University Press, New Delhi, in 1998, did
not carry any acknowledgement that the novel had previously been
translated into English by David Rubin and published by Vision Book,
New Delhi, in 1988.)
Anyhow, what Rai here said was that Premchand was a common
progenitor not of a shared literary inheritance in Urdu and Hindi but
of a divided one, and that ‘the communalisation of both the language
forms is obvious to see’.13 He pointed out that the Hindi versions of
some of the short stories had Hindu names while in the Urdu ver-
sion the corresponding characters were given Muslim names – but
refrained from adding that that was the exception confined to just a
couple of stories, while the vast majority of the short stories retained
the same names in both Hindi and Urdu versions as did all the novels.
Rai went on to say that in the case of stories such as ‘Poos ki Raat’ and
‘Sadgati’, it did not matter which language the story was first written
in, for their ‘very subject matter’ made the Hindi version out to be
‘relatively original’ while the Urdu texts of these stories, with their
punctilious adherence to nuqta or exact Perso-Arabic forms of words,
made them appear ‘artificial and as if translated’.14
Rai did not explain why, by this criterion, the short story ‘Kafan’
too should not be treated as having been written originally in Hindi.
For it too has a similar ‘subject matter’, and depicts a rural-Hindu cul-
tural universe as do the two stories he names; all its three main charac-
ters are Hindu (Ghisu, Madhav and Budhiya) while the climactic song
from Kabir clearly refers to Hindu beliefs, such as Maya (the world as
illusion, here personified) being a beguiling deceiver. However, ‘Kafan’
was indisputably written and published in Urdu first, in the journal
Jamia in December 1935. Summing up his understanding of the mat-
ter, Rai said: ‘It is a delicate matter to state and grasp, but looking at
stories such as these [‘Poos ki Raat’, and ‘Sadgati’] it would appear
that there is an organic relationship between a particular subject mat-
ter and a language-form. It would appear that some things can be said
in a more “natural” way in Hindi and some others in Urdu.’15
Considering that probably over 80 per cent of Premchand’s subject
matter was Hindu right from the start of his career when he wrote only
in Urdu, this would be to give scandalously short shrift to Urdu, in
defiance of all the available facts. See, for example, a passage in praise
of the Hindu divine trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Mahesh, which
runs to nine pages in highly Persianised Urdu in Premchand’s very first

23
 H arish T rivedi

novel, Asrar-e Ma’bid (The Secrets of the Sanctum Sanctorum); since

the novel is in Urdu to begin with, the elevated Persianised diction of
this passage may be in thought to be aptly in conformity with its sub-
lime subject matter.16 Indeed, if one were to agree with Rai’s formula-
tion, one would have to conclude, quite improbably, that, from 1903
to 1914, Premchand was saying in an unnatural manner in Urdu what
it would have been ‘natural’ for him to say in Hindi.
In any case, what both the facing-page volumes have in common is
that they demonstrate clearly that there is a wide divergence between
the Urdu and the Hindi texts, and that it will be a very rare reader
indeed to whom both the versions would be fully comprehensible. It
is true that the syntactical structure and the common words which
serve as the small change of daily conversation are much the same
in both the versions, especially in the dialogue among subaltern illit-
erate characters whom Premchand represented with extraordinary
‘authenticity’ – despite the fact that unlike some regional novelists,
he made them speak not in the local dialect but in standard khari
boli Hindi. But in the narrative part as well as in conversation among
educated characters, most of what may be called the key words are so
different in each version as to be unintelligible to the average, reason-
ably competent reader of the other language.
Of course, perception of difficulty across languages is necessarily
subjective and will depend on which language a particular person
comes from and is therefore relatively more conversant with. To take
just one small example from one of the best-known stories of Prem-
chand, ‘Bade Ghar ki Beti’ (A Well-Bred Lady; first published in Urdu
in Zamana, December 1910, and subsequently in Hindi in the collec-
tion Sapt Saroj, 1917), the first paragraph comprising 234 words has
just 4 words glossed by Rai and Ali (sarvat, ne’amul-badal, mutzad and
mutallah, of which the last is explained as tavajjoh, which itself is not
very common in Hindi), while Goyanka provides Hindi translations
of 17 more words besides, which are: mauza, nisf, zayad, muddat-e-
daraz, jankahi, zahiri, haroof, kushadagi, hazrat, vaqt-e-fursat, tibb
(misprinted in Rai and Ali as talab), sarf, aitqad, khushgavar, paiham,
sadayen and khat-o-kitabat. (Hindi-speaking readers of this chapter
may wish to check their bilingual word power against this list.)
The differences between Urdu and Hindi texts are thus writ large
on every page of both these facing-page editions, and indeed over the
whole of Premchand’s split-language double oeuvre. As Premchand’s
career progressed beyond the early Urdu-only phase, it became clear
that almost each short story or novel that he created would assume
sooner or later an afterlife in the other of his two languages, or, to

24
 P remchand in E nglish

change metaphors, it was born destined to share the universe with a

doppelganger. This may seem to Premchand’s English translators to be
an unnecessary complication and a double burden, if they feel obliged
(as most translators so far have not) to take both the versions into
account before producing their third version. But as responsible medi-
ators of Premchand’s texts, translators must learn to see this bilingual
situation not only as a burden but also as a challenge and indeed an
opportunity.

A special/strange text to translate

To offer personal testimony, I translated from Hindi into English some
years ago a relatively little known story of Premchand, ‘Vichitra Holi’
(A Special/Strange Holi; 1921; translated 2000), choosing it for the
reason that it stages a little rebellion against an English sahib by his
drunken servants on the carnivalesque day of Holi. As it proceeds,
it also involves a wealthy Indian gentleman, a loyalist of the Raj
and a friend of the sahib, who happens to drop in just then and gets
embroiled in the proceedings. Premchand wrote this story, published
in March 1921, at the height of the Gandhian non-cooperation move-
ment, just days after he himself had resigned from government service
upon hearing Gandhi speak at a public meeting in Gorakhpur where
he then lived. This was thus an apt text, I thought, for inclusion in
a postcolonial anthology of both British and Indian literatures to be
published from London.17
I had translated the story from the Hindi version, but with a view
to revising it for re-publication in another volume now after a gap
of fourteen years. I recently consulted the Urdu text as well and was
immediately rewarded with numerous challenging discoveries. I had
translated the title ‘Vichitra Holi’ as ‘A Special Holi’, rejecting the
more obvious alternative ‘A Strange Holi’, for the reason that the dif-
ferent kind of Holi described by Premchand here evoked appreciative
wonder rather than bafflement, and the word ‘vichitra’ in Hindi car-
ries a positive connotation on the whole. I now found that the Urdu
title was ‘Ajeeb Holi’, so that had I translated from Urdu, I would
perhaps have had to stick to ‘strange’. Curiously, the Urdu version of
this story did not appear in any journal a few weeks or months after its
Hindi publication, as was the case with many others of Premchand’s
Hindi stories from this period, but was first published only in 1928 in
the collection Khak-e-Parvana.
The Hindi text of this story, like many other texts of Premchand
from the transitional decade, is far from being wholly felicitous. It

25
 H arish T rivedi

is, in fact, distinctly uneven, unsettled and awkward in style, and at

places inept or even incorrect in terms of idiom and usage. Indeed, this
is just one of the numerous Hindi/Urdu texts of Premchand from this
middle period that we have all read for about a century without notic-
ing that there was anything the matter with them, but then translators
are obliged to read a text as if interrogating it at every turn to make it
yield its full and true intent. Anyhow, the defects of the Hindi text are
magnified as soon as we place it beside the Urdu text, just as the Urdu
text in turn begins to disclose its own faults and fissures when read
against the Hindi one. Premchand’s Hindi at this stage seems to have
been far from perfect and is apparently marked by instances of what
in language-learning studies is called ‘first-language interference’, the
first language in this case having been Urdu, while the Urdu version,
apparently composed after the Hindi in this case, has its own fair share
of problems of a different kind. In a broad generalisation, it could be
suggested that, while the Hindi text suffers from idiomatic lapses, the
Urdu text is marked by cultural dissonances.
To give some select examples (which in this discussion in English
may necessarily lose some of the force they would have in a discussion
in either Hindi or Urdu), ‘hangama macha hua tha’ in Hindi sounds
idiomatically better in Urdu where it is ‘hangama barpa tha’. ‘Nau-
kar’ in Hindi, which is a Persian word anyhow, is gratuitously turned
into the heavier ‘mulazim’ in Urdu, while ‘kautuk’ in Hindi is rarer in
register and also more playful than the common ‘tamasha’ which it
becomes in Urdu. Oddly, ‘ekmatra kartta’ in Hindi becomes more San-
skritically idiomatic in Urdu as ‘kartta-dhartta’, as if the writer is glad
to seize the opportunity to correct an earlier lapse irrespective of the
language, and ‘param mitra’ in Hindi in the context is more apt in its
proleptic irony than the rather flat ‘gahre dost’ in Urdu.18 There may
seem to be no clear pattern in these changes, except a general tendency
to mark off the turf of each language by making changes even when
they may not be necessary.
Much of common everyday Hindi or Urdu does not need translation
into the other language, but when translation is necessary as in a for-
mal or literary context, there is a tendency, here and elsewhere in Prem-
chand, to fall into the groove of changing for the sake of changing and
thus perhaps unwittingly to polarise the two languages. This tendency
seems to be aggravated in this middle period of Premchand’s career by
the fact that he seems to want to produce a Hindi that would without
any doubt look and sound like Hindi. It must be added that this was
not a stated policy of Premchand’s and is no more than an inference
of mine. He was a recent migrant to Hindi, a star convert warmly

26
 P remchand in E nglish

welcomed and much feted, and possibly felt some of the anxieties
attendant upon that role. There is a proverb in Hindi (or is it Urdu?)
that a newly converted Mussulman goes heavy on eating onions (tra-
ditionally prohibited for Hindus); Premchand similarly seems to have
feasted on high Hindi somewhat indiscriminately for some years after
he began writing in the language. With his new enthusiasm and com-
mitment, the last thing he may have wanted to do was to use some kind
of a hybrid form of Urdu and Hindi – which a little later began to be
championed under the name of Hindustani, especially after the estab-
lishment of the Hindustani Academy in Allahabad in 1927. Though
Premchand as a valued member of the academy then began publicly to
propagate the purportedly secular cause of Hindustani, he did not at
all refrain from using either Sanskritic Hindi or Persianised Urdu in his
subsequent literary works, even admitting on one occasion that there
did not exist a single book which could be said to have been written in
Hindustani, for perhaps a language such as Hindustani itself did not
yet exist.19
But there is another kind of difference between the two languages
where change is necessary because the two languages are polarised
enough already. This concerns mainly the cultural differences men-
tioned above and sometimes a few political differences as well. In the
concluding part of the story ‘Vichitra/Ajeeb Holi’ (which is less than
2,500 words in length anyhow), such differences come up prominently
to be negotiated in translation. The words ‘sahyog’ and ‘asahyog’
occur repeatedly in the Hindi text in reference to the contemporary
Gandhian movement, and the Urdu version must decide whether to
retain these words, which seemed to have become rather like proper
nouns, or to translate them. It vacillates and does both, so that we
get much of the time ‘tark-e-mavalat’ but also at places ‘asahyog’.
The loyalist friend of the British sahib named Ujagar Mal, after he
has been whipped and chased off by the sahib, has a change of heart,
turns from sahyog to asahyog, and goes to a public meeting organised
by Congress to announce publicly his new resolve. He says in Hindi:
‘Aaj is pavitra premamayi Holi ke din main aapse premalingan karne
aaya hoon’, which in Urdu becomes, perhaps a little incongruously,
‘Aaj is paak aur mohabbat-angez Holi ke din main aapse milap karne
aya hoon’. Again, the nine/ten simple words are common to the two
sentences, but the three key words (as they may be called) are widely
different in etymology and connotation. A similar effect is visible in
the last sentence of the story in which Ujagar Mal says in Hindi: ‘Main
aaj se apna tan, man, dhan sab aap par arpan karta hoon’, which in
Urdu remains the same except for ‘qurban karta hoon’. ‘Tan, man,

27
 H arish T rivedi

dhan’ is an internally rhyming collocation in which the three seem-

ingly simple Hindi words all come straight from Sanskrit, and these
have somewhat implausibly been retained in Urdu, but ‘arpan’, with
its strong bhakti connotations, has been replaced with ‘qurban’, which
is loaded equally heavily with a Muslim religious practice (and in any
case denotes ‘sacrifice’ rather than the quite different ‘dedication’ or
‘offering’ denoted by ‘arpan’). As a result, both the versions of the
sentence are rendered less than apt and unworthy of a great writer.
In Urdu, ‘qurban’ sits ill culturally speaking with ‘tan, man, dhan’,
while the Hindi is idiomatically defective; the correct usage is not ‘aap
par arpan’ (on the pattern of ‘aap par qurban) but ‘aap ko arpan’.
Premchand seems to fall between the two stools of Hindi and Urdu,
here and elsewhere betraying himself as thinking in one language but
writing in the other.

The three phases and two texts

The stability and even the integrity of some of Premchand’s literary
texts are thus seen to be suspect and open to interrogation. For exam-
ple, are both versions of this short story to be treated as original, or
must one have been necessarily composed later and if only for that
chronological belatedness be treated as a translation? If this question
has not been raised as a major issue so far, it may be partly because
Premchand seems to most of his readers in both the languages to be
so iconic and sacrosanct as not to abide mere textual questions. This
impression is reinforced by the fact that nearly all his extant works
were published in his own lifetime in both Urdu and Hindi under his
own name, with never a mention of any translator. Furthermore, he
set up in 1923 a printing press and publishing house of his own, Sar-
aswati Press, which thenceforth published most of his works under
that authoritative imprint. After his death in 1936, Saraswati Press
was inherited by his elder son Sripat Rai while his younger son Amrit
Rai set up a publishing house of his own, Hans Prakashan, and all
of Premchand’s works continued to be published exclusively by these
two presses, carrying the same textual authority, until the Premchand
copyright expired in 1996. To question the state of Premchand’s texts
is thus tantamount to questioning Premchand himself and his rightful
inheritors. Yet, many of the texts are manifestly unsatisfactory and
defective, as shown in the examples above, and have continued to be
so ever since their first publication. In the 1990s, Amrit Rai did begin
to make some effort to have the Urdu and Hindi versions of some of
the texts collated by a team of bilingual experts, and even requested

28
 P remchand in E nglish

the government to extend the copyright until such collation could be

completed, but this request was not granted.20
There can be no doubt that even though the texts themselves do
not acknowledge this, many of Premchand’s works in either language
were in fact translations. Only the myth of Septuagint, which holds
that seventy different translators of the Bible independently produced
exactly the same version, or the official fiction that both the Hindi and
the English versions of the Constitution of India are equally authentic
and neither has precedence over the other can invoke polygenesis as
an explanation, but not Premchand. Some of these translations were
clearly done by Premchand himself, for he says so in his letters, and
while it may no longer be possible to identify all the spectral figures
who translated Premchand’s other texts, usually under his authorisa-
tion or even with his collaboration, we do know a fair bit about some
of the translators/editors, such as Shiv Pujan Sahay and Iqbal Verma
‘Sehar’, both of whom are minor literary figures but not quite obscure,
and have in fact a standing and reputation of their own based on their
published works. There is significant evidence available of mediation
in Premchand’s texts by both these persons, but this is a subject that
needs fuller treatment elsewhere.
Meanwhile, so far as the language of original literary creation by
Premchand is concerned, the facts of the case as established by cumu-
lative research so far may be summed up as follows, for each of the
three major phases of Premchand’s literary career.

The first phase

From the beginning of his career as a writer of fiction in 1903 up to
some time in 1914, Premchand wrote exclusively in Urdu. All works
from this period which appeared subsequently in Hindi were transla-
tions, some done by Premchand but more by other hands. The most
notable of these early Urdu works are four novellas, later collected,
edited and rendered into Hindi by Amrit Rai as Mangalaacharan and
subsequently reprinted as Char Laghu Upanyas; and forty-six short
stories from this period,21 many collected by Amrit Rai and some sub-
sequently by Kamal Kishore Goyanka, and published by Rai in Hindi
adaptation and by Goyanka as in the original with Hindi annotation.

The second phase

Between the years 1914 and 1924, while continuing to write mainly in
Urdu, Premchand began to write more and more in Hindi while also

29
 H arish T rivedi

translating many of his works from Urdu into Hindi. At the beginning
of this period, Premchand wrote his first short story in Hindi, as he
instantly informed his friend Daya Narain Nigam in a letter written on
4 September 1914,22 and towards the end of it, he produced in 1924
a two-volume manuscript of his major novel Rangabhumi in Hindi in
the Devanagari script in his own hand, which a colleague Shiv Pujan
Sahay then proceeded to copy-edit for publication in January 1925.
Premchand published during this period (1914–24) a total of fifty-two
short stories, of which forty-seven were first published in Hindi and
five in Urdu.23

The third phase

From the year 1925 until his death in October 1936, Premchand wrote
as a rule in Hindi. He now composed all his novels in Hindi as well as
most of his short stories, but also produced some short stories and at
least one lecture in Urdu. Between 1925 and 1936, he published 127
short stories in Hindi and 24 short stories in Urdu in various journals
while 7 more of his Urdu short stories from an earlier period (first
publication unknown) were now included in two Urdu collections.
Posthumously, in the year 1937, two of his Hindi short stories (first
publication unknown) were included in the collection titled Kafan,
while one Urdu short story was published in the journal Zamana in
July 1937. Altogether, thus, 129 short stories by Premchand were pub-
lished in Hindi during this last phase and 32 in Urdu.24
The facts and figures cited above are derived mainly from the sus-
tained and substantial archival work done initially by Amrit Rai in the
1960s, and latterly by Kamal Kishore Goyanka. In 2010, Goyanka
edited an authoritative six-volume edition of all of Premchand’s short
stories arranged in chronological order, with each volume containing
a long introduction and an appendix laying out the details of publica-
tion of each story in a table under the following six heads: Hindi title,
Urdu title, language of first publication, the journal or collection in
which first published, the Premchand volume in Hindi in which first
collected and the Premchand volume in Urdu in which first collected.
For example, to take the first two stories in volume 3 of Goyanka’s
edition, the story titled ‘Mooth’ in Hindi had the same title ‘Mooth’
in Urdu, was first published in Hindi, in the journal Maryada in Janu-
ary 1922, was first collected in Hindi in Prem-Pachisi in 1923, was
first published in Urdu in the journal Zamana in December 1923 and
was first collected in Urdu in the volume Khwab-o Khayal in 1928.
The second story here, titled ‘Suhag ki Sari’ in Hindi, has no Urdu title

30
 P remchand in E nglish

as it was not published in Urdu, was first published in the Hindi jour-
nal Prabha in January 1922, was collected in Hindi in Prem Pachisi
in 1923 and remains uncollected in Urdu. Goyanka thus provides a
bibliographic database which is far more comprehensive than any that
was available earlier, and it stands as a great resource for all scholars
of Premchand to use, and where possible to supplement, rectify and
build on. It would be a small advance, for example, if a researcher
were to turn up an Urdu journal in which ‘Suhag ki Sari’ was in fact
published under that or some other title, and it would be a bigger
advance if some researcher were to find one or two other stories pub-
lished by Premchand in any year which Goyanka fails to list. After
all, Goyanka himself found more than a handful of short stories by
Premchand after Amrit Rai had concluded his search. For the moment,
Goyanka’s latest volume (2012) offers the fullest available documen-
tation of the publishing history of Premchand’s short stories in both
Hindi and Urdu, and we now know with fair certainty just how many
short stories Premchand wrote in Hindi and Urdu (301, of which 298
are available and 3 others are known to exist but not traceable), which
version was published first and where, and in which subsequent collec-
tions each version was reprinted.
An issue that is sometimes raised in this regard by some schol-
ars, including Christine Everarert and Frances Pritchett, is: was the
version that was first published by Premchand always the one first
written?25 As only a very few manuscripts of Premchand have sur-
vived, this question perhaps cannot be settled with the same abso-
lute factual certainty as for example the dates of first publication. In
fact, there are at least two major cases, both from the second phase
(which remains, of course, a grey area in this regard), which clearly
show that a work that Premchand wrote first in one language, Urdu,
was first published in the other, Hindi – which was indeed sympto-
matic of the larger situation that had motivated Premchand to move
from Urdu to Hindi. The novel Bazaar-e-Husn was written in Urdu
but due to lack of a publisher, Premchand himself translated it into
Hindi as Sevasadan, which was promptly published in 1919 while
the Urdu version lay unpublished until 1923. Even more remarkable
was the case of the novel initially written by Premchand in Urdu as
Chaugan-e-Hasti, then rewritten in Hindi by Premchand with sub-
stantial changes as Rangabhumi and so published (1925), but then
translated into Urdu from this revised and improved Hindi version
by Iqbal Verma ‘Sehar’ for a hefty fee after a hard negotiation and
finally published in Urdu under the old title but with new Hindi wine
in that old Urdu bottle.26

31
 H arish T rivedi

But these are both exceptions from Premchand’s transitional period.

On the whole, it seems reasonable and commonsensical to believe that
in the case of a great majority of the texts, the version that was written
first was what got published first. This was obviously and undeniably
so throughout the first phase in which Premchand apparently had the
literary competence and inclination to write only in Urdu. It was not
as if he did not know Hindi at all during these years, for as a require-
ment of his teacher’s training diploma, he had in 1904 ‘passed the
special vernacular examination in Hindi and Urdu’.27 This was also
true of the third phase by and large, in which Premchand wrote most
of his works in Hindi which were published first in Hindi, as he was
now famous, did not lack for publishers and often needed the money
urgently to keep his press going. In any case, the details of his writ-
ings and publications for this period are documented extensively in his
own letters as well as in letters that others, including the editors of the
various journals in which he published, wrote to him. On the whole,
one could say with confidence that, but for the two major exceptions
noted above, the great majority of Premchand’s texts throughout his
career were first published in the language they were first written in,
as indeed one would normally expect, and the version published later
can be taken to be a translation.
As noted above, the area that remains seriously hazy is how many
of these translations were done by Premchand and how many by
other known or unknown translators. Obviously, translations done by
Premchand himself will have an authority broadly comparable to that
of the original, while translations done by others whether authorised
(and paid for) by Premchand or not should be accorded a secondary
status. This will include most notably the adaptation into Hindi of
as many as fifty-six early stories of Premchand accessed (or ‘discov-
ered’) during his research for the biography by Amrit Rai and collected
by him in two volumes under the title Gupt Dhan (Hidden Treasure;
1962). In his introduction, Amrit Rai explained: ‘In the belief that to
publish the stories found in Urdu just as they were would have been
an injustice to the Hindi reader, I have clad them in the garb [cloak?;
in Hindi/Urdu, “jama”] of Hindi – in Munshiji’s [Premchand’s] own
Hindi, to the extent I was able to.’28
Amrit Rai not only was Premchand’s son and inheritor but had also
through his labours earned the right to be acclaimed as the greatest
Premchand scholar of his generation, with Madan Gopal preceding
him substantially in his endeavours but not eventually in authority
or output. He was quite as conversant with both Urdu and Hindi as
Premchand might have been (and had high competence in Bangla and

32
 P remchand in E nglish

Sanskrit besides,29 as Premchand did not), but what he produced must

still be treated as a translation and nothing like the original by Prem-
chand. Amrit Rai has in these Hindi versions of his usages such as
‘svargiya Akhtar’, obviously rendered as such from Premchand’s Urdu
original ‘marhoom Akhtar’ – but for the clear cultural contradiction
that Akhtar, a Muslim, cannot go to the Hindu svarga (heaven). Even
more of an awkward text in this regard is the short story titled ‘Triya
Charitra’ in Goyanka’s editorial rendering, which was spelt in Urdu
(in its first publication in Zamana, January 1913) so as to be read
‘Tiriya Charittar’. To raise the stakes, the Hindi phrase ‘triya chari-
tra’ is derived directly from a line in a Sanskrit shloka/verse (whether
known directly to Premchand or not) which says: ‘Striyashcharitram
purushasya bhagyam daivo na janati kuto manushyah’ (The character
of women, and the fortunes of men, are inscrutable even to the gods, to
say nothing of human beings). This whole story is full of cultural con-
notations which sit athwart the Hindu–Muslim/Hindi–Urdu divide.
The final issue to consider and try and settle at the end of this discus-
sion of Premchand’s bilingual corpus is: if nearly all of Premchand’s
texts exist in two versions, the Hindi (as now collected in the Racha-
navali) and the Urdu (as now collected in the Kulliyat), which one
should a translator take up to render into English? The answer so far
has understandably been: whichever version the translator happens
to have (more comfortable) access to, in terms of her own linguis-
tic competence. Among the older translators of Premchand, who did
their work half a century ago in the 1950s and the 1960s, this could
have been Urdu just as well as Hindi. But now, with serious decline in
North Indian Hindi/Urdu bilingualism, our younger Indian translators
are far more likely to know only Hindi. As for their/our competence in
English, the golden rule of translation, that one should translate from
a foreign language into one’s own language, seems to have been stood
on its head in India.
Anyhow, it is not a real choice any more in India whether one should
translate Premchand into English from Urdu or from Hindi. Increas-
ingly, translators are likely to go to the Hindi version most of the time,
as they have in the past as well. One must acknowledge the lamentable
but irreversible fact that Urdu is not what it used to be in its heyday,
which one may in hindsight demarcate as the two-thirds of a century
extending from 1837 to 1900. In 1837, Urdu in the Perso-Arabic script
was invidiously adopted by the British as the language of administra-
tion in the predominantly Hindi-speaking states of (what now broadly
correspond to) Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh. By 1900,
the same British government, made to realise its error, had in all these

33
 H arish T rivedi

three states allowed Hindi in the Devanagari script to be used as an

alternative medium of petition and administration.
Premchand began writing shortly after the then lieutenant-governor
of the United Provinces Anthony MacDonnell had in 1900 conceded a
popular demand for the official use of Hindi as an alternative to Urdu.
Within a matter of fourteen years, he could see which way the tide was
turning, and turned his back on Urdu to adapt himself to the new situ-
ation and began writing in Hindi. By the time his writing career ended,
Urdu was hardly to be mentioned in the same breath as Hindi though
it still continued to be taught as the compulsory doyam zuban (second
language) to all non-Urdu-speaking schoolchildren. Under official Brit-
ish diktat, Urdu had dominated and even oppressed Hindi for the bet-
ter part of the nineteenth century; as the twentieth century unfolded,
its partisans came to feel increasingly that it was in turn dominated and
oppressed by Hindi, especially after Partition and independence.
It is therefore a highly significant fact from the historical point of
view that Premchand wrote in both the languages for much of his liter-
ary career, beginning in one and choosing to move by and large to the
other, and is still acclaimed as the greatest fiction-writer in both the
languages. He is in fact one of the very few writers of significance ever
to have written in both Urdu and Hindi.30 We may not now be able to
read him equally in both the languages but when translating him into
English, we may perhaps attempt, with a little bit of help, to take both
Urdu and Hindi texts into account, even if most of us (like me) do not
have access to the Urdu script. If a Premchand text exists in both Urdu
and Hindi, it means that the text has another dimension, another layer
of nuance and connotation, and it will be a pity to lose if we translate
the text from just one of the two versions. As the account above of my
experience of translating ‘Vichitra/Ajeeb Holi’ seeks to demonstrate,
the text opened out to me in suggestive and enriching ways only after
I obtained access to the Urdu version (through an intermediary who
does not wish to be named; I may confess that I myself have learnt to
read Urdu and then promptly forgotten it three times in my life).

The way forward: two originals?

In the end, I have, therefore, a humble suggestion to offer. Given the
ground reality, let us take it for granted that most translators of Prem-
chand in India in the twenty-first century will pick up the Hindi ver-
sion to translate. It will be a pity if they go by that alone, and a way
must be found to make the Urdu variant available to them so as to
make their endeavour and experience as rich, complete and fruitful

34
 P remchand in E nglish

as possible. The simplest and the most accessible way, however, may
not be the obvious option of putting the Urdu Kulliyat digitally on
open-access Internet, because those who cannot read the script in hard
copy will not be able to read it in soft copy either. The best course may
be to put the complete works of Premchand in Hindi on the Internet,
with the Urdu variants of the often unfamiliar ‘key words’ given in the
footnotes with a Hindi gloss. We do not necessarily need two complete
separate texts, though that of course would be ideal; we can pretty
much make do with the significant variations.
With our electronic resources, this may not be a particularly ardu-
ous task to accomplish for a small team of bilingual scholars. Not only
will it preserve and put to translational use a Premchand text which
will have the aesthetic effect of taffeta, a fabric which looks to be of
two different shades of colour, depending on the angle and the light
in which one views it; but it should also give us a richer and more
lustrous Premchand in both the Devanagari text and in subsequent
English translation. It will be an extension of a practice already com-
mon in the case of Urdu poetry, which has for some decades now been
printed in Devanagari with footnotes provided for the ‘difficult’ Urdu
words; such editions have apparently had an even greater circulation
than the editions of many of these poets issued in the Urdu script.
But a vital difference would be that the Urdu variant provided in the
footnotes for some Hindi words will not be a secondary gloss provided
by some subsequent editor; it will have the greater authority (in a sub-
stantial number of the cases) of having been published as an alterna-
tive ‘original’ under Premchand’s own name and thus as an equally
primary text – if such a description is not a contradiction in terms.
This will be a bilingual variorum edition unlike any other published
so far for any other author in the world. In the otherwise comparable
cases of Western bilingual writers such as Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel
Beckett and Milan Kundera, there is no confusion regarding which the
primary version of a work is and which the (self-)translation; another
vital difference is that unlike each of these writers whose move from
one language to another was necessitated or at least facilitated by exile,
Premchand inhabited throughout his life the same bilingual terrain. In
fact, such an interwoven bilingual edition of Premchand may have the
added incidental advantage of reviving, at least in terms of a histori-
cal textual reconstruction, a bygone age of our cultural history when
Urdu and Hindi were more or less equally powerful contestants for
hegemonic currency and literary use, as they clearly are not now; it will
serve to remind us of what may be called the age of Urdu in what are
and have always been predominantly Hindi-speaking states in terms

35
 H arish T rivedi

of an overwhelming demographic majority. Through constituting a

bilingual text for Premchand in this manner, we would be memorialis-
ing a period of our linguistic and literary history which held sway for
the best part of the nineteenth century and which therefore represents
a vital phase of our shared archive. In histories of Hindi literature, the
terminal stage of the Urdu epoch and the beginning and consolidation
of the Hindi epoch, from broadly 1915/1919 to 1936, is often called
the ‘Premchand Yug’ or the era of Premchand.31 That this, or even
the preceding period of 1903–19, is not called any such thing in the
history of Urdu literature is perfectly understandable, for Premchand
has on the whole been regarded as a less significant figure in Urdu
than in Hindi. In the last decade of his life, from the founding of the
Hindustani Academy in 1927 to his passing away in 1936, Premchand
was, as noted above, a vigourous champion of Hindustani, at least in
his public pronouncements if not quite in his literary practice, and by
constructing a bilingual text for him as here proposed, we would be
creating a monument to his (serial) bilingualism as a lived fact as well
as an idealistic projection.
As for translation – to return to where we began – such a text will
be one and still two-in-one, both composite and yet clearly showing
the two parts of which it is composed. The Urdu–Hindi (and indeed
the Muslim–Hindu) cultural commingling has often been described as
ganga-jamuni but not many may know that at the precise point where
the two mighty rivers meet in Allahabad at the sangam, it is easily
possible (except during the turbulent monsoon months) to distinguish
the two rivers one from the other by the different colours of their
waters as they merge in midstream. Such an amalgamated but clearly
two-toned text of Premchand will produce quite unique effects when
translated into English. In fact, English is a language so utterly alien
to both Hindi and Urdu that, by contrast, it makes both of them look
like Tweedledum and Tweedledee. As I have found in my very limited
practice of translating Premchand from both Hindi and Urdu, many
of the differences between the Hindi and the Urdu texts of Premchand
are so insubstantial and often artificially created that they can easily
dissolve into one and the same version in English. For example, in the
instance from ‘Vichitra Holi’ cited above, the English ‘servant’ will do
nicely for both the Hindi ‘naukar’ and the Urdu ‘mulazim’, at least in
this particular context. On the other hand, some variations between
the Hindi and the Urdu texts seem so wide apart in their connotations
as to be hardly reconcilable in the same word in English; for exam-
ple, ‘nirankushata’ is clearly not ‘khudmukhtari’ and ‘garva’ is not
‘ghuroor’ despite sounding vaguely similar. If Premchand is henceforth

36
 P remchand in E nglish

translated into English from a composite Hindi–Urdu text as proposed

above, it will constitute a new practice for literary translation alto-
gether, probably anywhere in the world. It will be, uniquely, one trans-
lation out of two originals.

Notes
1 Personal information.
2 U. R. Ananthamurthy, ‘What Does Translation Mean in India?’, in
N. Manu Chakravarthy (ed.), U. R. Ananthamurthy Omnibus, New Delhi:
Arvind Kumar, 2007, p. 398.
3 The department of English at Jamia Millia Islamia is engaged in translat-
ing the entire corpus of Premchand’s short fiction, signalling the difference
between the Urdu and the Hindi versions.
4 Dharmavir, Premchand: Samant ka Munshi [in Hindi: Premchand: Agent
of Feudalism], New Delhi: Vani Prakashan, 2005, p. 15.
5 Jafar Raza, Premchand: Urdu-Hindi Kathakar [in Hindi: Premchand:
Urdu-Hindi Fiction-Writer], Allahabad: Lokbharati Prakshan, 1983, p. 9.
6 Ibid., pp. 13–14.
7 Ibid., p. 275.
8 Ibid., p. 285.
9 Harish Trivedi, ‘The Urdu Premchand: the Hindi Premchand’, The
Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, 1984, 22: 115.
10 For bibliographical details of all his works, see Kamal Kishore Goyanka,
Premchand ki Kahaniyon ka Kalakramanusar Adhyayan [in Hindi: Prem-
chand’s Short Stories: A Chronological Study], Delhi: Nataraj Prakashan,
2012, pp. 757–8.
11 Kamal Kishore Goyanka (ed.), Premchand ki Hindi-Urdu Kahaniyan [The
Hindi-Urdu Stories of Premchand], New Delhi: Bharatiya Jnanpith Prak-
sahan, 1990, p. xii.
12 Ibid., p. xiii.
13 Alok Rai and Mushtaq Ali (eds), Samaksha: Munshi Premchand ki Bees
Hindi-Urdu Kahaniyon ka Samantar Path [in Hindi: Eye-to-Eye: Parallel
Texts of Twenty Short Stories by Munshi Premchand], Allahabad: Hans
Prakashan, for the Mahatma Gandhi Antarrashtriya Hindi Vishvavidyala
[the Mahatma Gandhi International Hindi University], 2002, pp. i–iii.
14 Ibid., p. iii.
15 Ibid., p. iii.
16 Cited and discussed in Trivedi, ‘The Urdu Premchand’, pp. 111–12.
17 Harish Trivedi, ‘A Special Holi’, in Richard Allen and Harish Trivedi
(eds), Literature and Nation: Britain and India 1800–1990, Open Univer-
sity/London: Routledge, 2000, pp. 310–14.
18 All examples are from the same page: Premchand, Premchand Rachanavali
[in Hindi: Collected Works of Premchand], Ram Anand (ed.), Introduction
and Conceptualisation [‘margdarshan’], Ramvilas Sharma, 20 vols, Delhi:
Janavani Prakashan, 1996, vol. XII, p. 258; and Premchand, Kulliyat-e
Premchand [in Urdu: Collected Works of Premchand], Madan Gopal and
Rahil Siddiqui (eds), 24 vols, New Delhi: Qaumi Council bara’e Furogh-I
Urdu Zaban, 2000–5, vol. 10, pp. 450–5.

37
 H arish T rivedi

19 Cited in Harish Trivedi, ‘Hindi and the Nation’, in Sheldon Pollock (ed.),
Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2003, p. 979.
20 Personal information.
21 Goyanka, Premchand ki Kahaniyon, pp. 108–20.
22 Premchand, Premchand Rachanavali, vol. XIX, p. 39. Cited in Goyanka,
Premchand ki Hindi-Urdu Kahaniyan, p. viii.
23 Kamal Kishore Goyanka (ed.), Premchand Kahani Rachanavali [in Hindi:
The Collected Short Stories of Premchand], 6 vols, New Delhi: Sahitya
Akademi, 2010, vol. 3, p. 11.
24 Goyanka, Premchand ki Kahaniyon, pp. 149–94.
25 Christine Everaert, Tracing the Boundaries between Hindi and Urdu,
Leiden: Brill, 2010, p. 39; Pritchett, personal communications, 20 April
and 1 August 2014.
26 Premchand, Premchand Rachanavali, vol. XIX, pp. 79–80.
27 Amrit Rai, Premchand: A Life, translated from the Hindi by Harish
Trivedi, New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1982, p. 44.
28 Amrit Rai (ed.) [in Hindi: ‘Prastutakarta’, i.e., presenter], Gupt Dhan
[Hidden Treasure]: Premchand, Allahabad: Hans Prakashan, 1962, p. 6.
29 Personal information.
30 See Madan Gopal, Origin and Development of Hindi/Urdu Literature,
New Delhi: Deep and Deep Publications, 1996; and Harish Trivedi, ‘Mus-
lims and Hindus: Urdu and Hindi’, in Agnieszka Kuczkiewicz-Fras (ed.),
Islamicate Traditions in South Asia: Themes from Culture and History,
New Delhi: Manohar, 2013, pp. 213–46.
31 See in particular Ramvilas Sharma, Premchand aur unka Yug [in Hindi:
Premchand and His Age], Delhi: Meharchand Munshiram, 1955.

Bibliography
Ananthamurthy, U. R., ‘What Does Translation Mean in India?’, in N. Manu
Chakravarthy (ed.), U. R. Ananthamurthy Omnibus, New Delhi: Arvind
Kumar, 2007, pp. 395–8.
Dharmavir, Premchand: Samant ka Munshi [in Hindi: Premchand: Agent of
Feudalism], New Delhi: Vani Prakashan, 2005.
Everaert, Christine, Tracing the Boundaries Between Hindi and Urdu, Leiden:
Brill, 2010.
Gopal, Madan, Origin and Development of Hindi/Urdu Literature, New
Delhi: Deep and Deep Publications, 1996.
Gopal, Madan, Premchand: A Literary Biography, Bombay: Asia Publishing
House, 1964.
Goyanka, Kamal Kishore (ed.), Premchand ka Aprapya Sahitya [in Hindi:
Unaccessed Writings of Premchand], 2 vols, New Delhi: Bharatiya Janapith,
1988.
Goyanka, Kamal Kishore (ed.), Premchand Kahani Rachanavali [in Hindi:
The Collected Short Stories of Premchand], 6 vols, New Delhi: Sahitya
Akademi, 2010.

38
 P remchand in E nglish

Goyanka, Kamal Kishore (ed.), Premchand ki Hindi-Urdu Kahaniyan, New

Delhi: Bharatiya Jnanpith Praksahan, 1990.
Goyanka, Kamal Kishore (ed.), Premchand ki Kahaniyon ka Kalakramanusar
Adhyayan [in Hindi: Premchand’s Short Stories: A Chronological Study],
Delhi: Nataraj Prakashan, 2012.
Premchand, Kulliyat-e Premchand [in Urdu: Collected Works of Premchand],
Madan Gopal and Rahil Siddiqui (eds), 24 vols, New Delhi: Qaumi Council
bara’e Furogh-i Urdu Zaban, 2000–5.
Premchand, Premchand Rachanavali [in Hindi: Collected Works of Prem-
chand], Ram Anand (ed.), Introduction and Conceptualisation [‘margdar-
shan’] Ramvilas Sharma, 20 vols, Delhi: Janavani Prakashan, 1996.
Rai, Alok and Ali, Mushtaq (eds), Samaksha: Munshi Premchand ki Bees
Hindi-Urdu Kahaniyon ka Samantar Path [in Hindi: Eye-to-Eye: Parallel
Texts of Twenty Short Stories by Munshi Premchand], Allahabad: Hans
Prakashan, for the Mahatma Gandhi Antarrashtriya Hindi Vishvavidyala
[the Mahatma Gandhi International Hindi University], 2002.
Rai, Amrit (ed.), [in Hindi: ‘prastutakarta’, i.e., presenter], Gupt Dhan [Hid-
den Treasure]: Premchand, Allahabad: Hans Prakashan, 1962.
Rai, Amrit (ed.), [in Hindi: ‘prastutakarta’, i.e., presenter], Mangalacharan:
Aarambhik Upanyas [Beginnings: The Early Novels]: Premchand, Alla-
habad: Hans Prakashan, 1962.
Rai, Amrit, Premchand: A Life, translated from the Hindi by Harish Trivedi,
New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1982.
Raza, Jafar, Premchand: Urdu-Hindi Kathakar [in Hindi: Premchand: Urdu-
Hindi Fiction-Writer], Allahabad: Lokbharati Prakshan, 1983.
Sharma, Ramvilas, Premchand aur unka Yug [in Hindi: Premchand and His
Age], Delhi: Meharchand Munshiram, 1955.
Trivedi, Harish, ‘A Special Holi’, in Richard Allen and Harish Trivedi (eds),
Literature and Nation: Britain and India 1800–1990, Open University;
London: Routledge, 2000, pp. 310–14.
Trivedi, Harish, ‘Hindi and the Nation’, in Sheldon Pollock (ed.), Literary
Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2003, pp. 958–1022.
Trivedi, Harish, ‘Muslims and Hindus: Urdu and Hindi’, in Agnieszka
Kuczkiewicz-Fras (ed.), Islamicate Traditions in South Asia: Themes
from Culture and History, New Delhi: Manohar, 2013, pp. 213–46.
Trivedi, Harish, ‘The Urdu Premchand: The Hindi Premchand’, The Jadavpur
Journal of Comparative Literature, 1984, 22: 104–18.

39
 2
PREMCHAND IN ENGLISH
TRANSLATION
The story of an ‘afterlife’

M. Asaduddin

Premchand began writing at a time when the English readership in

India was miniscule. Tagore, his more illustrious senior contemporary
in Bangla, had overshadowed every other Indian writer, particularly
after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913, mainly
because of the strength/impact of the English translation of a selection
of his poems. However, much before that momentous event, a group
of Tagore admirers had made it their life’s mission to translate him
into English, thus making him accessible to a world audience. Prem-
chand had no such band of admirers who thought that he had a global
message. On the contrary, it was thought that he was too rooted to the
soil to have any universal message. Though he became somewhat of a
national figure, particularly after he joined the non-cooperation move-
ment spearheaded by Gandhiji, his appeal was, by and large, limited
to the Hindi heartland, and to that extent, there was no national urge
to have him translated into English.1 It must be pointed out, however,
that his admirers in the Progressive Writers’ Movement have done
their bits in getting him translated into other Indian languages.
To begin with, English translation efforts of Premchand’s works
were rather desultory and lacked any clear direction. Short stories
were the first to be translated into English, and they made occasional
appearances in journals like Thought, Mahfil and Indian Literature.
The first collection of stories to appear in English was compiled by
Gurdial Malik in 1946 with the title Short Stories of Premchand.2
The quality of translation was rather indifferent, even insipid. How-
ever, the eleven stories (which included such well-known pieces as
‘The Shroud’ and ‘The Story of Two Bulls’) published in the volume

40
 P remchand in E nglish translation

became the first window for the readers in English to have some idea
of Premchand as a writer of short fiction. The first collection that
made some impact was by David Rubin, The World of Premchand,3
published in the UNESCO Asian fiction series in 1969. Not only was
it the most comprehensive compilation of stories till then but it was
also the first collection to be published outside India and translated
by a native speaker of English. This collection, along with the publica-
tion of Godaan in Gordon C. Roadarmel’s translation in the earlier
year, gave Premchand much deserved international visibility and he
began to find place in university courses of study, even if the courses
were as varied as sociology, anthropology, culture studies and Indol-
ogy.4 A commendable feature of this volume is that it presented thirty
stories thematically under the categories of ‘The Village’, ‘The Town’
and ‘The World’. In his introduction to the volume, Rubin endeav-
oured to contextualise Premchand by stating the writer’s biographical
details and his thematic concerns. He does not deal with the process of
translation at any length, a task that he seemed to have left for his sec-
ond collection, Widows, Wives and Other Heroines,5 which presents
twelve stories revolving around women. By this time, Rubin had trans-
lated a substantial corpus of Premchand’s fiction and he was in a posi-
tion to make some general statements about the difficulties involved
in translating Premchand into English. In the second volume, he also
mentions his original sources clearly and unambiguously.
Among the other translators of Premchand who have volumes of
short stories to their credit are Nandini Nopany and P. Lal,6 Madan
Gopal,7 Rakhshanda Jalil,8 Madan Gupta,9 P. C. Gupta,10 Purnima
Mazumdar11 and Ruth Vanita.12 Taken together, these volumes present
not even half of Premchand’s short fiction, in good, bad and indifferent
translation, and some of the stories figure in all the volumes. The more
serious lack in these volumes (apart from the first and the last names in
the above list), however, is a clear policy, stated or implied. The stories
have not always been presented either chronologically or thematically.
The translators hardly talk about their principle/s of selection and the
objective/s behind the translation, and most significantly, they do not
engage with the process of translation with any rigour. If a reader picks
up any of these volumes at random, it might give her a very lopsided
idea of the kind and calibre the writer Premchand was and his status
in his own tradition. In fact, some of the volumes give one a fair idea
about how not to anthologise a writer of Premchand’s range. Each one
of them translates as though he/she is the first translator of Premchand
in English. There is no acknowledgement of earlier translations,13 no
effort to engage with them and no endeavour to tell readers how his/

41
 M. ASADUDDIN

her translations were different from those of others and what gap he/
she intended to fill. Moreover, most of them do not reveal their source
texts in any definitive way.14 Apart from Madan Gopal who had a
life-long engagement with Premchand’s works, I have genuine doubts
about whether other translators are familiar with the entire range of
Premchand’s short fiction. If they are, the anthologies do not provide
any clinching evidence.
In terms of quality, innovativeness and seriousness of engagement,
two volumes stand out. They are edited by Nandini Nopany and
P. Lal and Ruth Vanita. Apart from David Rubin, it is these transla-
tors, among Indians, who displayed serious engagement with Prem-
chand’s short stories by supplying adequate paratext along with their
translations, which consists of introducing the writer, his personal cir-
cumstances, his thematic and stylistic concerns and his place in the
tradition. Nopany and Lal also give original sources including editions
of versions from which the stories were translated, arranged them in
chronological order and gave the rationale as to why they chose sto-
ries mainly from the later period. They engage with earlier transla-
tions which, to my knowledge, no other Premchand translator has
done so far, and present samples of their translation alongside those
of others. They remain loyal to the original translatorial resources to
produce a version that would present the totality of the experience of
reading a Premchand story. To that extent, they reorder sentences and
paragraphs, and change expressions here and there which, according
to them, help capture the vision of the writer projected through a par-
ticular story. One may fault them on their strategy; indeed one may
find their translation slightly idiosyncratic and mannered, but there is
no doubt about the seriousness of their engagement and clarity of their
approach to the original.

***

So far, six of Premchand’s novels have been translated into English –

Godaan, Nirmala, Sevasadan, Rangabhumi, Karmabhumi and Gha-
ban, the first four have been translated twice over and the last two
have single translations. The translators – among whom there is one
translating pair – there are four white Westerners, four Indians, one
first-generation Indian Canadian and one second-generation Indian
American. They bring in the advantages (and disadvantages) of their
individual locations, perspectives and cultural knowledge to bear on
their practice as translators of Premchand. What is surprising, how-
ever, is that none of the translators engaged with earlier translations

42
 P remchand in E nglish translation

where such translation(s) existed. It is always desirable that a latter-day

translator gives the reader some idea about the earlier translation(s),
their inadequacies and the ways the latter translation seeks to address
those inadequacies, and all serious translators follow this convention.
It is through this critical engagement with each other’s translation that
the translators can generate debates and knowledge about translation
and thus enhance the quality and standard of translation in a culture.15
Among all Premchand novels the first one to be translated into Eng-
lish was Godaan, commonly regarded as his masterpiece and, argu-
ably, the best Hindi novel of the twentieth century, written in the final
days of his life (published in Hindi, 1936). In fact, by 1968, there
were two versions of the novel available in English – the earlier ver-
sion prepared by a pair of Indian translators16 and the second by a
Westerner17 (the nationalities are important for scholars of transla-
tion studies, as it is universally assumed that one should translate into
one’s native tongue). The Indian translators were P. Lal, of the Writ-
ers’ Workshop fame, and Jai Ratan, a prolific translator of Urdu and
Hindi fiction into English. Lal and Ratan had very set ideas about
what would work in English and what won’t. Compression is the
preferred mode adopted by them.18 That is why with the same font
size and roughly the same number of words to a page, their English
translation is all of 339 pages while the Roadarmel version runs into
442 pages. They often leave out descriptive passages in order to make
the target version more taut and compact. Their efforts were mainly
directed towards making the text intelligible to readers in English.
However, this is just one side of the story. The other side is that they
have added no paratextual element in the form of an ‘Introduction’,
‘Preface’ or even ‘Translators’ Note’, allowing the reader no other
entry into the text except through their version of the translation. It
is unethical for any translator to chop off parts of a text without the
permission of the author, but not even to mention it anywhere or give
the unsuspecting reader some rationale for deletions amounts to com-
mitting perjury on the reader. Then, when they italicise cultural terms
in their translation, they do not explain them either in the body of the
text or through a glossary, leaving the curious reader in a quandary.
However, the fact that even this inadequate version has gone through
quite a few reprints is a measure of the considerably good reception
it had with Indian readers. How much of that reception was due to
its accessibility and availability in a low-price edition is, of course,
a moot question.
Roadarmel’s strategy was different. He had a more reverential atti-
tude towards the text and its author. He worked under more genial

43
 M. ASADUDDIN

circumstances. Not only he had the benefit of an earlier manuscript

version of the translation by S. H. Vatsyayan, but also he had generous
funding from UNESCO and other agencies and institutions that pro-
vided him with leisure and financial support to work in a focused man-
ner. His is certainly the more ‘authentic’ version than that of Jai Ratan
and P. Lal in the sense that he tinkers very little with the original text.
He tries to retain the images, metaphors and so on without obviously
resorting to the foreignising technique that seems to be in favour in the
postcolonial times. In the new edition that came out in 2002 there was
an introductory essay by Vasudha Dalmia, a reputed scholar of Indian
literature and culture, that supplies the sociological and historical con-
texts of the novel that make its reading more rewarding and fruitful.
Nirmala has also been translated twice so far – the first translation
is by David Rubin19 (with help from Sripat Rai, Premchand’s son) and
the second by Alok Rai,20 Premchand’s grandson. The two versions
offer an interesting contrast. Fortunately, both the translators have
appended ‘Translator’s Note’ to their versions which clearly set out
the goal they set for themselves and the kind of target version they
were aspiring at. David Rubin makes a conscious effort to stay close to
the text, which lands him occasionally to literalism of the worst kind
while Alok Rai’s excessive zeal seems to carry him away to produce a
version which is more fluent than the original. If one back-translates
Rai’s English version into Hindi, one realises how much distance the
original text has travelled, stylistically. It may be speculated that in
order to produce a version which is different from Rubin’s, Rai moves
away from the original text. It would appear that Rai not only ‘mod-
ernised’ Premchand but also urbanised the speakers. The overwhelm-
ing impression is that Rai’s version is closer to the original Hindi
semantically and free from Rubin’s literalisms and misreading,21 even
though his style has a distancing effect.
Christopher King translated Ghaban into English in 2000 and gave
it the title Gaban22 [sic] for which he was sharply criticised by Harish
Trivedi in a review published in India Today (20 November 2000)
where Trivedi calls him ‘Premchand’s embezzler’. The inadequacy of
King’s translation starts with the title and extends to several other
areas. He misreads idioms, misunderstands colloquialisms and dis-
plays just the worst kind of literalism in his translation. He also writes
a sort of quaint English that alienates the readers. To give two ran-
dom examples from the first four pages: ‘Seven years went by in this
way, spent in laughing and playing’;23 ‘But Ramnath didn’t have that
much stick-to-itiveness in him’.24 This novel is certainly crying out for
a retranslation into English.

44
 P remchand in E nglish translation

The other novel that has been translated twice in English is Bazaar-
e-Husn (Urdu version) or Sevasadan (Hindi version), Premchand’s
first substantial novel. Anyone familiar with the textual/publication
history of this novel is aware of the twists and turns in the process
of their production25 till the point when the two versions were pub-
lished under two titles that radically shifted the emphasis and, in some
ways, signalled the diverse readership/literary culture they sought to
address. The Urdu version has been translated by Amina Azfar26 and
the Hindi version by Snehal Shingavi.27 Both of them follow Prem-
chand’s method in rendering dialogue, namely, separating the charac-
ters from what they say by colon or dash, which seems disconcerting
in English. But that is where the similarity ends. Shingavi’s transla-
tion has an academic flavour and it largely stays close to and tries to
capture the mood of the original. It has a substantial introductory
essay by Vasudha Dalmia. The essay endeavours to contextualise both
the writer and the text for informed readers. What is lacking, how-
ever, is any insight into the translation process. Shingavi has given no
‘Translator’s note’ or any other material pointing to the challenges
he must have faced and the ways he negotiated around them. There
is no uniform pattern in glossing culturally rooted words – if some
have been glossed and incorporated in a glossary, others were not.
Some proper names have been spelt that do not conform to conven-
tion.28 Azfar’s translation is very weak and inaccurate. Not only her
version is quite awkward29 at places, but also she displays an awful
lack of familiarity with Hindu/Sanskritic names and way of life. The
protagonist ‘Suman’ has been rendered by her as ‘Saman’ which does
not make any sense. Similarly, Subhadra has been rendered as Sobh-
dra, Uma as Oma, Balbhadra as Bal Bahadar and so on. Such an awful
lack of cultural familiarity is a recipe for translational disaster. The
same lack affects her understanding of Premchand’s idiom, resulting in
faulty translation at several places. Further, she displays her overzeal-
ous religiosity in inserting the acronym PBUH (peace be upon him) on
occasions when Prophet Muhammad’s name occurs. This demonstra-
tion of translatorial activism does great violence to the text. There is
no note by the translator indicating which edition she used and what
was her credo as a translator. The ‘Preface’ by Ralph Russell is help-
ful and the ‘Introduction’ by M. H. Askari provides some context.
But they cannot redeem Azfar’s translation. This is another novel that
requires a retranslation, to do justice to Premchand.
The two English translations of Rangabhumi by Christopher King
and Manju Jain, respectively, certainly mark a significant step forward
in Premchand translation into English. It is the longest novel written

45
 M. ASADUDDIN

by Premchand, reportedly his favourite, and must have required a

long-term engagement on the part of the translators. King seems to
have grown from his earlier rather awkward translation of Ghaban
to a slightly more informed and competent translator, even though
his language often tends to be stilted, as earlier. There is an intro-
ductory essay by Alok Rai, focusing on both Premchand’s theme and
style, which provides a good context. In his ‘Translator’s Note’, King
deals with the pertinent issues relevant to translation of Premchand
in general and to the specific text in question as well. Manju Jain,
an academic trained in literary critical discourse who has worked on
T. S. Eliot, has been very thorough in placing the author and the text
she is translating through a rich array of paratextual material running
into thirty-three pages. As the translator’s credo, she quotes T. S. Eliot
on translating Shakespeare in her ‘Translator’s Note’,30 which seemed
to have guided her in her translation practice. Eliot speaks about the
music of words in the quotation, but Jain goes further to highlight
a point particularly relevant to the text she is translating:

One may add that what cannot also be translated are the
nuances of the lived realities of one culture in terms of another,
as well as the multivalences of one language into those of
another. Translation is yet another form of interpretation and
not a mimetic rendition of the original text.31

In her ‘Introduction’, Jain touches on all the issues that the novel
addresses with a certain depth and works out the contemporary reso-
nances in considerable detail. Combining in herself the roles of both
a researcher and a translator, she not only makes the text more acces-
sible to the reader but also expands the possibilities of further studies
and research on the author and the text, giving it a rich ‘after life’ in
the Walter Benjaminian sense. Jain’s approach to translation might be
designated as ‘academic’ or ‘scholarly’ by some, but it shows the depth
of her commitment. Of all Premchand translators, Manju Jain seems
to be the only one who has resolutely decided not to italicise Indian
words in English. This editorial decision seems to have stemmed from
the assumption that the translation was made primarily for a non-
Hindi Indian readership to whom these words will be intelligible, and
the foreign readers, if they are sufficiently interested, can seek help and
try to understand the nuances of the original. Such an assumption of
a pan-Indian knowledge will be found, on closer analysis, to be ques-
tionable. The corpus of Indian words retained will not be understood
by a pan-Indian readership,32 let alone the readership abroad. In going

46
 P remchand in E nglish translation

for this overkill of retaining the cargo of native words, the translator
has made the text slightly opaque and somewhat difficult to travel
across cultures. Some of the words could easily have been translated
without much cultural loss. The translation is also marred by avoid-
able literalisms at many places. It has to be stressed that the translator
is always required to do a fine balancing act between how much to
retain of the original and how much to intervene, and this balance can
sometimes be crucial.
The latest in the pantheon of Premchand translators is Lalit Srivas-
tava, a scientist by profession, who has shown commendable effort in
translating Karmabhumi. He has been helped, as the ‘Acknowledge-
ments’ makes it clear, by others, but to undertake a work of such mag-
nitude for a first-time translator and to pull it off with reasonable
success is no mean feat. He knows his Hindi well and he tries to trans-
late it in an English that is both idiomatic and contemporary and stays
close to the original. In his ‘Introduction’, he introduces Premchand
and deals with the theme of the novel at some length and adds a sub-
stantial ‘Translator’s Note’ that deals candidly and insightfully with
the challenges he has encountered and how he tackled them. How-
ever, like Shingavi in Sevasadan, Srivastava, too, has no clear policy
regarding which Indian words to gloss and which not.33 Further, why
he needed to add a half-page footnote, one of its kind in the book, to
the familiar spat between Krishna and Arjuna is not understandable.34
He could have alluded to it in a single line and moved on, without
distracting readers’ attention and retarding the flow of the narrative. If
a curious reader felt the need, she would have done her own research
to understand the fuller context. The greatest lapse, both editorial and
translatorial, however, has happened regarding the title of the novel.
More than once in the ‘Introduction’, the translator mentions that he
has translated the title Karmabhumi as ‘The Field of Action’.35 He also
explains that he had in his mind the Urdu title of the novel Maidane-
amal while translating it to ‘The Field of Action’.36 But this title is not
to be seen either on the cover, back cover, blurb, the inner title page or
indeed anywhere else in the entire volume. Everywhere it has been des-
ignated as Karmabhumi. Such an avoidable lapse regarding the basic
requirement of a translated work does not do any credit either to the
publisher or to the translator.

Translating Premchand in English: some issues

Translating a literary text from any Indian language into English has
its own challenges. These challenges get compounded if the text is

47
 M. ASADUDDIN

loaded with cultural content. Premchand was a writer who was deeply
rooted to the soil. Never before did the countryside and the rural peo-
ple get such eloquent and nuanced representation in Urdu–Hindi liter-
ature. He represents the rural and small-town people with the totality
of their lifestyle and ethos – their social and moral values, beliefs,
superstitions, folklore, mythologies and so on. The translation of the
cultural content poses enormous challenge. Moreover, Premchand’s
universe is an inclusive one and encompasses Hindu–Muslim cultural
history of the last two thousand years. There are copious references to
historical and mythological figures and events relating to Hindu and
Muslim history.37 His characters – whether peasant or semi-urban –
internalised this heritage, so much so that the mere mention of a
name or term, of an idiom or proverb, creates resonances and evokes
a plethora of associations that convey their own meanings. On such
occasions Premchand could afford to be elliptical and assume some
knowledge for granted. It would be naïve on the part of the translator
to make any such assumptions.
The difficulty in translating him arises from his very rootedness.
Moreover, while he was writing his fiction he was also fashioning a
new prose style in Hindi and Urdu. Many aspects of writing styles and
even matters related to punctuation had not yet settled. A translator
will have to take important decisions about these aspects. Additionally,
in the beginning of his career, he wrote in an idiom that was resistant
to translation into English. There are often passages written in an ele-
vated style with elaborate rhetorical flourishes, a continuation of the
dastan tradition from which Urdu–Hindi fiction emerged. The transla-
tor may aspire to write an equally elevated style to signal the features
of the original but it will sound affected and put the reader off. Even
later in his career the themes he had chosen for his fiction and the
characters from villages or small towns he portrayed spoke a tongue in
a plethora of registers and dialectal variations that did not lend them-
selves easily to English. Carrying across this aspect of polyglossia, an
integral feature of fictional text as pointed out by Mikhail Bakhtin,38
is a daunting task. Many of Premchand’s characters are peasants, and
in the dialogue sections he tries to recreate their speech patterns, which
often contain distortion or corruption of the standard expressions/
words. For example, in the celebrated ‘A Story of Two Bulls’ when
Moti, one of the bulls, says, ‘hamara ghar nageech aa gaya’, or when
in Godaan, Dhaniya, declaims about the futility of trying to attain
‘suraj’, one wonders what they are talking about. The informed
Hindi reader knows that ‘nageech’ is a distorted form of ‘nazdeek’
and ‘suraj’ is a corrupted form of ‘swaraj’, but it is a challenge for

48
 P remchand in E nglish translation

a modern-day translator, usually located in an urban setting, first to

understand and then signal this in his/her English translation. Then,
in the same story, one character may speak chaste Urdu while another
character may speak a dialectal or regional variation of it. A resource-
ful translator must find some way to negotiate this and not homogenise
mechanically. Further, metaphors, idioms and proverbs which largely
emanate from particular culture and popular practices also need well-
­thought-out strategies to carry over their meanings/significance in the
translating language.39
There are other issues that need to be tackled by any translator who
wish to translate Premchand into English. In many stories where there
is a conversation scene, he separates the name of the speaker from
whatever he/she says with a dash, the mode that is followed by writ-
ers of plays. It looks awkward in a piece of fiction in English.40 So
the translator has to insert expressions like ‘said’, ‘replied’, ‘asserted’,
‘protested’, ‘thought to himself/herself’ and so on to keep the flow of
the narrative without giving any impression of oddity. Further, the
translator may choose not to mention the speaker’s name in every
utterance, as in the original, when the context makes it obvious who
is speaking. Then there is constant shift between the past and present
tenses within the same sentence or paragraph (the problem is ubiq-
uitous in almost all Indian languages) and the translator has to take
a decision about the tense he/she is going to follow and be consist-
ent with it and, further, to make a judicious use of quotation marks,
as there are none in the original. Moreover, there may be passages –
sometimes extended – where a character internalises his/her thoughts.
The translator will have to decide the strategy – whether to use ital-
ics, inverted commas and so on – to indicate these passages of self-
reflection/interior monologue. Another issue pertains to Premchand’s
predilection for often using a string of small sentences without men-
tioning the subject, object or the subordinate clause. The reader has to
understand the meaning from the context. Readers in Hindi may not
feel anything amiss while reading them in Hindi as they are attuned
to such usages, but they certainly seem jarring if one were to translate
them into English as they are, without inserting the missing elements.
This is not merely a stylistic point but extremely necessary for the sake
of clarity too.
Then there are terms and expression that have a fluidity of sense or
indeterminate meanings – words that may have been used in a vari-
ety of senses, and even the context may not always make the mean-
ing clear. Two such terms are ‘qaom’ and ‘biradari’ that have been
used extensively by Premchand. While ‘qaom’ may mean nation or

49
 M. ASADUDDIN

community, ‘biradari’ may mean community, caste, clan or extended

family. ‘Jati’ and ‘dharma’ are two more of such problematic terms.
Premchand was a writer in haste. Often he had no time to take a sec-
ond look at the manuscript. This has led to inconsistencies and inac-
curacies in some of the stories and novels, which continued through
subsequent editions. The translator has to take decisions about whether
to iron out the inaccuracies/inconsistencies or to let them remain as
they are in the original.41 In any case, the translators must always state
clearly what particular edition, and whether the Hindi or the Urdu ver-
sion, they are using as original for their translation.
Terms of address and the endless permutation and combination of
relationships and the terms used for them that characterise Indian social
life pose enormous challenge to the translator in English. Sometimes,
these terms may not have even a pan-Indian uniformity. Relationships
also may overlap. Sometimes, a person may be addressed by the same
relationship term by everybody in a village or part of a small town.
The same woman may be addressed as ‘kaki’ by the father as well as
his sons and daughters. Grandfathers may be addressed as ‘baba’ or
‘bapu’ (father) and fathers may be addressed as ‘bhai’ (brother), ‘dada’;
‘beti’ or ‘beta’ may be a term of address either for son or daughter,
son-in-law or daughter-in-law, and so on. The same character may be
addressed in different ways in different places within the same story.
That is why, the translator is required to be extremely alert and cultur-
ally informed while translating relationship terms.
Translation can, potentially, make or mar a writer’s reputation. This
is more so when only a fraction of the writer’s corpus is available in
translation. Readers are apt to arrive at a judgement about a writer by
reading one or two books and that too in indifferent or bad transla-
tion. It is a good sign that Premchand’s corpus in English is expanding,
making room for fresh appraisal as well as reassessment. One expects
that ‘Premchand in Translation’ will soon become a viable area of
study in our literature departments just as ‘Tagore in Translation’ has
already become so. This will be another window, another perspective
and another mode through which our great writers will be studied,
reassessed and revisited.

Notes
1 The first Premchand translation to appear outside India and in a foreign
language was in Russian.
2 Premchand, Short Stories of Premchand, Gurdial Malik (trans.), Bombay:
Nalanda Publications, 1946. The translator acknowledges that the stories

50
 P remchand in E nglish translation

were ‘translated at the instance of the late C. F. Andrews and published

through the good offices of Madam Sophia Wadia’. The same stories
also figured in Premchand, The Chess Players and Other Stories, Gurdial
Malik (trans.), Delhi: Orient Paperbacks, 1967, with the exception of ‘My
First Composition’.
3 Premchand, The World of Premchand: Selected Stories of Premchand,
David Rubin (trans. and ed.), London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969.
4 It is a fact that Indian literature continues to be studied in the West as con-
taining information about its people, that is, from a socio-anthropological
interest rather than from purely literary curiosity.
5 Premchand, Widows, Wives and Other Heroines, David Rubin (trans. and
ed.), London: Oxford University Press, 1995.
6 Premchand, Twenty Four Stories by Premchand, Nandini Nopany and
P. Lal (trans.), New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1980.
7 Premchand, The Shroud and 20 Other Stories, Madan Gopal (trans.),
New Delhi: Sagar Publications, 1972, and Premchand, The Best of Prem-
chand: A Collection of 50 Best Stories, Madan Gopal (trans.), New Delhi:
Cosmo Publications, 1997.
8 Premchand, The Temple and the Mosque, Rakhshanda Jalil (trans.), New
Delhi: Indus, 1992; and Premchand, The Temple and the Mosque: The
Best of Premchand, Rakhshanda Jalil (trans.), New Delhi: Harper Peren-
nial, 2011.
9 Premchand, Secret of Culture and Other Stories, Madan Gupta (trans. and
ed.), Bombay: Jaico Publishing House, 1960.
10 Premchand, A Handful of Wheat and Other Stories, P. C. Gupta (trans.),
New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1955.
11 Premchand, Selected Stories of Premchand, Purnima Mazumdar (trans.
and ed.), New Delhi: Ocean Books, 2003.
12 Premchand, The Co-Wife and Other Stories, Ruth Vanita (trans. and ed.),
New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2008.
13 Except for Nandini Nopany and P. Lal.
14 This is important because of the considerably different versions and edi-
tions in Urdu and Hindi. It is also possible that sometimes translators have
translated stories into English neither from Hindi nor from Urdu, but from
some other language in which the stories were translated. For example,
in Purnima Mazumdar’s collection, there is a story with the title, ‘Jamai
Babu’ which she has glossed in the footnote as ‘a live-in son-in-law’. None
of Premchand’s 300+ stories in different editions in Urdu and Hindi has
such a title. The only plausible explanation seems to be that Purnima
Mazumdar has worked from a Bangla translation of the Premchand story,
‘Ghar Jamai’ where it might have had the title, ‘Jamai Babu’ and she has
retained it without checking the Hindi/Urdu original.
15 When Scott Moncrief translated Marcel Proust’s famous multi-volume
novel, A la recherché du temps perdu as Remembrance of Things Past
(1922–30), it was nothing less than a historic event, and the English-
speaking world recognised this novel with the English title for more than
half a century during which it had influenced fiction-writers all over the
world, till the time D. J. Enright came out with his more accurate ver-
sion, In Search of Lost Time in 1992. Enright pointed to the lapses, gaps
and the absences in the earlier translation that he endeavoured to rectify

51
 M. ASADUDDIN

and fill in. The new translation generated fruitful debates about the pro-
cesses involved and strategies adopted by the two translators who were
six decades apart. The same happened when a third English translation
(and the first in the USA) of Albert Camus’s novel, L’etranger by Mathew
Ward came out in 1988 with the title, The Stranger, challenging the first
translation of the novel by Stuart Gilbert bearing the same title, the dif-
ference in the attitude of the translators towards the text was signalled
right from the famous opening sentence of the novel. It may be remem-
bered that Stuart Gilbert’s version, however imperfect the translation, had
a profound impact on Anglophone writers both for its existentialist theme
and for its bare, minimalist style. But the new translation opened entirely
new possibilities of interpretation. Similar is the story of Dostoevsky’s
Brotheres Karamazov which was translated in 1912 by Constance Gar-
nett, the astoundingly prolific translator of Russian fiction into English,
and generations of English readers and writers read this version to gain
insight into the Russian world. But when the most recent re-translation
of the novel was done by the translator-duo, Richard Pevear and Larissa
Volokhonsky, they tried to address some serious issues left open by Gar-
nett. In all the cases cited above, the latter-day translators engaged with an
earlier translation to establish the raison d’être of their own translations.
If the latter-day translators of Premchand’s novels had followed this tradi-
tion, it would have generated much helpful debate both on the author and
on the nature of translation.
16 Premchand, Godan: A Study of Peasant India, Jai Ratan and P. Lal (trans.),
Delhi: Jaico Publishing House, 1957, twenty-first impression, 2007.
17 Premchand, Godaan: The Gift of a Cow, Gordon C. Roadarmel (trans.),
London: George Allen & Unwin, 1968.
18 It is curious that Lal, in his collaborative translation of Premchand’s short
stories, does not follow the same method, that is, compression. On the
contrary, there are several instances of amplification. Jai Ratan, of course,
is known for his rather casual approach to the original and his merciless
excision of those parts of the original which he considered simply as ‘pad-
ding’ [personal conversation].
19 Premchand, Nirmala, David Rubin (trans.), Delhi: Vision Books, 1988.
20 Premchand, Nirmala, Alok Rai (trans.), Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1999.
21 Among the many misreadings are: balayen le lein – take the blame (ward
off evil); Sau pachaas ghazlein yaad kar lo – Memorize a hundred and fifty
ghazals (commit some hundred odd ghazals to memory); Vichitra swabhav
ki aurat hai – A woman’s character is peculiar (She’s a strange woman);
bal-krida – playing with hair (child’s play), Bas roye chali jati hai –
she left the world weeping (she kept on crying); Premchand, Nirmala,
David Rubin (trans.), Delhi: Vision Books, 1988, pp. 30, 49, 63, 159, 168.
22 Premchand, Gaban: The Stolen Jewels, Christopher R. King (trans.), New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000.
23 Ibid., p. 3.
24 Ibid., p. 4.
25 Harish Trivedi, ‘The Power of Premchand’, The Hindu Literary Review,
2 May 2004, p. 4.

52
 P remchand in E nglish translation

26 Premchand, Courtesan’s Quarter, Amina Azfar (trans.), Karachi: Oxford

University Press, 2004.
27 Premchand, Sevasadan, Snehal Shingavi (trans.), with an introduction by
Vasudha Dalmia, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005.
28 Names such as ‘Abdullatif’, ‘Abulwafa’, ‘Padamsingh’ are conventionally
written as ‘Abdul Latif’, ‘Abul Wafa’, ‘Padam Singh’, often, though not
always, indicating family name and the person’s own name.
29 Sample these: ‘There were comings and goings between the two families’;
‘She felt on her heart, the heat of strong sunlight arising from behind a
cloud of grief and regret’; Premchand, Courtesan’s Quarter, Amina Azfar
(trans.), Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 7, 9.
30 ‘What can be translated? A story, a dramatic plot, the impression of a
living character in action, an image, a proposition. What cannot be trans-
lated is the incantation, the music of the words, and that part of the mean-
ing which is in the music,’ T. S. Eliot, ‘Goethe as the Sage’, On Poetry
and Poetics, p. 126. Cited in Manju Jain, ‘Translator’s Note’, in Prem-
chand, Playground: Rangbhoomi, Manju Jain (trans.), New Delhi: Pen-
guin Books, 2011, p. xii.
31 Ibid., p. xii.
32 I am listing a few words that will not be understood in all parts of India:
‘dhela’, ‘muhallawala’, ‘handi’, ‘kulhiya’, ‘phullauri’, ‘rais’, ‘dhol’, ‘khon-
cha’, ‘janeudharis’, ‘sev’. Some of these words have exact or nearly exact
equivalents in English.
33 Words like ‘bhabhi’, ‘beta’, ‘ikka’, ‘kurta pajama’, ‘Ekadashi’ and so on
have not been italicised, while words such as ‘charpai’, ‘chapatti’, ‘mataji’
and so on have been. ‘Mohalla’ has been translated as ‘Ward’ while similar
other Indian words have been retained. Oxford University Press does not
seem to have a clear policy on this and allows translators to take their own
decisions in this regard. Even so, if translators set out their policies clearly
in their ‘Note’, it might serve the purpose of scholarship better. It must be
said, however, that Srivastava follows the sound policy of italicising the
glossed word in its first occurrence and then continue to write it in the
Romanised form. There is no harm in enunciating such a policy upfront
right in the beginning.
34 Premchand, Karmabhumi, Lalit Srivastava (trans.), New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2006, p. 42.
35 ‘This novel, Karmabhumi, which I translate as The Field of Action, is set
in Uttar Pradesh,’ Lalit Srivastava, ‘Introduction’, in Premchand, Karma-
bhumi, Lalit Srivastava (trans.), New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
2006, p. vii.
36 ‘I have loosely translated it as The Field of Action which ties in with the
Urdu title, Maidaane-amal . . .,’ Ibid., p. x.
37 Story titles like ‘Haj-e akbar’, ‘Gham nadari buz bakhair’, ‘Aab-e hayaat’,
‘Kaifar-e kirdaar’ and so on will require a certain familiarity with Perso-
Arabic tradition. Similarly, there are idioms, proverbs, names of historical
or legendary characters that would require familiarity with this tradition.
38 To quote Bakhtin, ‘The language used by characters in the novel, how they
speak, is verbally and semantically autonomous; each character’s speech
possesses its own belief system, since each is the speech of another in

53
 M. ASADUDDIN

another’s language; thus it may also refract authorial intentions and con-
sequently may, to a certain degree, constitute a second language for the
author. Moreover the character speech almost always influences authorial
character speech (and sometimes powerfully so), sprinkling it with anoth-
er’s words (that is, the speech of a character perceived as the concealed
speech of another) and in this way introducing into it stratification and
speech diversity,’ M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays,
Michael Holquist (ed.), Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981, pp. 3–4.
39 Roadarmel adopts the following strategy in translating idioms and images
in Godaan: ‘A similar problem arises in translating idioms and images.
A Hindi phrase may have an English equivalent with a similar meaning,
but which in English would be a cliché, and therefore produce an inappro-
priate response in the reader. If left closer to the original idiom or image,
however, the phrase may have a startling freshness to the English reader
that it did not have to the Hindi reader. Translators would inevitably dif-
fer in their judgement as to the nearest aesthetic and emotional equiva-
lents in such cases, and justification for particular renderings could only
be made in terms of having considered a variety of factors for each unit of
text,’ Gordon C. Roadarmel, ‘Introduction’, in Premchand, Godaan: The
Gift of a Cow, Gordon C. Roadarmel (trans.), London: George Allen &
Unwin, 1968, p. xxiv.
40 Some Premchand translators like Alok Rai, Snehal Shingavi, Manju Jain
and Amina Azfar have chosen to follow Premchand’s own method of ren-
dering dialogue while others such as Roadarmel, Rubin and King have
rendered it in the modern form.
41 In his ‘Introduction’ to Godaan: The Gift of a Cow, Roadarmel talks
about the kind of decisions he had to take as a translator: ‘A few deliber-
ate alterations have been made in the text to correct the most disturb-
ing inconsistencies, particularly of chronology, in the original . . . Some
changes in style are necessitated by the differences between Hindi and Eng-
lish. Passive constructions are sometimes made active, rhetorical questions
are sometimes turned into direct statements, short sentences are some-
times combined, and the direct thought and conversation characteristic of
Hindi has sometimes been changed to indirect thought and conversation,’
Gordon C. Roadarmel, ‘Introduction’, in Premchand, Godaan: The Gift of
a Cow, Gordon C. Roadarmel (trans.), London: George Allen & Unwin,
1968, p. xxiv; Christopher King, the translator of Ghaban (he spells it
wrongly as Gaban), points to the inconsistencies in that novel as follows
in his ‘Translator’s Preface’: ‘In the Hindi edition which I used I found
numerous misprints, which I corrected to the obviously intended word or
phrase. I found other mistakes which may be due to editorial sloppiness or
to Premchand’s own oversights. One of the most amusing of these is the
transformation of Rama’s mother’s name from Jageshwari to Rameshwari
partway through the novel . . . Similarly, in much of the novel, Premchand
refers to Pundit Indra Bhushan (first introduced in Chapter 15) as “Vakil
Sahab”, but abruptly switches back to “Pundit” or “Punditji” in the por-
tion of the novel (Chapters 29 and 30) describing his last days. I have
used “Vakil Sahab” throughout. In another passage, Rama goes out at a
certain time, and returns earlier! I have adjusted these times to make more
sense, according to the context of the passage. In another place or two, the

54
 P remchand in E nglish translation

amounts of money mentioned do not quite match up, and I have corrected
them also.’ Christopher R. King, ‘Translator’s Preface and Acknowledge-
ments’, in Premchand, Gaban: The Stolen Jewels, Christopher R. King
(trans.), New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. viii–ix.

Bibliography
Bakhtin, M. M., The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Michael Holquist
(ed.), Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.
Jain, Manju, ‘Translator’s Note’, in Premchand (ed.), Playground: Rang-
bhoomi, Manju Jain (trans.), New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2011, pp. xi–xii.
King, Christopher R., ‘Translator’s Preface and Acknowledgements’, in
Premchand (ed.), Gaban: The Stolen Jewels, Christopher R. King (trans.),
New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. vii–ix.
Premchand, A Handful of Wheat and Other Stories, P. C. Gupta (trans.), New
Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1955.
Premchand, Courtesan’s Quarter, Amina Azfar (trans. of Bazaar-e-Husn),
Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Premchand, Gaban: The Stolen Jewels, Christopher R. King (trans.), New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Premchand, Godaan: The Gift of a Cow, Gordon C. Roadarmel (trans.),
London: George Allen & Unwin, 1968.
Premchand, Godan: A Study of Peasant India, Jai Ratan and P. Lal (trans.),
Delhi: Jaico Publishing House, 2007.
Premchand, Karmabhumi, Lalit Srivastava (trans.), New Delhi: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2006.
Premchand, Nirmala, Alok Rai (trans.), Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Premchand, Nirmala, David Rubin (trans.), Delhi: Vision Books, 1988.
Premchand, Playground: Rangbhoomi, Manju Jain (trans.), New Delhi: Pen-
guin Books, 2011.
Premchand, Secret of Culture and Other Stories, Madan Gupta (trans. and
ed.), Bombay: Jaico Publishing House, 1960.
Premchand, Selected Stories of Premchand, Purnima Mazumdar (trans. and
ed.), New Delhi: Ocean Books, 2003.
Premchand, Sevasadan, Snehal Shingavi (trans.), with an introduction by
Vasudha Dalmia, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Premchand, Short Stories of Premchand, Gurdial Malik (trans.), Bombay:
Nalanda Publications, 1946.
Premchand, The Best of Premchand: A Collection of 50 Best Stories, Madan
Gopal (trans.), New Delhi: Cosmo Publications, 1997.
Premchand, The Chess Players and Other Stories, Gurdial Malik (trans.),
Delhi: Orient Paperbacks, 1967.
Premchand, The Co-Wife and Other Stories, Ruth Vanita (trans. and ed.),
New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 2008.
Premchand, The Shroud and 20 Other Stories, Madan Gopal (trans.), New
Delhi: Sagar Publications, 1972.

55
 M. ASADUDDIN

Premchand, The Temple and the Mosque, Rakhshanda Jalil (trans.), New
Delhi: Indus, 1992.
Premchand, The Temple and the Mosque: The Best of Premchand,
Rakhshanda Jalil (trans.), New Delhi: Harper Perennial, 2011.
Premchand, The World of Premchand: Selected Stories of Premchand, David
Rubin (trans. and ed.), London: George Allen & Unwin, 1969.
Premchand, Twenty Four Stories by Premchand, Nandini Nopany and P. Lal
(trans.), New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1980.
Premchand, Widows, Wives and Other Heroines, David Rubin (trans. and
ed.), London: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Roadarmel, Gordon C., ‘Introduction’, in Premchand (ed.), Godaan: The Gift
of a Cow, Gordon C. Roadarmel (trans.), London: George Allen & Unwin,
1968, pp. xviii–xxv.
Srivastava, Lalit, ‘Introduction’, in Premchand (ed.), Karmabhumi, Lalit
Srivastava (trans.), New Delhi: 2006, pp. vii–xv.
Trivedi, Harish, ‘The Power of Premchand’, The Hindu Literary Review,
2 May 2004, p. 4.

56
 3
PREMCHAND IN GERMAN
LANGUAGE
Texts, paratexts and translations1

Christina Oesterheld

In the first part of the chapter I will give a brief overview of existing
translations of Premchand’s works into German, also mentioning the
institutional and literary context of any given translation. Basic ques-
tions time and again coming up in the discourse on literary transla-
tion are the need of glossaries or glosses in the translated text, the
right amount of local colour to be maintained in the translation and a
matching register of language. These will be addressed in the second
part using examples from existing translations. The third part will be
devoted to an analysis of selected passages from translations by differ-
ent translators which will serve as the basis for a discussion of trans-
lation techniques. Finally I will discuss questions of possible target
audiences and respective marketing strategies.
But before turning to the topic of translation, let me briefly mention
literature about Premchand in German. The earliest text dealing with
this prominent Indian writer probably was an article by Peter Gaeffke
titled ‘Die Stellung der indischen Christen im Urteil der Hindu nach
der Darstellung Premcands’ (The Position of Indian Christians as Pre-
sented by Premchand; 1962), followed by his ‘Zum Menschenbild in
den Erzählungen Premcands’ (On the Image of Man in Premchand’s
Stories), published in 1966. His essay on Hindi novels of the first half
of the twentieth century2 which includes passages on Sevasadan (The
House of Service; 1918), Premashram (The Abode of Love; 1922),
Rangabhumi (The Stage; 1925) and Kayakalp (Metamorphosis; 1926)
appeared in the same year.

57
 C hristina O esterheld

A doctoral dissertation in English using Premchand’s fiction as

source material for tracing the image of Hinduism in his writing was
submitted to the German University of Münster.3 It contained some
interesting points on the relation between literature and religion, fic-
tional and factual world and so on, but it probably did not at all con-
tribute to the propagation of Premchand’s works in German-speaking
countries. Gaeffke again devoted some pages to Premchand in his
Hindi Literature in the Twentieth Century, which was published in
Germany in 1978.4 Here he first mentioned Premchand in the context
of Gandhi’s influence on Hindi literature, judging that his early short
stories ‘were of no literary value, but breathed the spirit of national-
ism’5 and then dealt with the novels Sevasadan, Premashram, Karma-
bhumi (The Field of Action; 1932) and Rangabhumi6 and with Godaan
(The Gift of a Cow; 1936).7 All aforementioned works were addressed
to an academic audience and apparently were read only by the small
circle of scholars in the field.
While also not published in German, the work of the German scholar
Siegfried A. Schulz on Premchand nevertheless is of some interest here
because he discussed German translations. His first article on Prem-
chand dealt with Godaan,8 followed by a talk organised by the Indian
Council for Cultural Relations in New Delhi in 1981 titled ‘Prem-
chand: A Western Appraisal’, which also was clearly not meant for
consumption in Germany and was not translated into German.9 In
this, he mentioned that Premchand had received very little attention
in the German media. Only one German language newspaper, the
Swiss Neue Zürcher Zeitung, had published an article on the occa-
sion of his birth centenary.10 Schulz mainly concentrated on discuss-
ing Godaan with special emphasis on the social and political concerns
of the novel and the historical as well as literary background. But, he
was very well aware that only a close reading of the text would result
in ‘valid data in regard to literary criteria’.11 He also clearly advo-
cated a comparative approach and stressed the influence of Dickens
that he found to be very prominent in Godaan. His more elaborate
comparative study of Godaan and Dickens’ Hard Times had also
been published in English only and had probably not been noticed
even in German academia.12 The Urdu version of one of Premchand’s
stories [Hindi: ‘Do Bailon ki Katha’ (‘The Story of Two Bulls’), Urdu:
‘Do Bail’] was included in the Chrestomatie der Urdu-Prosa des 19.
und 20. Jahrhunderts (Reader of Urdu Prose from the 19th and 20th
Centuries; 1965) with a short introduction and a glossary, but no
translation.13

58
 P remchand in G erman language

German translations of Premchand

The following account cannot claim to be exhaustive. It includes only
those works which I could trace while working on the subject. It is
quite possible that further translations of short stories appeared in lit-
erary journals but are not listed in library catalogues. As far as I could
find out, Premchand was for the first time translated into German in
1958, not from the original Hindi (or Urdu, for that matter) but from
English. It was a collection of his short stories, published under the
title Eine Handvoll Weizen (A Handful of Wheat) by the East German
publisher Aufbau Verlag Berlin, based on an English collection of the
same name published by the People’s Publishing House, New Delhi, in
1955.14 The volume includes the following stories:

Hindi title English title German title

‘Sava Ser Gehun’ A Handful of Wheat Eine Handvoll Weizen

‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’ The Chess Players Die Schachspieler
‘Kazaki’ Kazaki Kasaki
‘Dikri ke Rupaye’ The Decree Das Urteil
‘Bade Ghar ki Beti’ Daughter of a Noble Die Tochter aus
Family vornehmer Familie
‘Samar Yatra’ The Battle March Der große Marsch
‘Idgah’ Idgah Das Idgach
‘Sujaan Bhagat’ Sujan the Devout Sujan der Fromme
‘Namak ka Daroga’ The Salt Inspector Der Salzinspektor
‘Ishwariya Nyaya’ Heavenly Justice Göttliche Gerechtigkeit
‘Panch Parmeshwar’ The Village Judge Der Dorfrichter
‘Poos ki Raat’ A Winter Night Eine Winternacht
‘Kafan’ The Shroud Das Leichentuch
‘Thakur ka Kuan’ The Thakur’s Well Der Brunnen des Thakur

It is obvious that the translations of the titles very closely follow

the English version. It needs to be mentioned, however, that one short
story from the English collection (‘Forgiveness’; Hindi: ‘Kshama’) was
not included in the German volume. Unless the story was added only
to the second edition of the English collection which I have before me
there might have been some ideological reasons for not including it
in the German volume, as it presented a very negative image of Mus-
lim rule in Spain and could thus be understood to instigate or spread
prejudices against a religious community.
The translation of ‘Kafan’ was republished in the anthology of
Indian short stories Der Tigerkönig (The Tiger King) in 1966.15

59
 C hristina O esterheld

Another short story, ‘Das Kind’ (The Child; Hindi: ‘Balak’) was trans-
lated by W. A. Orley from Madan Gupta’s English version and pub-
lished in the anthology Der sprechende Pflug (The Talking Plough)16 in
1962. In the same year, Der Brunnen des Thakur (The Thakur’s Well),
another anthology with stories by Premchand and others, was pub-
lished at Leipzig. Unfortunately I have not been able to get hold of this
book. These two collections were followed – with a considerable gap –
by two translations directly from Hindi which are the only translations
so far of novels by Premchand into German: Nirmala, translated by
Margot Gatzlaff,17 and Godaan, translated by Irene Zahra.18
The only German translations from Urdu versions of Premchand
stories I have before me were published after a gap of several years
in 1989 by Ursula Rothen in her reader Allahs indischer Garten: Ein
Lesebuch der Urdu-Literatur (Allah’s Indian Garden: A Reader of
Urdu Literature).19 The stories are ‘Zwei Ochsen’ (Do Bail) and ‘Die
Schachspieler’ (Shatranj ki Bazi). A collection of stories translated
from Hindi by Konrad Meisig was published in the same year, having
the ‘Chess Players’ as its title story.20 Here we have the only case of
three different German versions of one story, albeit based on Hindi/
English in the first case, on Urdu in the second and on Hindi in the
third. These three translations can thus offer a very good textual basis
for a comparative study on the translation praxis. The contents of this
second short story collection in German are as follows:

Hindi title German title

‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’ Die Schachspieler

‘Motor ke Chhinte’ Autospritzer
‘Thakur ka Kuan’ Thâkurs Brunnen
‘Poos ki Raat’ Eine Nacht im Januar
‘Sava Ser Gehun’ Eineinviertel Kilo Weizen
‘Nasha’ Der Rausch
‘Yah Bhi Nasha, Vah Bhi Nasha’ Rausch bleibt Rausch
‘Kafan’ Das Leichentuch
‘Atmaram’ Goldschmied und Papagei
‘Jadoo’ Die Bezauberung
‘Manovritti’ Das Naturell einer Hure
‘Juloos’ Die Demonstration
‘Moteramji Shastri’ Moterâm Jî Shâstrî
‘Do Bailon ki Katha’ Die Geschichte von den beiden Ochsen

As one can notice, five stories were already contained in the first
German collection, and these are among Premchand’s masterpieces

60
 P remchand in G erman language

which could not be excluded from any representative collection.

Meisig was aware of the earlier German translations and also con-
sulted a number of English translations, but it is obvious from his
renderings of the texts that he tried to arrive at his own version.
Last in the series of translations from Premchand is ‘Autospritzer’
(A Car Splashing; Hindi: ‘Motor ke Chhinte’), based on an English
translation of 1969, included in the anthology of Indian short stories
Zwischen den Welten (Between the Worlds) published on the occa-
sion of India as the main guest at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2006.21
Strangely enough, the translation from the original Hindi prepared by
Konrad Meisig was not used for this anthology – I am not sure whether
the editor of the publication was even aware of Meisig’s translation.
Here again a comparison of the two translations may yield interest-
ing results. While looking at the choice of texts and the paratext, it is
important to keep the circumstances of the publication in mind. In this
context I will briefly deal with only one publication: the short story
collection whose details were given above. It seems quite obvious that
the choice of the English collection published by the People’s Publish-
ing House was the first or even the only choice for the East German
publisher because of the close ideological affinity of the Indian pub-
lisher with the Soviet bloc. It is possible that financial concerns also
played a big part in the decision. The German Democratic Republic
(GDR) was always short of foreign exchange. Hence buying the rights
from any other publisher might have proved too costly. But apart from
such extra-literary considerations, the texts chosen for the People’s
Publishing House collection were representative enough, the quality of
P. C. Gupta’s translations was up to the mark and there were not too
many other English translations around at the time either. The trans-
lation obviously fitted well into the wider project of furthering ties
with non-aligned Third-World countries and of publicising literature
of social criticism which were close to the mode of socialist realism
prescribed for authors in the Soviet bloc in the late 1950s.
Apart from these ideological considerations, common readers in
the socialist countries were eager to read about life in parts of the
world to which they usually had no access. In the GDR, the publishing
house Volk und Welt (The People and the World) at Berlin was spe-
cialised on translations from foreign languages, but translated books
were published by many other publishing houses as well. Translated
literature from all languages, European as well as non-European, sold
very well. First editions were often sold out within a couple of days.
Books were usually subsidised and thus affordable for everybody. Pub-
lication and hence also translation choices were thus not necessarily

61
 C hristina O esterheld

based on commercial considerations. It needs to be stressed that until

the reunification of Germany, a wide range of Indian authors had been
published in the GDR, among them many who did not subscribe to
any formula of social realism.

Paratexts
In a panel on Hindi literature during a conference at Lisbon in July
2012, a participant strongly condemned the practice of adding explan-
atory notes, introductions or glossaries to literary translations. He
expressed the conviction that a literary text has to be trusted to stand
on its own feet. This may very well hold good for texts from similar
cultural backgrounds, but what about cultural translations between
not so similar realms? When the reader of the translation is to be left
alone with the text, any allusions to the source culture which are alien
to the target culture will largely go unnoticed, thus narrowing or limit-
ing the realisation of the text. The reader will probably fill the gaps in
the text and visualise images evoked by the text according to his/her
own cultural background. To a certain degree this is unavoidable and
also desirable, but if the source language/culture is completely oblit-
erated, the reader will miss a chance to expand his/her own knowledge
of the world and of the human situation in other parts of the world,
and will not delve into the unfamiliar. The delicate balance between
the familiar and the unfamiliar that a literary translation may achieve
will be tilted too much towards the familiar. Hence the decision for or
against a paratext should be made for any individual text in accord-
ance with its cultural content. The translation of a short story about
modern urban middle-class life may go very well without additional
explanations, whereas Godaan is a different matter altogether. Here,
as in the field of literature in general, one should not resort to pre-
scriptions of any kind. And as Nirmaljeet Oberoi beautifully put it,
by providing a detailed piece of cultural information ‘what we lose in
grace we may gain in communication’.22
André Lefevere advocated paratext exactly to overcome imperialist
appropriation:

When we no longer translate Chinese T’ang poetry ‘as if’

it were Imagist blank verse, which it manifestly is not, we
shall be able to understand T’ang poetry on its own terms.
This means, however, that we shall have to tell the readers of
our translation what T’ang poetry is really like, by means of

62
 P remchand in G erman language

introductions, the detailed analysis of selected texts, and such.

We shall, therefore, have to learn to skip the leap we often
call ‘of the imagination’ but which could be much more aptly
called ‘of imperialism’.23

He then added that this blame could not be laid on Western cul-
tures only – similar practices could be observed in Chinese translations
as well24 and probably in all cultures of the world. In keeping with
this practice, none of the books we deal with here was considered to
stand on its own without this additional material. The explanatory or
introductory texts usually include some information on the literary
tradition; the historical, cultural and social context of the texts; bio-
graphical notes on Premchand; and a more or less detailed evaluation
of his work. Some also refer to the language situation with regard to
Hindi and Urdu.
In Godaan, the postscript (‘Nachwort’) was written by Annemarie
Etter, a scholar of English and Sanskrit with an intimate knowledge of
India. The postscript of Nirmala was written by the translator Margot
Gatzlaff, a renowned scholar of Hindi, and that of the story collec-
tion Eine Handvoll Weizen by Bianca Schorr, a scholar specialised
on modern Indian history. Bianca’s outlook was more socio-political
than literary, and she laid more stress on the political and ideologi-
cal function of literature than on its aesthetic aspects. Her general
remarks on modern Indian literature as predominantly didactic, which
in her view the audience obviously demands and appreciates,25 reveal
a strong influence of the ‘Progressive’ concept of literature and also
demonstrate that she was not aware of the diversity of the literary
landscape of India. Margot Gatzlaff, the translator of Nirmala, wrote
a quite detailed ‘afterword’, outlining Premchand’s life and works
and their ideology but does not at all mention the process or method
of translation. Different postscripts thus also reflect the context of
publication. All books published in the GDR/East Germany devote
much space to Premchand’s progressive leanings and to the social situ-
ation depicted in his works. They are thus in keeping with the gen-
eral political atmosphere, with the meta-narrative of enlightenment,
emancipation and social progress and the centrality of class struggles.
Annemarie Etter’s postscript to the Godaan translation briefly outlines
the emergence of modern Hindi and describes Premchand’s life and
literary career in more detail than the earlier texts. She then goes on
to provide the historical and political background to the novel, sums
up the main storyline and presents a critical evaluation of the novel.

63
 C hristina O esterheld

Interestingly, her assessment of the social situation and the future out-
look for India’s peasantry is more pessimistic26 than that of Bianca
Schorr who in 1958 expressed high hopes for social uplift and success-
ful leftist politics in India.27
Konrad Meisig’s postscript is the shortest. After a brief outline of
Premchand’s life and literary activities, the topics and ideological con-
tent/background of his works, he stresses the great and lasting influ-
ence Premchand has had on Hindi literature – a fact the other writers
did not pay much attention to. Problematic is his statement that Urdu
was the language of Indian Muslims,28 and he also doesn’t bother to
mention that Premchand’s influence on Urdu fiction was as promi-
nent as on Hindi fiction. It should perhaps be mentioned that Meisig’s
volume appeared in a publishing house that specialised in scholarly
publications.
The most recent anthology of Indian short stories in German trans-
lation opens with an introduction by Cornelia Zetzsche, who has
not studied Indian languages and thus approaches Indian literatures
through English. Her lack of cultural knowledge is revealed in state-
ments such as the one in which she calls ghazals and the Urdu lan-
guage an invention of Muslim conquerors (‘Erfindung muslimischer
Eroberer’).29 She, nevertheless, strongly advocates translations from
Indian languages and presents a very modern outlook which con-
sciously avoids to ‘exoticise’ India and its literatures. Against this
background it cannot be understood why she did not use any of the
available direct translations from Indian languages for the anthology.
Words common to most glossaries are names of food items, gar-
ments, plants, religious terms, terms of address, place names, Indian
institutions such as panchayat and more abstract terms such as dharma
and so on, as well as objects of everyday use which have no counter-
parts in Germany. The most inaccurate glossary is the one accompa-
nying the anthology Der sprechende Pflug. Some of the glosses are
wrong, and some are too unspecific to add to a better understand-
ing of the text, for example, when ‘dupatta’ is explained/translated
as ‘ein Kleidungsstück’ (a piece of garment).30 In addition to a glos-
sary, Nirmala also contains footnotes explaining social customs such
as dowry, purdah and so on. The glossary of Zwischen den Welten
contains fewer mistakes and has more detailed explanations, but the
few mistakes to be found here are very annoying, such as placing the
Chandni Chowk in New Delhi31 or translating ‘Pitaji’ as ‘respected
Pita’32 without explaining what ‘pita’ means!! Despite their occasional
flaws, glossaries nevertheless build bridges for understanding some of
the underlying concepts, images, values and so on of the words used

64
 P remchand in G erman language

in the texts. Without such aids the German reader would not be able
to construct images of the items he/she comes across in a story in his/
her mind or to grasp at least some of the connotations of expressions
taken from another language.
An interesting case of a different kind of cultural translation is the
Urdu short stories of Munir D. Ahmad who lives in Germany. Most
of his stories deal with life in Germany and are populated overwhelm-
ingly by German characters. Instead of adding explanatory notes, the
author chose to give explanations of German phenomena in the lit-
erary text itself whereby the text as a whole turns into a means of
cultural information. These interferences, however, sometimes prove
to be a burden on the texture of the story, thus reducing the interest
in the characters and the action/readability. The practice to include
explanatory notes in the literary text itself is usually not adopted in the
translations under discussion here.

The translations
The four important translators from Hindi and Urdu have an aca-
demic background. They are well-versed in the respective Indian
language(s) and possess the required cultural knowledge. In contrast
to them, Marianne Grycz-Liebgen who translated the short stories
from English into German was a professional translator of European
languages without any expertise in Indian culture.
Translation of course is an endless process, as endless as the poten-
tial of a literary text. Any work can be translated all over again with
ever new results. ‘Intention and interpretation lead to different texts
in different situations. Each step means selection and a closing and
(re)opening of probabilities from both sides. But the sides never meet.’33
Translation, as all communication, thus results in a ‘reduction of com-
plexity’,34 and in translation we have a doubled case of communica-
tion, or, as Vermeer calls it, a two-step process35 with the translator as
the site of the change between two (or even more, in case of English
as the medium) systems. The stimulation achieved by the resulting
translation again contains its own complexities which are different
from the complexities of the source. The translator is influenced in his/
her choices by his/her own idiosyncrasies as well as by the more gen-
eral cultural and literary environment he/she works in, by the (imag-
ined) expectations of the target audience, the publisher, literary critics,
colleagues and so on. Hence different translations of a given text may
yield fascinating results with regard to the choices made by the trans-
lator. Such a thorough, word-by-word analysis of the complete texts

65
 C hristina O esterheld

can, however, not be attempted in the present chapter. Here the focus
will be on a few selected cultural items or concepts and some obvious
flaws in translation.
Among the translators, it is interesting to note that only Irene Zahra
commented upon her translation of Godaan and explained why she
deemed it necessary to have a short glossary added to the text. Moreo-
ver, she admitted to have ‘corrected’ the text where it seemed to con-
tain errors and inconsistencies due to the ill health and the early death
of the author who was not able to correct/copy-edit the manuscript.36
This practice might look highly questionable, but probably enhanced
the readability of the resulting German text. Basil Hatim remarked
with regard to translations from Arabic which he demonstrated as a
highly explicative language: ‘is there any point in impressing these dif-
ference on, say, some Europeans whose languages do not usually opt
for this high degree of explicitness?’37 A very good case in point would
be the very elaborate, precise descriptions of action in Hindi/Urdu
with the help of conjunctive participles, compound verbs, participle
constructions and so on. They usually have to be simplified in German
because the German language simply does not possess the linguistic
arsenal for such a minute dissection of an action. In some cases pre-
fixes added to a verb or adverbs may fulfil a similar function, but very
often a complex construction in Hindi/Urdu will have to be replaced
by a simple verb form in German. In a brief note preceding the text of
the novel, Irene Zahra also explained the cultural and religious mean-
ing of Godaan, which to my mind provided a good opening or point
of departure for the reading.

Comparing three translations of ‘The Chess Players’

This comparison is of course complicated by the fact that the three
translations are based on different source texts: the first on Hindi via
English, the second on a Hindi and the third on an Urdu version. Nev-
ertheless different strategies can perhaps be delineated. The main focus
here will be on the readability of the translations, naturally with a
view also to check their ‘correctness’ by which I mean the correspond-
ence with the atmosphere and overall sense of the original. It is not
my intention here to point out minor misunderstandings and mistakes
which may occur in any translation.
Ursula Rothen was well aware of the intricacies of translation. For
her prose translations she chose a reader-oriented approach trying
to make the resulting text as enjoyable, colourful and witty as pos-
sible. Thus, her translation is much more vivid than that of Marianne

66
 P remchand in G erman language

Grycz-Liebgen, and almost never too literal. At the same time, however,
her rendering of cultural items is closer to the original as it is based on
an actual knowledge of the realities of life in South Asia. Marianne
Grycz-Liebgen, in contrast, tends to adapt cultural expressions to items
known to a German reader. Thus, for example, surma turns into ‘Wim-
perntusche’ (mascara),38 in her version and missi into ‘Farben für die
Zähne’ (colour for the teeth),39 in both cases faithful translations of the
English version,40 while Rothen gives more literal translations (‘Augen-
schwärze’ and ‘Gaumenfärbepulver’, respectively).41 The latter two
words are perhaps her own creations – German does not have words
for these items. Meisig uses the same word for surma,42 but describes
missi as ‘Pulver zum Schwarzfärben der Zähne’ (powder to blacken
the teeth).43 The original Urdu/Hindi words or German equivalents do
not appear in their glossaries. This leads me to the question: which
translation works better for a German reader without knowledge of
the subcontinent? Do the unfamiliar words used by Rothen or Meisig
succeed in evoking an image of the item in question? Is it perhaps more
appropriate to use words and create images of similar or related items
which are known to the common reader? For a well-informed reader
of course Rothen’s accuracy is more enjoyable because she/he can make
the link to the object concerned with all its connotations and asso-
ciations. The same is not possible for anybody without this cultural
knowledge. Missi poses an additional problem. Beautiful teeth should
be white – a concept that is common to many cultures. The function of
missi as a beautifier would thus require further explanation in addition
to just naming or describing the item. Such an explanation, however, is
nowhere to be found, not even in standard dictionaries.
Marianne Grycz-Liebgen’s translation as a whole captures the tone
and atmosphere of the story, but occasionally deviates quite substan-
tially from the original. Many of these deviations are based on mis-
takes in the English version, thus her translation of ‘Hazrat Husain’
as ‘Prophet(en) Hussain’44 following the English ‘prophet Hussain’.45
The word ‘prophet’ does not of course occur in the Hindi and Urdu
versions which have ‘Hazrat Hussain’46 and the phrase ‘shaheed-i Kar-
bala’47 instead. Again the word ‘prophet’ is used wrongly as a transla-
tion of ‘vali’ in the English48 and German49 versions. This is a serious
mistake, given the cultural and religious implications. A German trans-
lator with cultural knowledge of the subcontinent and particularly of
Muslim concepts could have corrected the inaccuracies of the English
translation. Another considerable shift in meaning appears when the
begum goes until the threshold of the sitting room but hesitates to
enter – her deeply imbibed sense of modesty does not allow her to face

67
 C hristina O esterheld

a male stranger. This fact does not become really clear in the German
translation which says ‘durfte aber nicht weitergehen’ (was, however,
not allowed to proceed further). The subtle nuance that she has interi-
orised this inhibition is lost in Grycz-Liebgen’s translation.50 Rothen’s
translation51 clearly brings out this fact and hence is more appropriate.
Meisig is the only translator who used diacritical marks for long
vowels. He also provides some information on the pronunciation of
Indian names, which seems necessary because he follows the English
spelling, but strangely enough he does not explain his diacritical mark
for vowel length. In all other translations there are no diacritics. Indian
names are written in a ‘Germanised’ form to facilitate a pronuncia-
tion which approximates the original, such as ‘Dschunija’ instead of
‘Juniya’. This is in line with German publishers’ guidelines. Diacritics
are generally understood to obstruct the reading of the text and to
look too academic.

Comparing two translations of ‘Motor ke Chhinte’

Even a first glance reveals that in many instances Meisig’s translation
is more colloquial and better catches the ironic tone of the original.
On the other hand, some formulations read better in the indirect trans-
lation, but there are a few factual mistakes in the translation from
English, such as ‘Feldweg’ (‘dirt track’)52 instead of ‘Gasse’ (lane) for
the Hindi ‘gali’.53 A more serious flaw is the omission of the ‘Sahib’s’
identity in the translation from English. The Hindi text does not leave
any doubt about the fact that the gentleman in the car is a colonial
officer. The ironic phrase ‘sahib bahadur’ already suggests as much,
and his a-grammatical Hindi provides the final clue. Hence Meisig
clearly identifies him as a colonial officer in his translation.54 His wife
is marked as British by the denomination ‘mem sahib’, which both
translators retain, but the explanation of ‘Memsahib’ as ‘Anrede’
(form of address) in the glossary to Zwischen den Welten55 does not
clarify anything for the uninformed reader. A problem faced by both
translators and solved by neither of them is the very ‘English’ Hindi
of the officer. In the translations he speaks correct standard German.
Would it have been more to the point to have him speak broken
German? I am not sure – it really is a difficult decision.

The translations of Nirmala and Godaan

Of the three translators we are concerned with here, Margot Gatzlaff’s
approach appears the most text-oriented, which occasionally impedes

68
 P remchand in G erman language

the aesthetic quality of the end result. Thus, for instance, she trans-
lated some idiomatic expressions too literally. A case in point is ‘dur se
salaam karna’56 which in its literal translation sounds odd and doesn’t
make much sense for a German reader. A better translation would
have been ‘kann mir gestohlen bleiben’. At other places, however, she
has tried her best to translate the text into idiomatic German.

The translation of ‘Balak’

This story is an example of a lot of information and nuances lost
on the way. Some reduction of the original text occurred already in
the English translation, and some more inaccuracies and omissions
were added during the translation from English into German. Thus,
the German text reads very matter-of-fact, laconic even, while in the
original we find many asides; many statements are clearly marked as
the first-person-narrator’s opinion, assumption or impression, all of
which is left out in the translation. Thus, when the changed expression
on Gangu’s face is meticulously described by the narrator in the first
scene in which the reader encounters him,57 this detailed impression is
completely omitted. The translated text is thus watered down and gets
more one-dimensional than the original. There also are some changes
in the sequence of the sentences in the English version by which the
translator probably wanted to improve on the story, but these changes
are not for the better. The narrator’s emotional reactions are cut short,
and the final paragraph is bereft of some of its most poignant sen-
tences in which the narrator accuses himself of mean-heartedness. The
blame for most of these blunders has to be put on the English transla-
tion, but more damage was also added by the German translator.

Conclusion
As was to be expected, translation is always conditioned by the respec-
tive context. The examples have clearly demonstrated how formula-
tions in the target language and even more obviously the paratexts
were influenced by the time at which the text was translated, the for-
mat or mode of publication, and the socio-political circumstances. The
fact that none of the translations discussed in this chapter stand on
their own – all are supported by paratexts – points to the need that
was felt for cultural translation beyond the literary text itself.
The choice of texts for translation is quite representative. Prem-
chand’s most famous short stories and Godaan, the novel widely
understood to be his best, are available in German translation, albeit

69
 C hristina O esterheld

perhaps mostly unnoticed by the general reading public. The above

analysis indicates that an intimate knowledge of the subcontinent is
vital for arriving at appropriate translations. Translations through
English need not necessarily be inferior to those from the original lan-
guages if the English translations they are based on do not deviate
too much from the text and if the German translations are edited or
proofread by a person with the cultural competence required for an
accurate and at the same time intelligible representation of the origi-
nal. Without such a counter-check, the result may contain a number of
serious misrepresentations. On the other hand, judging from my own
experience it is essential to have the draft read by a person without
knowledge of the subcontinent when a translation is produced by a
South Asianist because only such an ‘uninformed’ person will be able
to point out where the text is unintelligible for a common reader and
where the language of the translation is too close to the original, mak-
ing it sound awkward or clumsy in German. Ideally, thus, a translation
project should always involve at least two persons, one specialised in
the source language and culture and the other one a native speaker of
the target language without knowledge of the source language.
There also is an astonishing imbalance in the ratio between transla-
tions from Hindi and those from Urdu. The strikingly small amount of
translations from Urdu can perhaps only be explained by the predomi-
nance of scholars dealing with Hindi as compared to those working on
Urdu. It is also possible that Hindi texts were more easily available and
in better editions. Another noteworthy fact is the still limited number
of translations from Premchand’s voluminous oeuvre, given his high
status in the canon of Hindi and Urdu prose writing and the amount
of translations of later Hindi writers (Nirmal Verma, Yashpal, Mohan
Rakesh, Uday Prakash, to name only the most prominent ones). Do
his works not appeal to the modern publisher/critic/reader? Have they
lost their cultural and social meaning? The recent re-publication of the
Godaan translation and its critical acclaim would suggest otherwise,
but generally mainstream publishers are more interested in contem-
porary writing of a less overtly social-realist and occasionally idealist
nature. The small independent publishing house Draupadi at Heidel-
berg which is specialised on translations from Indian languages does
favour critical literature, but also has its main focus on contemporary
writing. Hence we perhaps cannot expect much to be done in the near
future as far as translating Premchand into German is concerned. As
far as the existing translations are concerned, only Godaan is still avail-
able in the recent edition. The older publications other than Godaan
have been out of print for a long time, and there is no chance of them

70
 P remchand in G erman language

getting re-published. Nirmala, Der Tigerkönig and Eine Handvoll

Weizen can be found in Internet portals offering second-hand books,
but Die Schachspieler seems to be unavailable even there.
Unfortunately, in Germany the choice with mainstream publishers
often is to have a translation from the English version or none at all.
Publishers tend to rely on the selection of authors who have been suc-
cessful in the English-language market instead of making their own
risky and more costly choices. Thus, suggestions for translations from
Indian languages usually originate from specialists of these languages
in academia, not from publishers. As far as I can see, aggressive mar-
keting is essential for the success of any book in the marketplace, and
we have never seen anything of the kind of marketing that English
language novels by Indian or non-residential Indian authors get in the
case of any Indian novel translated from a language other than English.

Notes
1 A version of this article was published in the Annual of Urdu Studies
(Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia, University of Wisconsin-
Madison), No 28, 2013.
2 Peter Gaeffke, Hindiromane in der Ersten Hälfte des Zwanzigsten Jahr-
hunderts, Leiden: Brill, 1966.
3 Peter Schreiner, The Reflection of Hinduism in the Works of Premcand,
unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Münster, 1972.
4 Peter Gaeffke, Hindi Literature in the Twentieth Century [Jan Gonda
(ed.), A History of Indian Literature, vol. 8, fasc. 5], Wiesbaden: Harras-
sowitz, 1978.
5 Ibid., p. 36.
6 Ibid., pp. 38–41.
7 Ibid., pp. 52–3.
8 Siegfried A. Schulz, ‘Premchand’s Novel Godan: Echoes of Charles Dick-
ens in an Indian Setting’, in Josep M. Sola-Solé, Alessandro S. Crisafulli,
and Siegfried A. Schulz (eds), Studies in Honor of Tatiana Fotitch, Wash-
ington, DC: Catholic University Press, 1972, pp. 341–66.
9 This was later published as a book; Siegfried A. Schulz, Premchand: A West-
ern Appraisal, New Delhi: Indian Council for Cultural Relations, 1981.
10 Ibid., p. 21.
11 Ibid., p. 25.
12 Siegfried A. Schulz, ‘Premchand’s Novel Godan: Echoes of Charles
Dickens in an Indian Setting’, in Josep M. Sola-Solé, Alessandro S.
Crisafulli, and Siegfried A. Schulz (eds), Studies in Honor of Tatiana
Fotitch, Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 1972, pp. 341–66.
13 M. A. Ansari and D. Ansari (eds), Chrestomathie der Urdu-Prosa des 19.
und 20. Jahrhunderts [Reader of Urdu Prose from the Nineteenth and
Twentieth Centuries], Leipzig: Verlag Enzyklopädie, 1965. A second edi-
tion, which was both a revised and an enlarged version of the first one,
came out in 1977.

71
 C hristina O esterheld

14 Premchand [Premtschand], Eine Handvoll Weizen: Erzählungen (A Hand-

ful of Wheat: Stories), Aus dem Englischen übersetzt nach der autorisierten
Auswahl und Übertragung aus dem Hindi von Marianne Grycz-Liebgen,
Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1958.
15 Helga Anton, Gisela Leiste, Helmut Nespital, Ilse Steiger and Kamil Zvel-
ebil (eds), Der Tigerkönig (The Tiger King), Berlin: Verlag Volk und Welt,
1966.
16 W. A. Orley, Der sprechende Pflug: Indien (The Talking Plough, India),
in Erzählungen Seiner Besten Zeitgenössischen Autoren, Auswahl und
Redaktion W. A. Orley, Herrenalb; Schwarzwald: Horst Erdmann Verlag,
1962.
17 Premchand, Nirmala Oder die Geschichte eines Bitteren Lebens (Nirmala,
or the Story of a Bitter Life), Aus dem Hindi, Übersetzung, Nachwort und
Anmerkungen von Margot Gatzlaff, Leipzig: Verlag Philipp Reclam jun,
1976.
18 Premchand, Godan Oder die Opfergabe: Roman (Godan or the Offering:
A Novel), Aus dem Hindi übersetzt von Irene Zahra, Nachwort von Anne-
marie Etter, Zürich: Manesse Verlag, 1979.
19 Ursula Rothen-Dubs, Allahs Indischer Garten: Ein Lesebuch der Urdu-
Literatur (Allah’s Indian Garden: A Reader of Urdu Literature), Frauen-
feld: Verlag im Waldgut, 1989.
20 Premchand [Premcand], Die Schachspieler: Erzählungen (The Chess Play-
ers: Stories), Aus dem Hindi übersetzt von Konrad Meisig, in Zusam-
menarbeit mit Petra Christophersen, Wiesbaden: Sammlung Harrassowitz,
1989.
21 Cornelia Zetzsche (ed.), Zwischen den Welten: Geschichten aus dem Mod-
ernen Indien (Between the Worlds: Stories from Modern India), Frankfurt;
Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 2006.
22 Nirmaljeet Oberoi, ‘Translating Culture: Theory and Practice’, in Anisur
Rahman and Ameena Kazi Ansari (eds), Translation/Representation, New
Delhi: Creative Books, 2007, p. 56.
23 André Lefevere, ‘Composing the Other’, in Susan Bassnett and Harish
Trivedi (eds), Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, London;
New York: Routledge, 1999, p. 78.
24 Ibid., p. 78.
25 Bianca Schorr, Nachwort (‘Postscript’) to Eine Handvoll Weizen:
Erzählungen (A Handful of Wheat), Aus dem Englischen übersetzt nach
der autorisierten Auswahl und Übertragung aus dem Hindi von Marianne
Grycz-Liebgen, Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1958, p. 200.
26 Annemarie Etter, Nachwort (‘Postscript’) to Godan Oder Die Opfergabe:
Roman, Aus dem Hindi übersetzt von Irene Zahra, Nachwort von Anne-
marie Etter, Zürich: Manesse Verlag, 1979, p. 716.
27 Schorr, Nachwort, p. 208.
28 Konrad Meisig, Nachwort (‘Postscript’) to Die Schachspieler: Erzählungen
(The Chess Players: Stories), Aus dem Hindi übersetzt von Konrad Meisig
in Zusammenarbeit mit Petra Christophersen, Wiesbaden: Sammlung
Harrassowitz, 1989, p. 136.
29 Zetzsche (ed.), Zwischen den Welten, p. 17.
30 Orley, Der sprechende Pflug, p. 425.
31 Zetzsche (ed.), Zwischen den Welten, p. 697.

72
 P remchand in G erman language

32 Ibid., p. 708.
33 Hans J. Vermeer, Luhmann’s ‘Social Systems’ Theory: Preliminary Frag-
ments for a Theory of Translation, Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2006, p. 52.
34 Luhmann as quoted in Vermeer, Ibid., p. 64.
35 Ibid., p. 67.
36 Irene Zahra (trans.), Zur Übersetzung (‘About the Translation’) Note to
Godan Oder Die Opfergabe: Roman, Aus dem Hindi übersetzt von Irene
Zahra, Nachwort von Annemarie Etter, Zürich: Manesse Verlag, 1979, 718.
37 Basil Hatim, Communication across Cultures: Translation Theory and
Contrastive Text Linguistics, Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997, p. xv.
38 Premchand [Premtschand], Eine Handvoll Weizen, p. 15.
39 Ibid., p. 15.
40 Premchand, A Handful of Wheat and Other Stories, P. C. Gupta (trans.),
New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1962, p. 9.
41 Rothen-Dubs, Allahs Indischer Garten, p. 235.
42 Premchand [Premcand], Die Schachspieler: Erzählungen, p. 1.
43 Ibid., p. 1.
44 Premchand [Premtschand], Eine Handvoll Weizen, p. 18.
45 Premchand, A Handful of Wheat and Other Stories, p. 12.
46 Premchand, Premchand Rachnavali, Ram Anand (ed.), 20 vols, Delhi:
Janvani Prakhashan, 1996, vol. 13, p. 107.
47 Premchand, Premchand ki Bis Kahaniyan (tartib, intikhab-o-tanqid)
Dr. Anvar Ahmad, Lahore: Beacon Books, 2003, p. 128.
48 Premchand, A Handful of Wheat and Other Stories, p. 12.
49 Premchand [Premtschand], Eine Handvoll Weizen, p. 19.
50 Ibid., p. 12.
51 Rothen-Dubs, Allahs Indischer Garten, p. 239.
52 Zetzsche (ed.), Zwischen den Welten, p. 121.
53 Premchand, Premchand Rachnavali, vol. 15, p. 470.
54 Premchand [Premcand], Die Schachspieler: Erzählungen, p. 17.
55 Zetzsche (ed.), Zwischen den Welten, p. 705.
56 Premchand, Nirmala Oder die Geschichte, p. 12.
57 Premchand, Premchand Rachnavali, vol. 15, p. 181.

Bibliography
Ansari, M. A. and Ansari, D. (eds), Chrestomathie der Urdu-Prosa des 19. und
20. Jahrhunderts (Reader of Urdu Prose from the Nineteenth and Twentieth
Centuries), Leipzig: Verlag Enzyklopädie, 1965.
Ansari, M. A. and Ansari, D. (eds), Chrestomathie der Urdu-Prosa des 19. und
20. Jahrhunderts (Reader of Urdu Prose from the Nineteenth and Twenti-
eth Centuries), 2nd edition, rev. & enlarged, Leipzig: Verlag Enzyklopädie,
1977.
Anton, Helga, Gisela Leiste, Helmut Nespital, Ilse Steiger and Kamil Zvelebil
(eds), Der Tigerkönig (The Tiger King), Berlin: Verlag Volk und Welt, 1966.
Ette, Annemarie, Nachwort (Postscript) to Godan Oder Die Opfergabe:
Roman, Aus dem Hindi übersetzt von Irene Zahra, Nachwort von Anne-
marie Etter, Zürich: Manesse Verlag, 1979, pp. 705–16.

73
 C hristina O esterheld

Gaeffke, Peter, ‘Die Stellung der Indischen Christen im Urteil der Hindu Nach
der Darstellung Premcands’ (The Position of Indian Christians in the View
of Hindus as Presented by Premchand), Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde
Süd- und Ostasiens und Archiv für Indische Philosophie, 1962, band VI:
15–28.
Gaeffke, Peter, Hindi Literature in the Twentieth Century [Jan Gonda (ed.),
A History of Indian Literature, vol. 8, fasc. 5], Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz,
1978.
Gaeffke, Peter, Hindiromane in der Ersten Hälfte des Zwanzigsten Jahrhun-
derts, Leiden: Brill, 1966.
Gaeffke, Peter, ‘Zum Menschenbild in den Erzählungen Premcands’ (On the
Image of Man in Premchand’s Stories), in Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde
Süd- und Ostasiens und Archiv für Indische Philosophie, 1966, band X,
pp. 6–65.
Hatim, Basil, Communication across Cultures: Translation Theory and Con-
trastive Text Linguistics, Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997.
Lefevere, André, ‘Composing the Other’, in Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi
(eds), Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, London; New York:
Routledge, 1999, pp. 75–94.
Meisig, Konrad, Nachwort (‘Postscript’) to Die Schachspieler: Erzählungen
(The Chess Players: Stories), Aus dem Hindi übersetzt von Konrad Meisig
in Zusammenarbeit mit Petra Christophersen, Wiesbaden: Sammlung Har-
rassowitz, 1989, pp. 135–8.
Oberoi, Nirmaljeet, ‘Translating Culture: Theory and Practice’, in Anisur
Rahman and Ameena Kazi Ansari (eds), Translation/Representation, New
Delhi: Creative Books, 2007, pp. 50–6.
Orley, W. A., Der sprechende Pflug: Indien (The Talking Ploough, India) in
Erzählungen Seiner Besten Zeitgenössischen Autoren, Auswahl und Redak-
tion W. A. Orley, Herrenalb; Schwarzwald: Horst Erdmann Verlag, 1962.
Premchand [Prem Chand], A Handful of Wheat and Other Stories, 2nd edi-
tion, P. C. Gupta (Selected and trans.), New Delhi: People’s Publishing
House, 1962.
Premchand [Premcand], Die Schachspieler: Erzählungen (The Chess Players:
Stories), Aus dem Hindi übersetzt von Konrad Meisig in Zusammenarbeit
mit Petra Christophersen, Wiesbaden: Sammlung Harrassowitz, 1989.
Premchand [Premtschand], Eine Handvoll Weizen: Erzählungen (A Handful
of Wheat: Stories), Aus dem Englischen übersetzt nach der autorisierten
Auswahl und Übertragung aus dem Hindi von Marianne Grycz-Liebgen,
Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1958.
Premchand, Godan Oder die Opfergabe: Roman (Godan, or the Offering:
A Novel), Aus dem Hindi übersetzt von Irene Zahra, Nachwort von Anne-
marie Etter, Zürich: Manesse Verlag, 1979.
Premchand, Nirmala Oder die Geschichte eines Bitteren Lebens (Nirmal, or the
Story of a Bitter Life), Aus dem Hindi, übersetzung, nachwort und anmerkun-
gen von Margot Gatzlaff, Leipzig: Verlag Philipp Reclam jun, 1976.

74
 P remchand in G erman language

Premchand, Premchand ki Bis Kahaniyan (tartib, intikhab-o-tanqid) (Twenty

Stories by Premchand. Compilation, Selection and Criticism), Dr. Anvar
Aḥmad, Lahore: Beacon Books, 2003.
Premchand, Premchand Rachnavali, Ram Anand (ed.), 20 vols, Delhi: Janvani
Prakhashan, 1996.
Premchand, The Great Stories of Munshi Premchand: A Collection of Best
Writings by the Writer of the Masses, Worded by Virena Varma, Delhi:
Manoj Publications, 1962.
Premchand, The Secret of Culture and Other Stories, Madan Gupta (trans.),
Bombay: Jaico Publishing House, 1960.
Premchand, Widows, Wives, and Other Heroines: Twelve Stories, David
Rubin (trans.), Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Rothen-Dubs, Ursula, Allahs Indischer Garten: Ein Lesebuch der Urdu-
Literatur (Allah’s Indian Garden: A Reader of Urdu Literature), Frauenfeld:
Verlag im Waldgut, 1989.
Schorr, Bianca, Nachwort (‘Postscript’) to Eine Handvoll Weizen: Erzählun-
gen (A Handful of Wheat: Stories), Aus dem Englischen übersetzt nach
der autorisierten Auswahl und Übertragung aus dem Hindi von Marianne
Grycz-Liebgen, Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1958, pp. 199–209.
Schreiner, Peter, The Reflection of Hinduism in the Works of Premcand,
unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Münster, 1972.
Schulz, Siegfried A., Premchand: A Western Appraisal, New Delhi: Indian
Council for Cultural Relations, 1981.
Schulz, Siegfried A., ‘Premchand’s Novel Godan: Echoes of Charles Dickens
in an Indian Setting’, in Josep M. Sola-Solé, Alessandro S. Crisafulli, and
Siegfried A. Schulz (eds), Studies in Honor of Tatiana Fotitch, Washington,
DC: Catholic University Press, 1972, pp. 341–66.
Shashtri, Shanti (ed.), Der Brunnen des Thakur: Indische Erzählungen (The
Thakur’s Well: Indian Stories), Marianne Grycz-Liebgen (trans.), Leipzig:
Reclams Universal-Bibliothek, 1962.
Vermeer, Hans J., Luhmann’s ‘Social Systems’ Theory: Preliminary Fragments
for a Theory of Translation, Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2006.
Zahra, Irene (trans.), Zur Übersetzung (‘About the Translation’) Note to
Godan Oder Die Opfergabe: Roman (Godan, or the Offering: A Novel),
Aus dem Hindi übersetzt von Irene Zahra, Nachwort von Annemarie Etter,
Zürich: Manesse Verlag, 1979, pp. 717–18.
Zetzsche, Cornelia (ed.), Zwischen den Welten: Geschichten aus dem Mod-
ernen Indien (Between the Worlds: Stories from Modern India), Frankfurt;
Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 2006.

75
 4
PREMCHAND IN RUSSIAN
Translation, reception, adaptation

Guzel Strelkova

Premchand, one of the greatest Indian writers, has profoundly influ-

enced Hindi literature. The translation and reception of his works in
other world languages is a valid enquiry for research. For Russian
readers, Premchand shares equal stature with Rabindranath Tagore
in terms of popularity. These two writers have remained stellar rep-
resentatives of Indian literature in Russia. For Premchand, USSR has
been particularly hospitable, and many of his works were translated
into Russian much before they began to be translated into English or
any other European language, or even many Indian languages.

Beginnings: early Premchand

translations into Russian
Translation of Premchand’s work began in Russia in as early as the
late1920s, and by the fifth decade of the twentieth century, more than
fifty of Premchand’s short stories1 and six of his novels were translated
into Russian from both Hindi and Urdu. Further, some of these trans-
lations were retranslated into languages of the former Soviet Union
(Armenian, Kazakh, Lithuanian, Tajik, Tatar, Uzbek and others).
These editions ran into hundreds of thousands in absolute numbers
which confirm a huge readership. From today’s vantage point, it might
seem a forgotten chapter of the past century. Hence it is important
to recollect and preserve what has been done in this field. The aim of
the present chapter is to present a review of Russian translations of
Premchand’s works. The purpose is not to criticise or evaluate some
translations, and to denigrate others, but to show the results of serious
efforts of many Russian Indologists and translators, which confirm the
importance of Premchand in Russian language and culture.

76
 P remchand in R ussian

The earliest translation of a Premchand story took place not in

Russian, but Ukrainian, published in a magazine called Chervony
shlyah.2 The story was ‘Saut’ (Савт) translated by A. P. Barannikov.
During that period Barannikov3 was a professor of Leningrad Ori-
ental Institute (since 1939 – Full Member of the Soviet Academy of
Science), who introduced studies of contemporary Indian philology
in place of classical studies of India.4 In 1927, Barannikov wrote a
review on Premchand’s translation of Leo Tolstoy’s short stories5 titled
Taalstaay ki Kahaaniyaan.6 The review began with a passage which
stressed the importance and necessity of modern Indian languages
and their studies, along with studies of literature written in those lan-
guages.7 It was also noted that European (and naturally, English) lit-
erature attracts the attention of Indian readers and is translated into
Indian languages. Among the Russian writers, Leo Tolstoy was the
most popular in India, thanks to Mahatma Gandhi, who popularised
his writings, especially those of a moral and philosophic character.8
Barannikov introduced Premchand, the translator of Tolstoy’s sto-
ries, as ‘the most prolific writer of Modern India, the author of many
stories, novellas and novels’,9 adding to his list collections of stories,
such as Sapt Saroj, Prem Purnima, Prem Pachisi, the novel Premash-
ram and others, that were translated into many Indian languages. It
is interesting that Barannikov made a cautious assertion that the rep-
etition of the word ‘prem’ (love) in the title of Premchand’s books
lent credence to the idea that he was influenced by Tolstoy’s ideas
expressed in his ‘A Letter to a Hindu’, in which he wrote about love
as ‘one of the most powerful factors in human relations’. Barannikov
states: ‘in one of Premchand’s latest novels a hero founded an original
agricultural community which closely resembled Tolstoy’s communi-
ties.’10 He gave the titles of all twenty-one stories, included in the col-
lection, in their original Russian form followed by a Hindi title with its
Russian translation in brackets, as in the following examples:

‘Бог правду видит, да не скоро скажет’11 (‘Kshama Daan’ –

‘Милосердный’12)
‘Кавказский пленник’13 (‘Rajput Qaidi’ – ‘Раджпут-пленник’14)
‘Зерно с куриное яйцо’15 (‘Ande ke Barabar Daana’ – ‘Зерно с куриное
яйцо’)16

The reviewer clearly showed, but did not immediately comment on

the fact that some of the titles differed from the original. A reader can
see that, for instance, Premchand has replaced ‘the Caucasian’ in ‘The
Caucasian captive’, with ‘Rajput’; ‘God Sees the Truth, but Will not

77
 G uzel S trelkova

Speak Fast’ was completely changed by the translator into ‘Kshama

Daan’ (Gift of Forgiveness). However, some of the titles were trans-
lated ‘word for word’, for instance, ‘Три вопроса’ (‘Three Questions’ in
English) was translated as ‘Teen Prashn’. After praising ‘a true to life,
metaphoric, simple language and at the same time following the can-
ons of classical Hindi’ language by Premchand and pointing out some
Sanskrit and Urdu words used by him, Barannikov wrote: ‘The mere
list of the titles of some stories shows that Premchand’s attitude to the
texts by Tolstoy, accessed in English translation, was rather free.’17 The
reviewer also noted that some of the titles followed the English transla-
tion of the Russian original, but some of the titles showed that the place
of action in the stories was shifted to India, and so the characters and
situations were domesticated. Barannikov chose to comment on Prem-
chand’s translation of one of the shortest stories in this collection, which
was close to the original text, but not the title. It was ‘Девочки умнее
стариков’ (Girls Are Cleverer Than Old Men), in Hindi titled as ‘Baal
Leela’ (Children’s Game).18 For this purpose he translated the entire
story. This translation of ‘Baal Leela’ undertaken by Barannikov for his
review, in 1927, can be considered the first translation of a Premchand
story from Hindi into Russian. Premchand’s art of translation in which
domestication played a major part is also in evidence here: the story
starts at Holi (instead of Easter), the two girls are named Maya and
Devaki and a fight between grown-ups is designated as ‘Mahabharata’.
Barannikov stressed in his review that in comparison with other
stories this one was not altered much in translation. He showed more
serious changes in a story titled ‘Ek Admi ko Kitni Bhumi Chaahiye’
(How Much Land Does a Man Need). The elder and younger sisters
in the Russian original are nameless, but they are named as Urmila
and Nirmala in Premchand’s translation. Yet, the main alteration
was in the story’s form because a narration in the original story was
transformed into a dialogue between the sisters in Hindi. The Russian
scholar noted that ‘such dramatic form is normal for Indian novels,
novellas and stories,’19 and praised Premchand for his eagerness to
make Tolstoy’s high moral ideas and the Russian writer’s simple lan-
guage clear to an ordinary, common Indian reader. Premchand ‘intro-
duced many local changes and fulfilled his task with great success’.20
Concluding his review, Barannikov stressed that the translations and
adaptation of Tolstoy’s stories and fairy tales by Premchand coincided
with the period of the non-cooperation movement. Quite significantly,
this collection was published in a series of books which popularised
the idea of non-cooperation (asahyog). Such ideological conclusion
was typical for Soviet scholars of those early years and predicted the

78
 P remchand in R ussian

direction in which Premchand’s creations were translated, studied and

commented upon in the Soviet Union. Premchand was seen as a father
figure in Hindi/Urdu literature who fought for the happiness of the
proletariat, the downtrodden and especially the peasants.
In 1934, Barannikov wrote another article on Premchand. It was
titled ‘Sapt Saroj by Premchand’,21 which was initially included in
a collection of articles written to commemorate S. F. Oldenburg – a
renowned historian and philologist, and the founder of Russian Indol-
ogy and Buddhology. In the article Barannikov briefly introduced
Premchand as the best fiction-writer in Hindi and Urdu, quoting some
Indian critics who recognised the artistic merit of Premchand’s nov-
els. Barannikov noted that Premchand used a new literary style and
introduced a new genre where ‘a deep psychological depth was given
to social moments’.22

Translations: 1950s–1970s
As we can see, there were only two or three stories of Premchand
translated into Russian by the 1930s, and yet two critical articles came
out immediately following them. Here, it will be appropriate to men-
tion the translation by L. D. Handrov titled ‘Nakazanie za Chestnost’’
(‘Sajjanata ka Dand’; Punishment for Honesty) which was published
in a literary magazine called Vestnik Inostrannoy Literatury (Bulletin
of Foreign Literature), edited by Barannikov in 1930.23 Most prob-
ably, these translations were the earliest among Premchand’s transla-
tions into any foreign language. It was through Barannikov’s efforts
that a small circle of Russian scholars and translators interested in
India emerged who were instrumental in spreading Premchand’s works
across Russia. Later, one of them, V. I. Balin, became an avid scholar
of modern Indian literature and specialised in Premchand’s stories and
early novels. In one of his earliest articles in 1958, titled ‘Premchand
and His Novels Premashram and Godaan’,24 he remarked, ‘scientific
research on Premchand’s writings outside his motherland began for the
first time in the Soviet Union. The thorough realism and original char-
acter of Premchand’s talent was noted by an outstanding Soviet Indolo-
gist and academician A. P. Barannikov more than twenty years back.’25
Another prominent Indologist, V. M. Beskrovny, a younger col-
league of Barannikov and the author of Urdu–Russian (1951), Hindi–
Russian (1953), and Russian–Hindi (1957) dictionaries, wrote two
articles on Premchand towards the end of the 1940s. The first one was
on his drama Sangram,26 which Beskrovny discussed as a social drama.
The second article, titled ‘Premchand (1880–1936)’,27 was about the

79
 G uzel S trelkova

great Hindi writer’s life and creations. There were two more publica-
tions of Premchand’s stories translated into Russian from English in
the 1940s: ‘Put’ k Spaseniju’ (The Way to Rescue) which was trans-
lated by someone called L. I. and published in a magazine, Smena,
in 1946.28 The other one, ‘Smirenie’ (Humbleness) was translated by
O. Kholmskaya and published in a weekly, Ogonek, in 1948.29 But
it took nearly twenty years after initial studies of Premchand’s prose
to attract real attention of Russian readers to his stories and novels.
It could happen only after serious historical and political changes in
the Soviet Union and worldwide. After a visit of top Soviet officials
N. A. Bulganin and N. S. Khruschev to India in November 1955, the
relationship between the two countries developed considerably. The
Decree of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR confirmed the successful
development of relations and cooperation between the two countries
in different fields. It also assured that special measures ‘will be taken
to increase mutual knowledge of life, achievements and culture of each
other’.30 This prompted the translation of many of Premchand’s sto-
ries and later some of his novels like Rangabhumi, Nirmala, Karma-
bhumi, Ghaban, Godaan and Vardan into Russian in the mid- and
late 1950s.
V. I. Balin, in his essay mentioned above, indicated that articles of
earlier Soviet Indologists, which discussed the importance of Prem-
chand’s creations, can be considered as initial steps only, because the
vast literary heritage of the writer demanded a more detailed study.
For that epoch of the Soviet–Indian friendship, V. I. Balin concluded,
‘further acquaintance with the creations of Premchand will help to
strengthen fraternal friendship between India and the Soviet Union.’31
The Soviet scholar popularised Premchand’s fiction to an appreciable
degree. He was the author of many articles and research papers draw-
ing on both the Urdu and the Hindi versions of Premchand’s works.
He dedicated his PhD thesis to Premchand’s novels and stories, and
went on to publish a book Premchand – A Short-Story Writer32 in
1973. The main thrusts of this research are – Premchand’s love for
the ordinary people, his democratic approach and sympathy for the
poor and the oppressed. He appreciates Premchand’s patriotism and
his support to the Indian independence struggle. Premchand has been
considered here as a pioneer of the realistic genre in Indian literature,
and this avant-gardist role explains some idealistic tendencies that
existed in Premchand’s prose. Balin stressed that the simple and lucid
language of Premchand helped him influence ‘public consciousness’,33
which was the main reason behind the genre of the story occupying an
important place in Urdu and Hindi literature.

80
 P remchand in R ussian

V. I. Balin’s book deserves much attention as he was one of the main

translators and editors of collections of Premchand’s stories, published
in the USSR since the mid-1950s till late 1970s. He also authored
many of the prefaces to them which more or less corresponded to the
views expressed in his book. It shows that translations of Premchand’s
prose from Hindi and Urdu into Russian were deeply inflected by the
Soviet system of scientific research, which often had ideological char-
acter and preferences. It is a pity that aesthetic criteria such as form,
style, narrative technique and so on, associated with Premchand’s
prose did not appear important in that Soviet period. Nevertheless, in
the twenty-first-century Russia, we have appreciated the great efforts
and enthusiasm of many Indologists of that time who studied contem-
porary Hindi literature, and popularised Premchand’s writings.
As Bibliography of India34 indicates, there were several early transla-
tions of Premchand’s stories into Russian. ‘Smirenie’, mentioned earlier,
translated by O. Kholmskaya from English (not Hindi or Urdu) was
included in a short collection, Indian Stories (Индийские рассказы)35
in 1953. The collection had a preface written by a very popular Soviet
poet, Nikolay Tikhonov, who was interested in the Orient and India
since his childhood. Tikhonov, who was the chairman of the Soviet
Peace Committee, wrote several poems about India too. Two years
later, in 1955, four of Premchand’s stories, translated by M. Antonov,
were included in a collection of stories by Indian writers, called Drevo
Vody (A Tree of Water).36 This book was published by Detgiz, a special
state publishing house which published literature for children. The first
two stories featured in the book were by Premchand, and they were
‘Gilli-Danda’ (in Russian translation, ‘Igra v Chijik’) and ‘Do Bailon
ki Katha’ (‘Istoriya Dvuh Volov’). The same year, these stories were
included in Kolodets Thakura (Thakur’s Well),37 the first collection of
Premchand’s stories in Russian. It included twenty-three stories, trans-
lated from Urdu and Hindi into Russian by M. Antonov, N. Anikeev
and U. Lavrinenko. In the ‘Afterword’ appended to the volume,
V. Beskrovny stressed Premchand’s role as an innovator in literature,
supporter of progressive ideas and a writer who, for the first time in
Indian literature, represented the life of the most oppressed castes.38

Variations of style in the Russian

translations of Premchand
If we compare the Russian translation with the original text in Hindi,
for example, ‘Do Bailon ki Katha’, it will be clear that the translation
was true to the original with minimal changes, where necessary, and

81
 G uzel S trelkova

done in a very literary Russian. The translation followed the text very
closely, but not ‘word for word’, and the changes made, if any, did not
deviate from the main sense of the story. The difference was trivial.
For example, in translating idioms, the translator M. Antonov tried
to follow norms of Russian language: ‘ankhon mein ansoon lekar’39
he translated as ‘with tears in eyes’ (so slezami na glazah) or instead
of ‘roti’ he used ‘bread’ (khleb).40 He could use ‘years’ instead of ‘so
many days’–‘stol’ko dney’ (itne dinon)41 – spent by the two bullocks
with their master. But if we read a phrase with an inversion like,
‘have escaped our brothers’ (spaslis’ nashi bratya) instead of ‘nau-das
praaniyon ki jaan bach gayi’ (lives of nine-ten living beings saved) or
that ‘they will remember us with gratitude’ (Oni budut s blagodarnos-
tyu vspominat’ nas)42 instead of ‘aashirvaad denge’ (will bless us), then
there should be some reason. Most probably, such changes could be
explained by the ideological situation in the USSR. Almost in the same
vein, in the last section of the story, Hira and Moti are discussing God’s
mercy, and how God has manifested mercy in the form of a small girl
who gave them roti. In such a case it was difficult to escape mentioning
God, especially because of the sad scepticism of Moti: ‘They say that
God is merciful to everybody. . . . Then why has his mercy not spread
to us also?’ (govoryat, chto bog ko vsem milostiv . . . pochemu zhe
na nas ne rasprostranyaetsya ego milost’?).43 There are some prefer-
ences also, and most probably they depend on the choice made by the
translator. In the original Hindi text Hira exclaims ‘Bhaagvan ki dayaa
hai’ (It is God’s mercy), when the two bullocks reach the known place.
And this ‘dayaa’ is repeated for the third time by Premchand, and
a reader can see a stylistic logic in such repetition. But in Russian
translation we find ‘Slava bogu!’ (Praise the God!),44 and this sounds
felicitous in the context as it is a rather common Russian exclamation
that is used when something good or happy happens.
‘Saut’, translated into Ukrainian by A. P. Barannikov with the title
‘Савт’45 many years ago, was also included in this first collection of
stories by Premchand in the USSR. It was translated into Russian by
M. Antonov. The title was changed to ‘Vtoraya Zhena’ (Second Wife).
It is interesting to note that Barannikov in his review of Sapt Saroj
had translated the title ‘Saut’ in Russian as ‘One of Several Wives of
a Husband’ (Odna iz neskol’kih zhen muzha). We see that this was
an explanation of the Hindi term, and M. Antonov preferred a kind
of adaptation, avoiding details. Antonov’s translation is lucid and
close to the source text. There might be slight changes, for instance,
‘remarkably’ (otlichno) is used instead of ‘completely’ (pooraa), in a
phrase regarding the saut, Gomati, who realises her position perfectly

82
 P remchand in R ussian

well. We come across it in connection with the festival of Rakshaband-

han, mentioned in the story. In the original text there is ‘ek din Goda-
vari Gomati se miithaa chaaval pakaane ko kahaa’ – and this ‘one day’
is important. The second phrase in original starts with ‘Shaayad vah
Rakshabandhan ka divas thaa’ (Probably it was the day of Raksha-
bandhan). The Russian translation presents it as ‘V odin iz prazdnikov
Godavari velela Gomati prigotovit’ sladkij ris’ (During one of the fes-
tivals Godavari asked Gomati to cook sweet rice). We see that the two
sentences of the original are combined into one, and ‘one day’ and
‘Rakshabandhan’ became ‘one of the festivals’.
Sometimes a Hindi word may be left without any explanation.
Like, for example, ‘maur’ to wear which during a wedding ceremony
Devadatt is afraid: ‘Chto skazhut lyudi, kogda ya nadenu maur?’ (What
will people say, when I will put maur on? – Devadatt asks himself).46
Many years later, when this translation of the story was included into
Ratnyj Put47 – another collection of stories by Premchand in Russian –
a footnote ‘Maur – golovnoy ubor jeniha’ (a head decoration of a
groom) was added,48 but it lacked any special ethnographic or reli-
gious details. There are some helpful explanations regarding Indian
festivals and religious ceremonies in M. Antonov’s translation. They
are included in the body of the text or given in short footnotes. For
example, ‘Ram Leela’ is translated as ‘a performance dedicated to
God Rama’.49 Regarding flowers and milk thrown into Ganga during
the wedding of Devadatta and Gomati, an explanatory footnote was
added: ‘Svadebnyj ritual indusov’ (a Hindu wedding ritual).50 It seems
that the translator has endeavoured to give an adequate translation of
the original text, without drawing attention of the reader to unneces-
sary or exotic details. This first collection of stories by Premchand
discussed above was followed by two more collections. One was a
collection of stories for children, Zmeinyj Kamen (A Serpent’s Stone),
published in 1957, and the other was Sekret Tsivilizatsii (The Secret of
Civilisation), published in 1958.
Many stories of Premchand from the first collection in Russian,
Kolodets Thakura were included three years later, in 1958, along with
the translation of Nirmala, in a book, with the title, Rasskazy. Nirmala
(Stories. Nirmala).51 It was a huge volume running into 574 pages.
There were thirty-three stories included, plus the novel, Nirmala. The
novel was published two years earlier, in 1956, independently.52 Both
the books had their prefaces written by V. I. Balin, which also carried
a short biography of Premchand. Besides writing the prefaces, Balin
also translated several stories. In fact, the collection Rasskazy. Nir-
mala opened with his translation of a story, ‘Prazdnichnaya Yarmarka’

83
 G uzel S trelkova

(A Festival Fair) which in the original was, ‘Idgah’. In addition, there

were five more stories translated by Balin for the volume.
Ratnyj Put,53 a collection of twenty-one stories, was published in
a popular series, ‘People’s Library’. The edition had a print run of
100,000 copies and was illustrated by the prominent Russian painter,
Mikhail Romadin. Practically all the stories, included in the book, had
been translated into Russian earlier. However, what set this collection
apart was a clear editorial policy in showing Premchand’s evolution as
a writer of short stories. Thus, it starts with the story, ‘Duniya ka Sab se
Anmol Ratan’ (The Most Valuable Jewel on Earth) from his first Urdu
story collection, Soz-e Watan. The story was translated from Urdu by
Balin, and he gave it the title, ‘Samoe Dragotsennoe v Mire’ (The Most
Valuable in the World). And predictably, the last story of this collec-
tion was ‘Kafan’ (Shroud) translated by U. Lavrinenko who gave it the
Russian title, ‘Savan’. The preface to this collection was written, again,
by Balin where he gave a dramatic presentation of Premchand’s life
and talked briefly about the development of modern Indian literature.
Apart from these three important collections of Russian transla-
tion of Premchand’s stories, Izbrannoe (Selections)54 was published in
1979 in Leningrad with a preface by Balin. It was dedicated to the
birth centenary of Premchand. This comprehensive collection includes
translations of stories, articles on art and literature and an early Prem-
chand novel, Prozrenie (Enlightenment, Insight)55 written in Urdu in
1912. The novel was translated for the first time, and nineteen out
of the twenty-six stories were translated either for the first time or
some of the previously translated and published stories by Premchand
were translated into Russian again by a new translator (e.g. the story
‘Kafan’ was translated for this collection by Nikita Gurov; earlier, it
was translated by U. Lavrinenko). Five essays on art and literature by
Premchand were translated for this collection by Balin. The annota-
tions were done by Ya. V. Vasilkov, a prominent Indologist, and the
translator of the Mahabharata. This collection which carried a beauti-
ful portrait of Premchand had a print run of 50,000 copies.
During Premchand’s Jubilee celebration year, Balin, head of Indian
Philology Department of Leningrad State University at the time, and
a Soviet scholar Dr N. D. Gavryushina, from the Institute of Orien-
tal Studies of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, were invited to India.
They gave lectures in some Indian universities and participated in
the celebration ceremonies. After this visit to India, N. D. Gavry-
ushina published some articles on Premchand’s works. One of the
most prominent among them was ‘Premchand’s Innovation and Rus-
sian Classical Literature’.56 In addition to the works discussed above,

84
 P remchand in R ussian

six of Premchand’s novels were translated into Russian. Nirmala, as

observed earlier, was the first Premchand novel translated from Hindi
into Russian57 by four translators in 1956, shortly after Nikita Khru-
shev’s visit to India. The translators were V. Vyhuholev, I. Lilin, O. Ult-
syferov and I. Fialkovsky. It was done urgently, according to a ‘state
order’, a result of changing political equation between India and Rus-
sia. It was a good translation, in normal literary Russian, and close
to the original text58 though there were some small deletions to avoid
repetitions. Sometimes old-fashioned Russian words or jargons were
used, even if they did not have any analogue in the original. Similar to
other Russian translations, the dialogue form, typical of early Prem-
chand, was not used, but the sentimental tone dominating the novel
was preserved. The edition had a list of sixty-two notes compiled by
a prominent scholar of Indian ethnography, N. Guseva. In 1956, the
year when the Russian translation of Nirmala done from the Hindi
version came out, a translation of Godaan from Urdu was published.59
The novel was translated by V. Krasheninnikov and U. Lavrinenko
(they translated some of Premchand’s stories also). The title in Russian
was ‘Zhertvennaya Korova’ (A Sacrificial Cow). Balin in his articles
and forewords to the translations of Premchand’s works had trans-
lated the title ‘Godaan’ in Russian as ‘Vozdayaniye’ (Recompence/
Retribution). There is no Russian translation of the Hindi version of
the novel, but Russian readers and theatre lovers have a translation of
Vishnu Prabhakar’s stage adaptation of Godaan, named after the main
hero, Hori. It was translated by the translator duo, V. Krasheninnikov
and U. Lavrinenko.
I can compare the Russian text of Zhertvennaya Korova only with
the Hindi version, and not with the Urdu original from which it has
been translated. Yet, on the basis of such a comparison, I can say that
the translation is quite close to the original, even though there are
occasional differences with the Hindi text. There are some stylistic
nuances – a sentence might be divided into two or three, sometimes
an additional stress is added or an explanation of an ‘exotic’ word
is weaved into the body of the text, even though there are footnotes
in this edition. For example, in the opening scene of the novel, in the
original Hindi text we read: ‘usne paraast hokar Hori ki laathi, mir-
zai, joote, pagrhi aur tambakoo ka batua laakar saamne patak diye’60
(Defeated, she brought Hori’s stick, a short jacket, shoes, turban and
tobacco-pouch and threw them before him). The Russian translation
is the following: ‘Vot i teper’ ona, kak vsegda, ustupila: prinesla palku,
mirzai – kurtku s dlinnymi rukavami, tyurban, bashmaki i kiset s taba-
kom. No vmesto togo shtoby pochtitel ‘no podat’, ona vse eto serdito

85
 G uzel S trelkova

shvyrnula muzhu’.61 The back translation from Russian will be: ‘And
now she, as usual, gave in: she brought a stick, mirzai – a long sleeve
jacket, a turban, shoes and a tobacco-pouch. But, instead of giving it
respectfully, she threw them all before her husband angrily.’ As we see,
there are two sentences instead of one, and the sense of the phrase is
slightly changed also: ‘as usual’ and ‘instead of giving respectfully’ are
added. To my mind, these changes have been made largely for the sake
of intelligibility, from a desire to make the cultural situation obtaining
in the original text more accessible to Russian readers.
Any novelist of genius takes great care about the ending of his/her
novel. Towards the end of Godaan in the Hindi version, the narra-
tor talks about ‘moh ke bandhan’ which was too difficult to be torn
and ‘dukh kaa naam to moh hai’.62 In the Russian translation, based
on the Urdu text, the sentence is – ‘How difficult it was for Hori
to part with dreams which were not fulfilled’ (kak trudno emu bylo
rasstat’sya s mechtami, kotorym tak i ne suzhdeno bylo sbyt’sya).63
There is no mention of dharma also (compared to the Hindi text: ‘jo
jivan kaa sangi thaa uske naam ko rona hi kyaa uskaa dharam hai?).64
As said earlier, the coyness of the Russian translators to any allusions
to religion or faith is understandable given the ideological orientation
of the state policy in Russia at the time. However, it must be noted
that the last three passages of the novel in Russian translation corre-
spond closely with the Hindi text. The large readership for the novel
can be gauged from the fact that this edition had a print run of 90,000
copies.
There were Russian translations of three more novels by Premchand:
Karmabhumi, Ghaban and Rangabhumi. Karmabhumi was translated
as Pole Bitvy (A Battlefield) by I. Rabinovich and published in 1958.65 It
begins with ‘A respectful appeal of the author’ (Pochtitel’noe obraschenie
avtora) signed by Premchand, dated 5 September 1932.66 Most prob-
ably, this is one of the most ‘free style’ translations of Premchand’s prose
into Russian. The translator, I. Rabinovich, an Indologist, wrote articles
in an informal, ironic and sometimes sarcastic vein, using a style that
bordered on the colloquial. It appears that while translating the novel,
Rabinovich often used the same kind of style. For example, a sentence
‘us din fees ka hona anivarya hai’67 sounds in Hindi like a statement and
lacks any emotional charge, but the Russian translation is: ‘bud’ dobr,
plati ili uhodi’ (would you be so kind as to pay or go away?).68 Here
is one more example of expressing the sense of a sentence with altered
emphasis than in the original: ‘yahi hamari paschimi shiksha ka aadarsh
hai, jis ke taarifon ke pul bandhe jaate hain’ is translated into Russian
as ‘Takov nash skolok s proslavlyaemoy do nebes systemy zapadnogo

86
 P remchand in R ussian

obucheniya’ (Such is our aping of the Western system of education that

we praise it up to the heavens!).69 In comparison with other volumes of
Premchand translation into Russian, this volume certainly has a distinct
style. Later, in 1969, Rabinovich dedicated a chapter in his book Forty
Centuries of Indian Literature70 to Premchand.
The novel Ghaban was translated from Hindi to Russian as Ras-
trata71 in 1961 by Z. Dymshits and O. Ultsyferov – two prominent
Indologists. The preface to the translation was written by V. Balin, and
he stressed the motive of atonement of somebody’s sins by your own
suffering72 dominating the character of Jalpa. Interestingly, the same
motive, with a variation of redemption by service (seva) was discussed
at that time and later by other scholars in the context of the novels of
Jai Shankar Prasad, Jainendra Kumar and Agyeya. One of the schol-
ars, S. M. Eminova, wrote a special article,73 discussing this subject
which occupied Premchand’s mind in his first novel, Sevasadan. This
novel was not translated into Russian, but the article by Eminova gives
a general idea of the plot and its theme.

The latest Premchand translations and

criticism in Russian
A final edition of Premchand’s prose, translated into Russian, appeared
ten years later, after the so-called Perestroyka. Titled Izbrannoe,74 the
volume featured the novel Rangabhumi (Arena) and eleven stories, all
of which were translated and published earlier in other editions. It was
a huge volume of 717 pages, edited by E. P. Chelyshev, and published
in a series, Library of Indian Literature. We can call this edition the
last example of Indo–Russian friendship at the state level. After the
collapse of the USSR, unfortunately, there was practically no interest
in modern and contemporary Indian literature. However, the situation
has now changed and Premchand’s prose is again drawing the atten-
tion of Indologists and lovers of India and those who study Hindi.75
There are two good examples confirming this fact. The first is a book
by the above-mentioned, and now one of the eldest specialists in mod-
ern Hindi literature, Nina D. Gavryushina.76 In 2006, she published a
book Premchand and the Hindi Novel of the XX Century,77 the first
chapter of which discussed the role Premchand played in the devel-
opment of modern Hindi novel. The scholar showed also the main
sources on the basis of which Premchand’s talent grew. It depicted
his connections with world literature – both European and Russian,
and paid special attention to his inclinations towards Leo Tolstoy and
Maxim Gorky. This first chapter is a sort of prologue to the second

87
 G uzel S trelkova

chapter, dedicated to the development of Hindi novel in independent

India (1950–2005). The author clearly showed that in one way or the
other Premchand’s prose influenced different kinds of contemporary
Hindi novel, be it social-political, regional, existential or a ‘new novel’,
or novels written by Hindi women writers. N. Gavryushina concen-
trated her attention on the literary tradition initiated by Premchand.
As mentioned in the summary of the book, the scholar’s main idea was
to discuss ‘pivotal trends and developments in the post-Independence
Hindi novel . . . and not only evaluate Premchand as a true classic but
to trace the way he, even after his death, contributed to the develop-
ment of the Hindi novel’.78
The long-term impact of Premchand on the Russian literary sensi-
bility can also be gauged by the PhD thesis (2008) of Tatyana Duby-
anskaya, ‘Development of Hindi Novel in the End of the Nineteenth
and the Early Twentieth Century’.79 The last chapter of this disserta-
tion is titled ‘The New Principles of Organization of a Text’s Artis-
tic Structure: The Early Experiments of Premchand’. Dubyanskaya
very insightfully discussed two novels, Hamkhurma va Hamsavab
(Prema, in Hindi; 1906–7) and Jalwa-e Isar (Vardan in Hindi; 1912).
The Russian scholar has shown similar compositional structure of
both the novels and different variants of the finale which Premchand
chose for his novels in a very original way. Both the novels can be
considered within a scheme of ‘a novel about the ordeal of an ideal
hero’.
To complete the picture of Russian translations of Premchand and
studies dedicated to this celebrated Hindi writer, it is necessary to
mention a PhD dissertation, ‘Creations of M. Gorki and Premchand
in Historical Perspective’, by a prominent translator from Russian
into Hindi and a scholar of Russian and Hindi literature, Madan-
lal Madhu80 and the last publication of Premchand’s story in Rus-
sian. This is ‘Kafan’ translated by the prominent Russian Indologist
Nikita Gurov. The translation has been published earlier also. For
the second time it was included in an anthology of Indian story of
the twentieth century, The Sun Racer (Skakun Solntsa), published
in 2009.81 This publication was dedicated to the ‘Year of India’ in
Russia and was celebrated with the financial support of Indian Acad-
emy of Letters (Sahitya Akademi). The anthology was based on the
volume Indian Short Stories: 1900–2000, published by the Sahitya
Akademi of India, and stood as a symbol of Russian scholars and
translators’ continual preoccupation with Premchand through close
to a century.

88
 P remchand in R ussian

Notes
1 А. Э. Азарх, Премчанд: Био-библиографический указатель (A. E. Azarh,
Premchand: Bio-bibliographic Index) Изд, Всесоюзной книжной палаты,
М., 1962, c. 21. Д. А Бирман, Г. Г. Котовский, Н. Н. Сосина, Библиография
Индии (Bibliography of India), М., Наука, 1976.
2 Червоний шлях (Red Way), Харьков, 1926, №1, с. 60–68.
3 Я.В.Васильков, Баранников Алексей Петрович./Индуизм, Сикхизм,
Джайнизм, Словарь (Ya. V. Vasilkov, Barannikov Alexey Petrovich/Hin-
duism, Sikhism, Jainism, Dictionary) М., 1996, c. 75–76.
4 A. P. Barannikov was not only an enthusiast of contemporary Indian litera-
tures. He translated into Russian Prem Sagar by Lalu Ji Lal, Jatakamala by
Aryashura from Sanskrit and Ramacharitamanas by Tulsidas from Avadhi.
5 А. П. Баранников, Рецензия на перевод Премчандом рассказов Л.Толстого
(A. P. Barannikov, ‘A Review of Premchand’s Translation of Stories by
L. Tolstoy’)/Индийская филология, Литературоведение, Изд.Восточной
литературы, М., 1959, c. 258–70.
6 Premchand, Taalstaay ki Kahaniyaan, Calcutta: Hindi Pustak Agency, 1924.
7 А. П. Баранников, Рецензия на перевод Премчандом рассказов Л.Толстого
(A. P. Barannikov, ‘A Review of Premchand’s Translation of Stories by
L. Tolstoy’)/Индийская филология, Литературоведение, Изд.Восточной
литературы, М., 1959, c. 258.
8 Ibid., p. 259.
9 Ibid., p. 260.
10 Ibid.
11 The original Russian title means ‘God sees the truth, but will not say fast’.
12 ‘A Merciful Act’.
13 ‘Caucasian Captive’.
14 ‘A Rajput-Captive’.
15 ‘A Grain Equal to a Chicken’s Egg’.
16 Barannikov, ‘A Review of Premchand’s Translation of Stories by
L. Tolstoy’, p. 261.
17 Ibid., p. 262.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid., p. 263.
20 Ibid., p. 268.
21 А. П. Баранников, «Саптасародж» Премчанда (A. P. Barannikov, ‘Sapt Saroj
by Premchand’)/Индийская филология, Литературоведение, Изд.Восточной
литературы, М., 1959, c. 7–11. After the article’s first publication in 1934, it
was published (with abridgements) after twenty-five years in this collection
of the main articles of A. P. Barannikov.
22 Ibid., p. 7.
23 No 5, pp. 121–7.
24 В. Балин, Премчанд и его романы “Обитель любви” и “Воздаяние” (V.
Balin, Premchand and His Novels, Premashram and Godan), Литературы
Индии, Издательство Восточной литературы, М., 1958, c. 70–104.
25 Ibid., p. 103.
26 Бескровный В. М. «Борьба» – социальная драма Премчанда (V. B. Besk-
rovny, ‘Bor’ba’ – A Social Drama by Premchand’)/Известия АН СССР, М.,
1947, т.6.,вып.3, c. 229–46.

89
 G uzel S trelkova

27 Бескровный В. М. ‘Премчанд (1880–1936)’ (V. B. Beskrovny, ‘Pemchand

(1880–1936)’ – “Ученые записки Тихоокеанского института” (АН СССР),
М.-Л, 1949, т.2, с. 193–205.
28 No. 5–6, pp. 19–20.
29 No. 22, pp. 21–3.
30 Постановление Верховного Совета СССР от 29 декабря 1955 года об
итогах поездки Председателя Совета Министров СССР товарища Н. А.
Булганина и члена Президиума Верховного Совета СССР товарища Н. С.
Хрущёва в Индию, Бирму и Афганистан (A Decree of the Supreme Soviet
of the SSSR dated 29 December 1955, regarding the results of visit of the
Head of the Soviet of Ministers of the USSR Comrade N. A. Bulganin and
Member of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the SSSR, Comrade N.
S. Khrushchev to India, Burma and Afganistan)/Сборник законов СССР и
указов Президиума Верховного Совета СССР, 1938 г.-июль 1956 г/под
ред. к. ю. н. Мандельштам Ю. И. – Москва: Государственное издательство
юридической литературы, 1956, c. 150–2.
31 В. И.Балин, Премчанд и его романы «Обитель любви» и «Воздаяние»
(V. Balin, ‘Premchand and His Novels Obitel’ lyubvi’/Premashram
and Vozdayanie/Godan’)/Литературы Индии, Издательство Восточной
литературы, М., 1958, c. 104.
32 В. И.Балин, Премчанд-новелист (V. I. Balin, Premchand – A Short-Story
Writer) Издательство Ленинградского Университета, 1973. The book con-
taining five chapters analyses the evolution of Premchand as a writer of
short stories.
33 Ibid., p. 159.
34 Библиография Индии, Дореволюционная и советская литература на русском
языке и языках народов СССР, оригинальная и переводная Издательство:
Изд-во восточной лит., 1959, c. 423.
35 Индийские рассказы, Библиотечка “Огонька”, М., 1953.
36 Древо воды, Рассказы индийских писателей (A Tree of Water: Stories by
Indian Writers) М., 1955.
37 Премчанд, Колодец тхакура (Premchand, a Well of Thakur), Пер, с урду и
хинди, М., Изд, Иностранная литература, 1955.
38 Ibid., p. 248.
39 The original Hindi text is on http://gadyakosh.org/gk – a site of Hindi
prose.
40 In fact the last example khleb (хлеб) means double bread, not roti, which
the translator could use to show Indian specific usage, and it shows that
a translator can choose – either adopt the meaning of a word or use an
original and explain the meaning. In this edition of Premchand’s stories
there are just a few footnotes given by the editor, M. Lozhechko.
41 Премчанд, Колодец тхакура (Premchand, The Thakur’s Well), Пер, с урду
и хинди, М., Изд, Иностранная литература, 1955, p. 22.
42 Ibid., p. 22.
43 Ibid., p. 23.
44 Ibid., p. 24.
45 Savt – a transliteration of the Hindi title in Cyrillic.
46 Ibid., p. 145.
47 Премчанд, Ратный путь (Premchand, A Military Way), Рассказы, М., Изд,
«Художественная литература», 1969, p. 35–47.

90
 P remchand in R ussian

48 Ibid., p. 37.
49 Ibid., p. 146.
50 Ibid., p. 152.
51 Премчанд, Рассказы, Нирмала (Premchand. Short Stories. Nirmala.), Гос.
изд, Художественной литературы, М., 1958.
52 Премчанд, Нирмала (Premchand, Nirmala), Перевод с хинди, Изд.
Иностранной литературы, М., 1956.
53 Премчанд, Ратный путь (Premchand, Military Way: Stories), Издательство
“Художественная литература”, М., 1969.
54 Премчанд, Избранное (Premchand, Selected Works), Изд, Художественная
литература, Л., 1979.
55 Original title in Urdu ‘Jalwa-e Isar’; ‘Vardan’ in Hindi.
56 Н. Д.Гаврюшина, Новаторство Премчанда и русская классическая
литература (N. D. Gavryushina, ‘Premchand’s Innovation and Russian
Classical Literature’/Азия и Африка сегодня, № 12, М., 1980.
57 Премчанд, Нирмала (Premchand, Nirmala), Изд.Иностранной литературы,
М., 1956.
58 The text of Nirmala in Hindi is on www.gadyakosh.org.
59 Премчанд, Жертвенная корова (Premchand, a Sacrificial Cow), Гос, изд,
Художественной литературы, М., 1956.
60 Premchand, Godaan, 13vaan samskaran [13th edition], Banaras: Saras-
vati Press, 1956, p. 6.
61 Премчанд, Жертвенная корова (Premchand, a Sacrificial Cow), p. 12.
62 Premchand, Godaan, p. 372.
63 Премчанд, Жертвенная корова (Premchand, a Sacrificial Cow), p. 534.
64 Premchand, Godaan, p. 372.
65 Премчанд, Поле битвы (Premchand, a Battle of Struggle), Гослитиздат, М.,
1958.
66 Ibid., p. 6.
67 Hindi text of Karmabhumi is on www.gadyakosh.org.
68 Премчанд, Поле битвы (Premchand, a Battle of Struggle), p. 9.
69 Ibid., p. 10.
70 И. С. Рабинович, Сорок веков индийской литературы (I. S. Rabinovich,
Forty Centuries of Indian Literature), М., 1969, c. 282–91.
71 Премчанд, Растрата (Premchand, Embezzlement/Peculation), М., Гос, изд,
Художественной литературы, М., 1961.
72 Ibid., p. 11.
73 C. Эминова, “Дхарма служения” в романе Премчанда “Обитель служения”
(S. Eminova, ‘Dharma of Service’ in a novel by Premchand ‘A Refuge of
Service’ – (Sevasadan in original)/М. Наука, 1989, c. 220–9.
74 Премчанд, Избранное (Premchand, Selected Creations), Изд, Художественная
литература, М., 1989 (Библиотека индийской литературы).
75 I have to note with a sense of regret that there is no translation of Prem-
chand books included in e-libraries which are popular now.
76 N. D. Gavryushina was born in 1928 in Leningrad and studied Hindi in
Leningrad State University (one of her teachers was Rahul Sankrityayan
himself). She got her Ph.D. in Indian literature in 1955 and studied con-
temporary Hindi literaure, mainly Jainendra Kumar’s novels. She contin-
ues to work in the Institute of Oriental studies of Russian Academy of
Science till now.

91
 G uzel S trelkova

77 Гаврюшина Н. Д, Премчанд и роман хинди ХХ века (N. D. Gavryushina,

Premchand and Hindi Novel of XX Century), М., ИВРАН, 2006.
78 Ibid., p. 223.
79 Дубянская Т, А, Развитие романа на хинди в конце ХХ – первой трети
ХХ в (Tatyana Dubyanskaya, ‘Development of Hindi Novel in the End of
the Nineteenth and the Early Twentieth Century’ unpublished Ph.D. dis-
sertation/Диссертация на соискание степени к.ф.н, Москва, ИСАА МГУ,
2008).
80 Мадху Маданлал, Творчество М.Горького и Премчанда в историческом
соотношении (Madhu Madanlal, ‘Creative works of M. Gorky and Prem-
chand in Historical Interpretation’) Автореферат диссертации канд.филол.
наук, М., Изд.Московского Университета,1975.
81 Скакун солнца, Антология индийского рассказа ХХ века, “Восточная
литература” РАН, М., 2009.

Bibliography
Azarh, A. E., Premchand – Bibliographic Index, Moscow: Soviet Book Cham-
ber, 1962.
Balin, V., ‘Premchand and His Novels Premashram and Godaan’, in Indian
Literature, Moscow: Oriental Literature, 1958, pp. 70–104.
Balin, V., Premchand, the Novelist, Leningrad: Leningrad University, 1973.
Barannikov, A. P., ‘Review on Premchand’s Translation of L. Tolstoy’s Short
Stories’, in Indian Philology and Literary Criticism, Moscow: Oriental
Literature, 1959, pp. 258–70.
Barannikov, A. P., ‘Saptasaroj by Premchand’, in Indian Philology and Liter-
ary Criticism, Moscow: Oriental Literature, 1959, pp. 7–11.
Beskrovny, V. M., Premchand (1880–1936), ‘Scientific Notes from Pacific
Ocean Institute’ (AN USSR), M., – L, 1949, 2: 193–205.
Beskrovny, V. M., ‘Sangram – A Social Drama by Premchand’, Izvestia AN
USSR, Moscow, 1947, 6(3): 229–46.
Birman, D. M., Kotovsky, G. G. and Sosina, N. N., Indian Bibliography,
Moscow: Science, 1976.
Dubyanskaya, T. A., Development of Hindi Novel in the End of the Nine-
teenth and the Early Twentieth Century, unpublished PhD dissertation,
MSU, 2008.
Eminova, S. M., Religion of Atonement in Premchand’s Novel Sevasadan, Lit-
eratures of India, Collection of Articles, Moscow: Nauka, 1989, pp. 220–9.
Gavryushina, N. D., Premchand and Twentieth Century Hindi Novels,
Moscow: IVRAN, 2006.
Gavryushina, N. D., ‘Premchand’s Innovation and Russian Classical Litera-
ture’, Asia and Africa Today, No. 12, M., 1980.
Kotovsky, G. G., V. V. Balabushevich, Institute of Oriental Studies, Academy
of Science of the USSR, Bibliography of India – Post Revolutionary and
Soviet Literature in Russian and Other Languages of USSR and Both in
Original and Translation, Moscow: Oriental Literature, 1959, pp. 385–9,
392–3.

92
 P remchand in R ussian

Madanlal, Madhu, Creations of M. Gorki and Premchand in Historical Per-

spective, unpublished PhD dissertation, Moscow University, 1975.
Premchand, A Military Way (Ratha Yatra): Stories, Moscow: State Publishing
House Belles Lettres, 1969.
Premchand, A Well of Thakur: Translation from Urdu and Hindi, Moscow:
Foreign Literature, 1955.
Premchand, Ghaban, Moscow: State Publishing House Belles Lettres, 1961.
Premchand, Godaan, Moscow: State Publishing House Belles Lettres, 1956.
Premchand, Nirmala, Moscow: Foreign Literature, 1956.
Premchand, Nirmala, translated from Hindi, Moscow: Foreign Literature,
1956.
Premchand, Rangabhumi, Leningrad: Belles Lettres, 1967.
Premchand, Rangabhumi, Moscow: State Literary Publishing House, 1958.
Premchand, ‘Saut’, Red Way, Kharkov, 1926, No. 1, pp. 60–8.
Premchand, Selected Works, Leningrad: Belles Lettres, 1979.
Premchand, Selected Works, Moscow: Belles Lettres, 1989. (Library of Indian
Literature).
Premchand, Stories, Nirmala, Moscow: State Publishing House Belles Lettres,
1958.
Rabinovich, I. S., Forty Centuries of Indian Literature, Moscow: Nauka Pub-
lishing House, 1969.
Sahitya Akademi, The Sun Racer – Anthology of Indian Story of the Twenti-
eth Century, Pub. Oriental Literature, 2009.
Vasilikov, Y. V. and Barannikov, Alexei Petrovich, Dictionary of Hinduism,
Sikhism, Jainism, Moscow, 1996.

93
 5
BEYOND ORIENTALISM
Premchand in Spanish translations

Sonya Surabhi Gupta

In Evaristo Carriego, a biography of a fellow poet written early in his

life, Jorge Luis Borges had said that a book is not just ‘a chain of expres-
sions’, but a volume, ‘a prism with six rectangular faces’.1 Parting from
this idea that a book goes beyond the text in that it is a collation of the
text and several other ancillaries, Gerard Gennete developed the concept
of the paratext, ‘the means by which a text makes a book of itself’.
Books, he argued, rarely appear by themselves – that is, as texts in their
‘naked state’ – given that a book’s text is always accompanied and rein-
forced by a ‘certain number of productions’, ‘verbal or not’, that present
it or, as Genette explains, that ‘make it present’. This accompaniment
constitutes, according to Genette, the paratext of the work: ‘we are deal-
ing . . . with a threshold, or – the term Borges used about a preface – with
a “vestibule” which offers to anyone and everyone the possibility either
of entering or of turning back.’2 For Genette, paratexts are thresholds
between the text and what lies outside it, a zone not just of transition,
but also of transaction. Translation also has this liminality, unfolding
as it does in a transitional indeterminate flux, in a transpositional shuf-
fle moving from one cultural space to another. Translation is not just
a passive rendering, but a creative act that operates at the threshold,
redrawing the lines between transition and transaction. In fact, it has the
capacity of being both a transition and a transaction, an exchange that is
commodity based and at the same time one that opens up a new field of
possibilities through the force of making. It also operates at the thresh-
old in its movement back and forth into the source and target languages
and cultures and therefore can be a strategic act operating at what Mary
Louise Pratt calls ‘contact zones’, and defines as ‘social spaces where dis-
parate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly
asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination’.3

94
 B eyond O rientalism

Translation studies in our times have highlighted such complex

manipulative processes that translations can be a part of, as in colonial
situations characterised by unequal power relationships. Recent stud-
ies have laid bare the complicity between Orientalism and translation
by establishing that translations, quite like the census, the map, and
the museum, as Benedict Anderson argues, shaped the way in which
the colonial state imagined its dominions.4 But translation, whatever
be the way in which you look at it – that is, as a product, a social
process, or a semiotic or hermeneutic act – occurs in certain condi-
tions of knowledge production in a given culture and any rewriting or
representation of a source culture into a target culture is closely linked
to the episteme of a given time. Translations are now done in a far
more self-reflective manner and can therefore be tools and sites where
foundations for sustainable solidarities can be built.
In this chapter, we are looking at two recent anthologies of Prem-
chand’s short stories in translation into Spanish. Spain did not have
an imperial relationship with India, and as such did not produce dis-
cursive knowledge about the East in general, but it was a European
imperial power from the sixteenth century till the nineteenth century.
Despite the colossal equivocation of Christopher Columbus, who, in
1492, believing that he had reached India, called the newly discovered
lands as the Indies, cultural contact between Spain and India has been
minimal and historically remote as compared to, say, France and Por-
tugal, both of which had their possessions in the subcontinent until
independence and even later.5 Even so, as we shall establish, a geneal-
ogy of twentieth-century Spanish translations of Indian texts shows
that translations of literary works from India into Spanish have largely
redeployed the orientalist disregard for India’s present and were, for a
long time, mainly geared towards satiating yet another Western thirst
for an exotic spiritual India. More recently, a fair amount of Indian
writing in English has been churned into Spanish. However, when it
comes to translation of works from the so-called regional Indian lan-
guages, the wheels of the translation industry in Europe come to a
grinding halt, particularly in the case of Spanish. It is in this general
background that we will first locate and then analyse the two antholo-
gies of Premchand’s short stories in translation into Spanish, one from
Spain and the other from Mexico: Antología de cuentos (2012), trans-
lation of Premchand’s short stories by Alvaro Enterría published in
Spain, and La India: ‘Los intocables’ y otros cuentos (2010), again
a translation of Premchand’s short stories undertaken by Chandra
Bhushan Choubey and Yogendra ‘Swaraj’ Sharma and published in
Mexico.

95
 S onya S urabhi G upta

Even as we have said that Spain did not have an imperial relation-
ship with India, medieval Spain was the first European site for trans-
lation of Indian texts. Translation, language and power were, in fact,
at the heart of production of European modernity as the Translators’
School at Toledo diligently translated into an incipient Spanish the
Panchatantra (translated in 1257 as Calila e Dimna); several treatise
on chess, alchemy and mathematics were brought to Spain by the
untiring Arab travellers in that miracle called Al-Andalus, and from
there on transmitted to the rest of Europe. Translation was also at
the core of the loot and plunder of the Americas, which provided the
material base for the making of European modernity. In his study on
linguistic colonialism in the New World encounter between Euro-
pean colonisers and native Indians, Stephen Greenblatt has pointed
out the connivance of language, translation and the empire, noting
that the primal crime in the New World, the first of the endless series
of kidnappings of Indians, was, in fact, plotted in order to secure
translators.6 Vicente L. Rafael, in his analysis of the role of transla-
tion in articulating the relationship between Christianity and colo-
nialism in the case of the Philippines Tagalog society under early
Spanish rule, has noted that the Spanish words conquista, conver-
sión and traducción (conquest, conversion and translation) are, in
fact, semantically related.7 Eric Cheyfitz has, therefore, argued that
translation was ‘the central act of European colonization and impe-
rialism in America’.8
For centuries, America became Europe’s other. Increasingly, how-
ever, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Orient, that is, the
East, grew as a set of alternatives for Europe as a place to consume,
and to fantasise about. Spain, which was in imperial decline, finally
lost all its colonies in 1898. Spanish Orientalism of the nineteenth cen-
tury is mainly Africanist but it is around this time when the very first
translations of Indian texts into Spanish began. Predictably enough,
in the list of Indian texts translated into Spanish around these times,
the majority is from Sanskrit.9 Most of these were, in fact, mediated
translations, and that too of incomplete texts.10 These translations
contributed a great deal in constituting ‘India’ within the bounds of
traditional European fantasies, deploying the same procedures as ori-
entalist scholars did when they privileged certain texts over others to
construct a canon of Indian literature.
It is worthwhile to point out that Spanish translations of modern
Indian writers like Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, Girish Karnad and
Saadat Hasan Manto have been mainly done in Latin America.11 In
Spain, contemporary Indian writing in English is fairly available in

96
 B eyond O rientalism

translation into Spanish, thanks to the enormous industry of transla-

tion in the West. The large majority of these translations were pub-
lished in the decade of the 1990s and the beginning of this century.12
In her introduction to Felix IIarraz’s translation into Spanish of Girish
Karnad’s Tughlaq, the then ambassador of Mexico to India, Doña
Graciela de la Lama, mentions that while preparing the Bibliografia
Afroasiatica (Afroasiatic bibliography) for El Colegio de Mexico, she
had noted that there were very few translations into Spanish of mod-
ern Indian literature.13 She further noted that the Mexican philosopher
and writer José Vasconcelos had translated the works of Rabindranath
Tagore but that Tagore’s fame did not create a reach for Indian litera-
ture in general, nor other writers of Bengali nor those of other regional
languages of India.14 It was to correct this situation that after Tughlaq,
the Centre for Afro-Asian Studies of El Colegio de Mexico did under-
take some translations notable among which is the anthology of stories
of Saadat Hasan Manto published in 1996. The recent anthology of
short stories of Premchand entitled La India: ‘Los intocables’ y otros
cuentos is a publication of yet another prestigious Mexican university,
the Tecnológico de Monterrey. As we can see, most of these publica-
tions are from university presses.
While new concepts about translation from Latin America and India
have deeply influenced the theory and practice of translations and
have led to a reassessment of the history of translation and postco-
lonial writing itself, the cultural economics of translation remains a
domain still largely regulated by metropolitan centres. Who decides
what will be translated, published and disseminated? As Aijaz Ahmad
has noted, the archive of the so called Third World literature is largely
built by the machinery of accumulation, translation and gloss for texts
from Asia and Africa operating in the metropolitan countries.15 For
example, for the entire Spanish-speaking world, it is Spain that plays
the role of translation motor. As per the Index Translationum of the
UNESCO, Spain is the second country in the world after Germany in
terms of number of translations produced.16 In terms of publishing
politics, translation rights are generally sold once and then acted on
in Spain, rather than in any Latin American country and the transla-
tions are then exported to various Latin American markets.17 Apart
from this commercial constraint about translation of Indian writers
like Premchand, the other major constraint is a linguistic one. As Aijaz
Ahmad has pointed out:

rare would be a literary theorist in Europe or USA who does

not command a couple of European languages beside his or her

97
 S onya S urabhi G upta

own . . . rare would be a modern intellectual in Asia or Africa

who does not know at least one European language . . . Equally
rare would be, on the other side, a major literary theorist in
Europe or US who has ever bothered with an Asian or African
language and the enormous industry of translation which cir-
culates texts among advanced capitalist countries grinds errati-
cally and slowly when it comes to translation from Asian or
African languages.18

It is, therefore, not surprising, that the two anthologies of Prem-

chand’s short stories in translation that we are studying have been
produced at the margins of the publishing industry of the Spanish-
speaking world. We would now like to dedicate our attention to an
analysis of the two anthologies of Premchand’s short stories that we
are studying. The first anthology entitled Antología de cuentos is the
one prepared by Alvaro Enterría and published from Spain in 2002
by José J. de Olañeta Editor, a Palma de Mallorca–based independent
publisher, in collaboration with Indica Books, which is a Varanasi-
based book company partnered by Alvaro Enterría, specialised in
Indology. The anthology has now again been published in a brand new
edition in 2012 with some additions. A word about the translator and
Indica Books will be in order. Alvaro Enterría started Indica in 1994
in Varanasi, first as a bookshop and later as a publishing house spe-
cialising in Indology. Apart from its regular fare of the Sanskrit texts,
Indica has brought out translations of classical novels, bhakti poetry
and modern Indian fiction with works translated into Spanish directly
from Indian languages. It is evident that this publisher has tried to add
to the dominant brahmanical canon while remaining clearly within the
bounds of a Hindu upper-caste India. A cursory look at the publisher’s
catalogue would confirm our statement.
In the preparation of an anthology, the compilation itself is an
authorial act, and if we are talking of an anthology in translation, the
intervention of the compiler-translator becomes all the more decisive.
In the case of Alvaro Enterría, he is also the publisher, hence the para-
texts that surround and support the translated anthology and contrib-
ute to the construction of meaning of the published text also bear his
mark of authority. In Enterría’s anthology the front and back cover
pages are a reproduction of a lamina, ‘Views of Calcutta and Its Envi-
rons’ dating 1848, a work of the British orientalist George Chinnery,
which firmly places the book in a rural setting, albeit a rural Hindu
setting with the temple looming large over the men, animals and the

98
 B eyond O rientalism

hutments. There are a total of twelve stories in the collection. The

introduction is a bio-note on Premchand, his life and works, though
there is neither any explanation as to the selection criteria of the sto-
ries19 nor any comment on the translation, which could have been
an important paratextual element to capture several nuances of the
source texts. The title is flat and neutral, mentioning only the author’s
name and that the book is an anthology of short stories. There are
useful endnotes that in some cases are explanatory but, in most cases,
serve in lieu of a glossary.20
The second anthology under review has been prepared by two
Indian Hispanists, now residents of Mexico: Chandra Bhushan
Choubey and Yogendra ‘Swaraj’ Sharma. It has been published by
Miguel Angel Porrua Publishers for the Tecnológico de Monterrey
University, Santa Fe Campus.21 This anthology brings together eleven
stories and, as the translators mention in a note on the collection,
they have chosen stories that revolve around themes they consider
to be recurrent in Premchand’s oeuvre, that is, the peasant life in
India, and its misery, problems and causes.22 The anthology includes
an extensive introduction on the Premchand moment in Hindi litera-
ture as well as a separate note on the approach of the anthologists
towards the translation. Since Premchand’s writings are set in a par-
ticular context and region, they pose a challenge for translation. In
such a case, the paratexts acquire paramount importance. The para-
texts in this anthology – the introduction, the translators’ note, the
glossary at the end, the bibliography – are clearly aimed to orient
the situatedness of the text and help the Mexican/Latin American
readers/researchers to engage with the complexities of the translated
texts. The book cover shows a rural Indian woman in a veil. The title
of this second anthology is La India: ‘Los intocables’ y otros cuentos,
which translates in English as ‘India: “The Untouchables” and Other
Stories’.
The title of this second anthology brings us to the contentious issue
of the translation of caste by Choubey and Sharma. The representa-
tion of Dalits in Premchand has been an object of scrutiny, say, in
a story like ‘Kafan’, which is included in both the anthologies. It is
the last story in Enterría’s anthology and the lead story in Choubey
and Sharma’s collection and hence foregrounded in both the editions.
However, it is in the latter that there is a clear foregrounding of the
caste question, not only in the title of the anthology, but also in the
introduction. Underlining the relevance of the anthology, the transla-
tors mention in the introduction that not much has changed in India

99
 S onya S urabhi G upta

since the times of Premchand (1910–2010) in that poverty and hunger

still haunt the masses, and the caste system continues its hold in mod-
ern India. They write:

El tema más recurrente en todas las obras de Dhanpat Rai

Srivastava es el sistema de castas, aún vigente en la India [. . .]
La relevancia de la crítica del sistema de castas en la narrativa
de Premchand radica en que en la India moderna (del siglo
21st) todavía hay templos, pozos, lugares públicos donde los
de casta baja (sudra/dalits) no tienen cabida.23
[The most recurrent theme in the works of Dhanpat Rai
Srivastava is the caste system, still in vogue in India [. . .] The
relevance of the criticism of the caste system in Premchand’s
narrative lies in the fact that in modern India (of the 21st cen-
tury) still there are temples, wells, public places where those
from low caste (sudra/dalits) do not have entry.]

The translators are either unaware or have consciously chosen not to

address the recent Dalit critique of the treatment of the caste question in
Premchand and the debate that has ensued.24 But this is not all. A care-
ful analysis of how caste has been translated by Sharma and Choubey
leads us to the conclusion that, in fact, the untouchable becomes a care-
fully selected metaphor for India like the image of the veiled woman on
the cover page. We shall begin with ‘Los intocables’ or ‘The Untoucha-
bles’ of the title. In the title ‘ “The Untouchables” and Other Stories’,
‘The Untouchables’ is referring to the story carrying the same title
included in the collection as the sixth story.25 The bibliography of the
texts translated provided by the translators lists the sixth story as ‘La
intocable’ (The Untouchable Woman)26 and is listed as the translation
of Premchand’s story ‘Shudra’ from the third volume of Mansarovar.27
As we know, the title of Premchand’s story ‘Shudra’ refers to Gaura,
the Dalit woman protagonist of the story. And the translators knew it
and translated it as such in the first instance. How did ‘The Untouch-
able Woman’ become ‘The Untouchables’ of the title and what are the
reasons for this displacement? It is clear that this is not a slip or a bad
or incorrect translation but a conscious decision, an afterthought; and
if it is an afterthought, what implications does it have?
While it is evident that translators translate texts, it is equally true
that they translate paratexts also. The Vigo Translation School in Spain
has therefore developed the concept of paratranslation and as Yuste
Frias explains, the concept was coined to analyse the impact of the aes-
thetic, political, ideological, cultural and social manipulations at play

100
 B eyond O rientalism

in all the paratextual productions situated in and out of the margins of

any translation.28 The translation of a title must take into account that
the title of a text is a constituent element of the textual world,29 that
is to say that the title is associated with the content of the book and is
thus part of the text. The translation of the title packages the text and
impacts its reception in the target culture. One can take the example of
the Spanish translation of Khushwant Singh’s novel Delhi (1990). The
translated title into Spanish is Las mil y una noches de Delhi (Thou-
sand and One Nights of Delhi), assimilating the novel into the arche-
type of the exotic Orient.30 In the case of the anthology under study, the
translators are also the anthologists and therefore it is to be believed
that the title is of their own choice. The foregrounding of the Dalits in
the title can be interpreted as a call for recognising the centrality of the
caste question in contemporary India as well as in Premchand’s writing
but could also be read as a carefully selected metaphor at a time when
the blockbuster Brazilian soap opera Caminho das Indias, which was
televised all over Latin America, had raised the curiosity of many in
Latin America about the caste system in India through its love story
between an upper-caste girl and an educated dalit boy.31
This foregrounding of Dalits, however, is completely absent from the
actual translation where the Dalit element is flattened and made invisi-
ble. The glossary does not lead the reader to any knowledge of the fact
that bhangi and chamar are caste names like nigger or mambi in Latin
America. While the entries on bania and brahmin list them as caste of
traders and caste of priests, respectively,32 the entries on chamar and
bhangin are listed as occupations: chamar: curtidor (leather tanner);
bhangin: mujeres que se dedican a realizar la limpieza (women who
do the cleaning).33 This sanitisation of Dalit identity is not limited to a
paratextual element such as the glossary where one could attribute it
to mere inconsistency. It happens at the level of textual translation too.
For example, in ‘Kafan,’ at the very beginning of the story in the open-
ing paragraphs, Ghisu and Madhav are introduced thus in the original
text: ‘Chamaron ka kunba tha aur sare gaon mein badnam’ (It was a
family of chamars, and notorious in the whole village). The translation
of this in the two anthologies is as follows:

Enterría’s translation: ‘Era una familia de chamars con mala repu-

tación en todo el pueblo’34 (It was a family of chamars with a bad
reputation in the whole village).
Choubey and Sharma’s translation: ‘Era la aldea de los peleteros y
ambos eran famosos en el pueblo’35 (It was the hamlet of furriers
and both of them were famous in the village).

101
 S onya S urabhi G upta

Whether it is the ‘leather tanner’ of the glossary or the ‘furrier’ of the

translated text in ‘Kafan’, Choubey and Sharma’s translation of caste
is deeply problematic, as focusing only on the occupation, it does not
bring out the double bind of labour as exploitation and caste as deg-
radation that is inherent in the Dalit identity. It is precisely this story
that has been severely criticised by Dalit writers and intellectuals for
its characterisation of the Dalits as indolent and soulless specimen of
the lumpen proletariat without raising any issue that is related to the
problems of chamars or Dalits.36 As Laura Brueck points out, while
‘Kafan’ can be read as a critique of institutionalised systems of pov-
erty and caste oppression that lead to dehumanisation, Dalit critiques
argue that a lack of Dalit consciousness in Premchand can come from
confusion between caste and class-related oppression:

[T]he boundaries of the Hindi Dalit literary public are drawn

in part in the space between caste and class, and Dalit critics
are careful to mark their ideological difference from Marxist
thinkers. Caste and its attendant problems are, in their think-
ing, entirely separate from economic inequality which is a
symptom of social oppression rather than its cause.37

Choubey and Sharma display a lack of sensitivity in their translation

when it comes to translating caste. The caste question present in the
original text is further diluted in the translation despite their expressed
intention to foreground it. Alvaro Enterría’s translation is aware and
conscious of these caste-based nuances, but it is not so when it comes
to translating Premchand’s transcultured idiom. The most important
characteristic of Premchand’s works is his use of Hindustani and his
desanskritisation of modern literary Hindi. While the introduction
specifically makes mention of this, the standard Spanish employed in
Enterría’s translation completely blunts this linguistic uniqueness of
the original texts and in the process makes a tabula rasa of the class
conflict depicted in the stories such as ‘Poos ki Raat’. Choubey and
Sharma recognise the challenge posed by Premchand’s idiom and state
that they have chosen not to use a neutral standard Spanish. By not
blunting Premchand’s use of language – its orality, its syntactic devia-
tions – Choubey and Sharma have been able to capture the class con-
figuration of the characters.
In translating Premchand into Spanish, Choubey and Sharma as well
as Alvaro Enterria have undoubtedly undertaken an enormous step
of moving beyond Orientalism and beyond the current market-driven
translations of Indian texts. It is hoped that the above discussion on

102
 B eyond O rientalism

these two anthologies will remind us once again that translators are as
enmeshed in the interplay of language and power as the writers them-
selves. It is in realising their own precarious role and positioning, that
translators can be more self-reflexive and be aware of the pitfalls and
traps that await them.

Notes
1 Jorge Luis Borges, Evaristo Carriego: A Book about Old Time Buenos
Aires, Norman Thomas de Giovanni (trans.), New York: E. P. Dutton,
1984, p. 65. (Original in Spanish, Evaristo Carriego, Buenos Aires: Emece
Editores SA, 1955).
2 Gerard Gennete, ‘Introduction to the Paratext’, New Literary History,
1991, 22(2): 261.
3 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation,
London: Routledge, 1992, p. 4.
4 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism, New York: Verso, 1991, p. 164.
5 Spain, by contrast, was present in India only between 1580 and 1640,
and then only because, having annexed Portugal, it also took over that
country’s empire for the duration of the annexation.
6 Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse, London and New York: Routledge,
1992, p. 17.
7 Vicente Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Con-
version in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule, Durham and Lon-
don: Duke University Press, 1988; 3rd edition, 2001, p. xvii. Conversion,
Rafael states, refers to the act of changing a thing into something else, and
is commonly used to denote the act of bringing someone over to a religion
or practice, but it also has the connotation of translation.
8 E. Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization
from The Tempest to Tarzan, New York; Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1991, p. 104.
9 Sanskrit began to be taught at the Central University of Madrid in 1856,
and the first translations of works like Abhigyan Shakuntalam were pro-
duced in the 1890s. The Vedas were translated into Spanish in 1935, the
full version appearing in 1967. The Manavadharmashastra or Laws of
Manu were translated in 1900 and then in a later version in 1912. By
the 1950s, there were three versions of Bhagvadgita. The Kamasutra was
translated in 1973.
10 Valero, Sales and Taibi, ‘Traducir (para) la interculturalidad: repertorio y
retos de la literatura africana, india y árabe traducida’ (Interculturality: Rep-
ertory and Challenges of Translated African, Indian and Arab Literature),
Tonos Digital: Revista Electrónica de Estudios Filológicos No. 9, June 2005,
http://www.um.es/tonosdigital/znum9/estudios/interculturalidad.
htm (accessed on 21 September 2014).
11 The majority of these translations have been done in Mexico. The list
of Latin American works translated into Indian languages, particularly
Hindi, is woefully short and if one takes into consideration that Latin
American fiction has invited worldwide attention, it is surprising that One

103
 S onya S urabhi G upta

Hundred Years of Solitude of Gabriel García Márquez has been the only
Latin American novel translated into Hindi till date.
12 Valero, Sales, and Taibi, ‘Traducir (para) la Interculturalidad’. Sales et al.
explain: ‘The majority of these translations have been published in the 90s
and what’s gone of the 21st century. In the shelves of Spanish book-stores
we find pioneering writers such as Rabindranath Tagore; . . . two of the
three narrators considered as founding fathers of the Indian English novel,
Mulk Raj Anand and R. K. Narayan (the third, Raja Rao, has not yet
been translated); bestsellers that emerged in the eighties, such as Salman
Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Chandra, Anita Desai,
Vikram Seth, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Manju Kapur, Jhumpa Lahiri
and Meera Syal; other authors of international prestige such as Rohinton
Mistry, Manil Suri and Gita Mehta, as also an occasional work of Anita
Rau Badami, Anita Nair, Ardashir Vakil, Amit Chaudhuri, Shauna Singh
Baldwin, Pankaj Mishra, Shashi Tharoor and David Davidar’ (translation
mine).
13 Graciela de la Lama, ‘Introduction’, in G. Karnad (ed.), Tughlaq: El Gran
Sultan de Delhi (Tughlaq: The Great Sultan of Delhi), Felix Ilarraz (trans.),
New Delhi: Embassy of Mexico, 1981, p. ix.
14 Tagore has been translated into Spanish by some leading names of the
Hispanic literary world. Zenobia Camprubi and 1953 Nobel Prize win-
ner Juan Ramon Jimenez are his best-known translators in Spain while
in Latin America the list ranges from Pablo Neruda in Chile to Cecilia
Mierelles in Brazil.
15 Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1994, p. 81.
16 See Valero, Sales, and Taibi, ‘Traducir (para) la Interculturalidad’.
17 Christopher Rollason, ‘Problems of Translating Indian Writing in English
into Spanish, with Reference to “A Married Woman” by Manju Kapur’,
2006, http://yatrarollason.info/files/MANJUTRANSREV.pdf (accessed on
11 September 2014).
18 Ahmad, In Theory, p. 97. Sales and Valero mention that Oscar Pujol,
Enrique Gallud Jardiel and Alvaro Enterría are just three Spanish Indolo-
gists who have worked, besides Sanskrit, with Hindi texts too; Valero,
Carmen, Dora Sales, Beatriz Soto y Mohamed El-Madkouri, ‘Panorama
de la traducción de literatura de minorías en la España de comienzos de
siglo: Literatura de la India, Literatura árabe, Literatura magrebí y litera-
tura de países africanos’, in Tonos Digital: Revista Electrónica de Estu-
dios Filológicos, No. 8 December 2004, http://www.um.es/tonosdigital/
znum8/estudios/17-tradumin.htm (accessed on 21 September 2014). Men-
tion needs to be made of an anthology of short stories by women writers
of India edited by Sonya Surabhi Gupta and Francisca Montaraz, which
includes entries from Tamil, Telugu, Marathi and Urdu besides English
and Hindi (Lihaf: cuentos de mujeres de la India, 1997).
19 The stories translated are: ‘Mukti Marg’, ‘Do Bailon ki Katha’, ‘Meri
Pehli Rachna’, ‘Poos ki Raat’, ‘Bade Bhai Sahab’, ‘Lottery’, ‘Shatranj ke
Khiladi’, ‘Satyagraha’, ‘Manushya ka Param Dharam’, ‘Dudh ka Daam’,
‘Atmaram’ and ‘Kafan’.
20 Apart from the anthology under study, Alvaro Enterria had translated
from Hindi and English several short stories that were put together in an

104
 B eyond O rientalism

anthology La aldea y la ciudad: Antología de relatos cortos de la literatura

contemporánea de la India published by Indica Books in 1998 (re-edited
with Jose Olañeta in 2007). One story of Premchand was included in this
anthology. Some other translations of Premchand’s stories by him had
earlier appeared in various magazines in Spain.
21 In an interview, Choubey tells us that the idea of translating Premchand
occurred to him as he noticed the similarities in the rural life of Mexico
and India, particularly in the literary representation of the same in the sto-
ries of the Mexican writer Juan Rulfo and Premchand. During his doctoral
tenure at the El Colegio, he and his fellow researcher Yogi Sharma trans-
lated a few stories for the journal of the Centre for Afro-Asian Studies at
the Colegio, which finally took shape of a collection published in 2010,
Laura Uriostegui, ‘Mexico e India: similitudes de realidades’ (interview
with Chandra Bhushan Choubey, March 2010), http://www.csf.itesm.
mx/medioscomunicacion/visiontec/pdfs/vision_96.pdf (accessed on 15
September 2014).
22 Chandra Bhushan Choubey and Yogendra Sharma, ‘Introduction’, in
Premchand (ed.), La India: ‘Los intocables’ y otros cuentos, Chandra
Bhushan Choubey and Yogendra Sharma (trans.), Tecnologico de Mon-
terrey: Miguel Angel Porrua, 2010, p. 25. The stories translated in this
anthology are: ‘Kafan’, ‘Dudh ka Daam’, ‘Chamatkar’, ‘Poos ki Raat’,
‘Saubhagya ke Kodey’, ‘Shudra’, ‘Thakur ka Kuan’, ‘Yahi Meri Matri-
bhumi Hai’, ‘Himsa Parmo Dharma’, ‘Brahma ka Svang’ and ‘Sadgati’.
23 Choubey and Sharma, ‘Introduction’, p. 18.
24 The debate centres around whether Premchand is a writer with a Dalit
consciousness or not. See Laura Brueck, ‘Dalit Chetna in Dalit Literary
Criticism’, http://www.india-seminar.com/2006/558/558%20laura%20
r.%20brueck.htm (accessed on 15 September 2014), and Omprakash Val-
miki, ‘Veinticinco por cuatro son ciento cincuenta’, Estudios de Asia y
África, 2009, XLIV (Sin Mes), http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=
58620940004 (accessed on 15 September 2014).
25 Premchand, La India: ‘Los Intocables’ y otros cuentos, Chandra Bhushan
Choubey and Yogendra Sharma (trans.), Tecnologico de Monterrey:
Miguel Angel Porrua, 2010, pp. 109–34.
26 Ibid., p. 189.
27 Ibid.
28 Jose Yuste Frias, ‘Paratextual Elements in Translation: Paratranslating
Titles in Children’s Literature’, in Anna Gil-Bajardi, Pilar Orero and Sara
Rovira-Esteva (eds), Translation Peripheries: Paratextual Elements in
Translation, Frankfurt am Main; Wien: Peter Lang, 2012, p. 118.
29 David Lodge, The Art of Fiction, Middlesex: Penguin, 1992, p. 193.
30 Ovidi Carbonell i Cortes, Traducir al Otro: traducción, exotismo, pos-
colonialismo (Translating the Other: Translation, Exotism, Postcolonial-
ism), Cuenca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla–La Mancha, 1997,
p. 132. That this is not an isolated case is evident from the title of yet
another anthology of contemporary Indian short stories in translation into
Spanish prepared by Francisca Montaraz: the title of this anthology is Los
confabuladores nocturnos (The Nocturnal Confabulators, 1998). The title
is derived from a quote from Jorge Luis Borges which forms the epigraph
to the anthology and makes reference to Thousand and One Nights. By

105
 S onya S urabhi G upta

the title itself, an anthology of contemporary Indian short fiction is put

into the exoticised space of the fantastic, of the nocturnal, the archetype
of the Orient.
31 Caminho das Índias was a marathon soap opera that ran on Brazil’s popu-
lar Rede Globo from January to September 2009. The serial was telecast
for six days a week at prime time, recording highest rating points. It even
won an International Emmy award for Best Telenovela for 2009. It was
later televised in a Spanish version in many countries in Latin America.
32 Premchand, La India, p. 185.
33 Ibid.
34 Premchand, Antología de Cuentos, Alvaro Enterría (trans.), Palma de
Mallorca: Jose de Olañeta, 2002, new edition, 2012, p. 137.
35 Premchand, La India, p. 32.
36 Omprakash Valmiki, ‘Premchand: Sandarbh Dalit Vimarsh’, Teesra Paksh,
2004, 14–15: 28.
37 Brueck, ‘Dalit Chetna in Dalit Literary Criticism’.

Bibliography
Ahmad, Aijaz, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1994.
Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism, New York: Verso, 1991.
Borges, Jorge Luis, Evaristo Carriego: A Book about Old Time Buenos Aires,
Norman Thomas de Giovanni (trans.), New York: E. P. Dutton, 1984. (Orig-
inal in Spanish, Evaristo Carriego, Buenos Aires: Emece Editores SA, 1955).
Brueck, Laura, ‘Dalit Chetna in Dalit Literary Criticism’, http://www.india-
seminar.com/2006/558/558%20laura%20r.%20brueck.htm (accessed on
15 September 2014).
Carmen,Valero, Sales, Dora, and El-Madkouri, Beatriz Soto y Mohamed, ‘Pan-
orama de la traducción de literatura de minorías en la España de comienzos
de siglo: Literatura de la India, literatura árabe, literatura magrebí y literatura
de países africanos’ (Panorama of Translation of the Literature of Minorities
in the Beginning of Century Spain: Literature from India, Arab Literature,
Maghrebi Literature and Literature of African Countries), in Tonos Digital:
Revista Electrónica de Estudios Filológicos, No. 8, December 2004, http://
www.um.es/tonosdigital/znum8/estudios/17-tradumin.htm (accessed on 21
September 2014).
Carmen,Valero, Sales, Dora and Taibi, Mustafa, ‘Traducir (para) la Intercul-
turalidad: repertorio y retos de la literatura africana, India y árabe traducida’
(Translating (for) Interculturality: Repertory and Challenges of Translated
African, Indian and Arab Literature), Tonos Digital: Revista Electrónica de
Estudios Filológicos, 9 June 2005, http://www.um.es/tonosdigital/znum9/
estudios/interculturalidad.htm (accessed on 21 September 2014).
Cheyfitz, Eric, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from
the Tempest to Tarzan, New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

106
 B eyond O rientalism

Choubey, Chandra Bhushan and Sharma, Yogendra, ‘Introduction’, in Prem-

chand (ed.), La India: ‘Los Intocables’ y otros cuentos, Chandra Bhushan
Choubey and Yogendra Sharma (trans.), Tecnologico de Monterrey: Miguel
Angel Porrua, 2010, pp. 7–24.
Cortes, Ovidi Carbonell i, Traducir al otro: traducción, exotismo, poscolo-
nialismo (Translating the Other: Translation, Exotism, Postcolonialism),
Cuenca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Castilla–La Mancha, 1997.
de la Lama, Graciela, ‘Introduction’, in G. Karnad (ed.), Tughlaq: El Gran
Sultan de Delhi (Tughlaq: The Great Sultan of Delhi), Felix Ilarraz (trans.),
New Delhi: Embassy of Mexico, 1981.
Frias, Jose Yuste, ‘Paratextual Elements in Translation: Paratranslating Titles
in Children’s Literature’, in Anna Gil-Bajardi, Pilar Orero and Sara Rovira-
Esteva (eds), Translation Peripheries: Paratextual Elements in Translation,
Frankfurt am Main; Wien: Peter Lang, 2012, pp. 117–34.
Gennete, Gerard, ‘Introduction to the Paratext’, New Literary History, 1991,
22(2): 261–72.
Greenblatt, Stephen, Learning to Curse, London; New York: Routledge, 1992.
Gupta, Sonya Surabhi and Montaraz, Francisca, Lihaf: Cuentos de mujeres de
la India (Lihaf: Stories from Women of India), Madrid: Horas y horas, 1997.
Karnad, Girish, Tughlaq: El Gran Sultan de Delhi (Tughlaq: The Great Sultan
of Delhi), Félix Ilárraz (trans.), New Delhi: Embassy of Mexico, 1981.
Lodge, David, The Art of Fiction, Middlesex: Penguin, 1992.
Márquez, Gabriel García, Ekant ke Sau Varsh, Translation of One Hundred
Years of Solitude from Spanish to Hindi by Sonya Surabhi Gupta, New
Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2003.
Montaraz, Francisca, Los confabuladores nocturnos: Antología de relatos de
la India contemporánea (Nocturnal Confabulators: Anthology of Stories
from Contemporary India), Madrid: Siddharth Mehta Ediciones, 1998.
Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation,
London: Routledge, 1992.
Premchand, Antología de cuentos (Anthology of Stories), Alvaro Enterria
(trans.), Palma de Mallorca: Jose de Olañeta, 2002, new edition, 2012.
Premchand, La India: ‘Los Intocables’ y otros cuentos (India: “The Untoucha-
bles” and Other Stories), Chandra Bhushan Choubey and Yogendra Sharma
(trans.), Tecnologico de Monterrey: Miguel Angel Porrua, 2010.
Rafael, Vicente, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conver-
sion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule, Durham and London:
Duke University Press, 1988; 3rd edition, 2001.
Rollason, Christopher, ‘Problems of Translating Indian Writing in English
into Spanish, with Reference to “A Married Woman” by Manju Kapur’,
2006, http://yatrarollason.info/files/MANJUTRANSREV.pdf (accessed on
11 September 2014).
Singh, Khushwant, Delhi, Delhi: Viking, 1990.
Singh, Khushwant, Las mil y una noches de Delhi (The Thousand and One
Nights of Delhi), Madrid: Planeta, 1991.

107
 S onya S urabhi G upta

Uriostegui, Laura, ‘Mexico e India: similitudes de realidades’ (Mexico and India:

Similar Realities), interview with Chandra Bhushan Choubey, March 2010,
http://www.csf.itesm.mx/medioscomunicacion/visiontec/pdfs/vision_96.pdf
(accessed on 15 September 2014).
Valmiki, Omprakash, ‘Premchand: Sandarbh Dalit Vimarsh’, Teesra Paksh
2004, 14–15: 25–32.
Valmiki, Omprakash, ‘Veinticinco por cuatro son ciento cincuenta’ (Twenty
into Four are One Hundred and Fifty), Estudios de Asia y África 2009,
XLIV, http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=58620940004 (accessed on
15 September 2014).

108
 6
PREMCHAND IN FRENCH
AND THE FRENCH FOR
PREMCHAND

Sharad Chandra

The subject given to me was, ‘Premchand in French’. I stretched it to

‘Premchand in French and the French for Premchand’ to underline his
exuberant appreciation for the literature produced in that language.
While talking about the French translations and translators of his work,
and his presence on the literary scene of France from 1976 onwards,
I would also like to dwell on his own involvement with French literature.

I
To my knowledge there are three main French translators of Prem-
chand’s work – Catherine Weinberger-Thomas, Nicole Balbir and
Fernand Ouellet. Catherine and Nicole are from INALCO, Paris, and
Fernand Ouellet is from Canada. Nicole died in 2008. After her volun-
tary retirement from INALCO in 1992 she gave all her time to research
in linguistics and translation of medieval and modern Hindi literature
and has left behind a considerable body of work in that field.1 But as
far as Premchand is concerned, her total contribution is the translation
into French of two short stories, ‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’ and ‘Do Behne’.2
Fernand Ouellet is basically a historian and has taught history at the
universities of Laval and Ottawa in Canada. After his retirement in
September 2008, he joined as an associate professor in the faculty of
theology, ethics and philosophy at the University of Sherbrooke, Can-
ada, where he works now. The wide variety of books and articles pub-
lished by him evince his interest in the area of intercultural education.
The biographical note from his publishers informs that he has travelled
to India on numerous occasions, including several research trips, and

109
 S harad C handra

that he takes a keen interest in the writings of Munshi Premchand.

Fernand Ouellet has translated and published two collections of Prem-
chand’s short stories, Deux Amies et Autres Nouvelles (Two Friends
and Other Stories) and Déliverance (Deliverance), in 1996 and 2000,
respectively.3 Six years later, he came up with Godan: Le Don d’une
Vache (Godan: The Gift of a Cow) and very recently with Rangabhumi.4
All these translations reportedly have been done from original Hindi.
My efforts to gather information from him about how and when he got
to learn Hindi, what triggered his fascination for Premchand, what was
his method of translation, what sustained him through translating huge
works like the last two novels and what was the reception like of his
translations failed. These translated works are not easily available in
India to enable one to compare them with the original. I tried and could
only see one, Godan: Le Don d’une Vache. It reads well but in the
absence of explanatory notes or an introduction from the translator we
know nothing about his experience. This notwithstanding, now when
the popular taste of the French translators has shifted to more recent
writers like Nirmal Verma, Vinod Kumar Shukla, Jainendra Kumar,
Kunwar Narayan, Mannu Bhandhari, Mohan Rakesh and Krishna
Baldev Vaid, regular and continuous addition through his pen to the
body of Premchand literature in French is a welcome fact.
This brings me to Catherine Weinberger-Thomas, not only a gifted
and devoted translator of Premchand but also a senior, well-known
exegete of his work in France. Catherine Thomas has taught Hindi
language and literature – at the INALCO (L’ Institut National des
Langues et Civilisations Orientales), the National Institute of Orien-
tal Languages and Civilizations, University of Paris – and is at pre-
sent Professor Emeritus from there. The subject of her PhD thesis, in
the framework of comparative literature, was a structuralist study of
Premchand’s short stories, which was later published in book form.5
Eventually, she got to translate some of his short stories, and pub-
lished them with an insightful introduction and glossary under the title
Le Suaire, Récits d’une Autre Inde (The Shroud, Stories from Another
India).6 As per French academics, this remains, to date, the best trans-
lation of Premchand in French.
Catherine Weinberger-Thomas opens her introduction with the
words, ‘The work of Premchand dominates Hindi literature of the 20th
century,’ and the following sixteen pages provide the prospective read-
ers a brief summary of the writer’s themes, preoccupations, social affil-
iations, political leanings, temperamental traits and literary likes and
dislikes. The quality, policy and method of Premchand’s writing, his
literary importance and the reasons that inspired her to study him and

110
 P remchand in F rench

translate him – everything that a new reader likes to know. By way of

background she also traces in her introduction, briefly but systemati-
cally, the evolution of Hindi short story from juvenile tales of magic
and romance to the first modern short story, ‘Rani Ketaki ki Kahani’,
and from there, to its fully developed, well-constructed form of short
fiction in the hands of Premchand with a clear turn to realism.
From the vast corpus of about 300 short stories, Catherine Thomas,
carefully leaving out moralist and propagandist stuff, has selected
eight to translate into French: ‘Namak ka Daroga’ (L’Inspecteur du
Sel; 1914), ‘Saut’ (L’Epouse Rivale; 1915), ‘Boodhi Kaki’ (La Vielle
Tante; 1921), ‘Sava Ser Gehun’ (Une Mesure de Ble; 1924), ‘Poos
ki Raat’ (Une Nuit d’ Hiver; 1930), ‘Thakur ka Kuan’ (Le Puit de
Thakur; 1932), ‘Prem ki Holi’ (La Flambee d’un Amour; 1936) and
‘Kafan’ (Le Suaire; 1936), which is also the title of her collection. Her
focus is obviously on the social concerns of Premchand. For Prem-
chand, according to her, the village life was the richest source of inspi-
ration and he picked realistic details from there to give his stories a
dynamism, range and richness not known before. All of these eight
stories consist of the everyday experience of the villagers. There is
no dramatic turn, no revelation, no revolt. The sole purpose of the
narrative seems to be to record the truth of the lived moment in all
its authenticity, its fragility and its fragmentariness. Each one of the
stories corresponds to a value fervently upheld by Premchand; they
ideally integrate into the main ideology of his work.
On her experience of translation Catherine Thomas says,

Translating him was difficult of course – any translation is,

from whatever foreign language. In this case, it was not so
much the linguistic aspects of translation that were hard to
cope with, but the cultural background. I had to convey to
a readership then largely unaware of things Indian. . . . Also,
I wanted to remain as close to the text as possible, while con-
veying the full spectrum of his literary qualities and the impact
of his social message.7

She has not translated much – just eight short stories – but has superbly
reproduced in French the magic of Premchand’s words, the same flow,
the same cadence, the same turn of phrase. Take, for example, the
opening lines of ‘Kafan’,

झोपड़ के द्वर पर बाप और बेटा दोनो एक बझे ु हु ए अलाव के

सामने चप ु चाप बैठे हु ए है और अन्दर बेटे की जवान बीवी बुिधया

111
 S harad C handra

प्रँह
ु सव-वेदना
से ऐसी से पछाड़ खा रही थी। रह-रह कर उसके म
दिल हिला देने वाली आवाज निकलती थी कि दोनो कलेजा थाम
लते ाँव थे। जाड़ो की रात थी, प्रकृ ति सन्नटे मे डू बी हु ई। सारा ग
अंधकार मे लय हो गया था।8

translated into French by her the passage reads,

Au seuil de la cahute, le pere et le fils etaient assis, silencieux,

devant un feu eteint, tandis qu’ a l’interieur la jeune epouse du
fils, Buddhiya, se debattait dans les douleurs de l’enfantement.
Des cris ntermittents s’echappaient de ses levres, si dechi-
rant que leur coeur devait se faire violence. C’etait une nuit
d’hivers. La nature etait plongee dans la silence; le village tout
entier s’etait dissous dans les tenebres.9

At the end of the same story, the father and the son, both dead drunk
are rollicking and mumbling the refrain of a popular song. Even that
has been caught quite cleverly in the French version. She has retained
the typical Hindi words like Pandit, Tilak, Kachauri, Thakur and so
on and explained them in detail in the glossary. What mainly seems
to have appealed to the French eye – besides, of course, the literary
excellence of Premchand – is his being ‘un ecrivain engage’ (a commit-
ted writer) and a follower of Mahatma Gandhi: ‘S’il est un mot pour
definer a la fois l’ homme et l’ ecrivain’, says Catherine, ‘c’ est celui d’
engagement’.10 She finds him a reformist, social activist, progressivist,
Marxist, Gandhian, traditionalist and a staunch supporter of Indian
cultural values, all rolled into one. Expatiating on Premchand’s social
concern, she says he wanted to relieve the peasants of their wretched-
ness, the women and untouchables of their unspeakable misery and
his countrymen from the bondage of foreign rule. In her reading of the
mind of her chosen writer, she is not far from the truth. Premchand
himself had told Banarasi Das Chaturvedi that it gave him ‘spiritual
relief’ to see his ‘lot cast with the poor’.11
Premchand’s second main preoccupation was ‘Swaraj’. To a ques-
tion by Banarasi Das Chaturvedi about his ambitions, he wrote back:

I have no ambitions. My highest ambition at present is that we

should succeed in our struggle for Swaraj – Self-Government.
I have no desire for money or fame. I get just sufficient to keep
me alive. I do not hanker after a motor-car or a bungalow. . . .
I want to write a few books of high standard but these too
with an aim to win Swaraj.12

112
 P remchand in F rench

Premchand was a crusader from the very start and wrote with mission-
ary zeal till the very end. With his total identification with the national
cause he propagated in fiction what Gandhiji was doing in politics.
About the same time as Le Suaire, Catherine Thomas published a long
critical essay on Godaan,13 and four years later, an in-depth study of
her favourite novel, Premashram (1921) under the title, L’ Ashram de
l’Amour,14 which was very well received by the small community of
specialists and generated wide critical acclaim.
During her tenure at the INALCO, Catherine Thomas taught the
sociology of Hindi literature and its significance in understanding
changes in modern Indian ideology, especially Gandhism, of which
Premchand was a great exponent. Hence, from Premchand or through
Premchand, her field of study expanded to exploring the mean-
ing and function of cultural traditions and transformation in India.
She began to work on other related social issues like widow burn-
ing and ritual suicide. Her subsequent works, namely, Le Gandhisme
et L’imaginaire, a collection of critical essays on Gandhism,15 and her
examination of the Western perceptions of India and their influence
on the self-image of Indians in modern times published as Cendres
d’immortalité: La Crémation des Veuves en Inde,16 too are considered
important books by French specialists on India. The last one has since
been translated into English and published in Chicago as Ashes of
Immortality: Widow-Burning in India.

II
Premchand was an avid reader of world literature but it was the
French literature that he declared wholeheartedly as ‘the best and the
most enjoyable in all of Europe’.17 Enthusiastic comments by him on
Victor Hugo, Flaubert, Maupassant, Balzac, Zola, Rolland, Proust
and others can be found scattered all over in his letters and articles,
though at times, he has not hesitated to express his disapproval like,
‘some of the stories of Guy de Maupassant are very good but the dif-
ficulty with them is that they are steeped in sex.’18 For that reason,
probably, he demoted Maupassant in his reckoning and bestowed
the honour of being the best story writer on Chekhov from Russia.
With its theme of spiritual redemption, he liked the novel Thais by
Anatole France and translated it into Hindi without losing time.19
Another French title that he made available to his Urdu readers was Les
Aveugles (The Blind)20 by the Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck who
used to write in French. He also thought of translating Les Miserables
but found that it had already been done by Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi.

113
 S harad C handra

He praised Notre Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) as

most entertaining and pleasant piece of literature in his review of its
Hindi translation,21 lamenting all the while that ‘unfortunately, all our
translations are done through the medium of English’ and as such are
twice removed from the original. His own translations too were from
the English version, but he assures his readers that in spite of him not
being an expert translator, while reading Ahankar they will, at places,
get a glimpse of the splendour and brilliance of the original.22 Towards
the end of his ‘Introduction’ to Ahankar he curiously declares that
he is dead against the practice of ‘adapting’ a work in the name of
translating it, and firmly denies having done so himself, yet anyone
can plainly see the heavy coat of Indian culture liberally applied by
Premchand everywhere in Ahankar. Of course, it doesn’t make Thais
any less beautiful. It only presents it in an Indian garb. Premchand
was as much a master of his art as Anatole France. And the change of
the title from Thais to Ahankar, in fact, suits the Hindi version much
better. First, because the word or name ‘Thais’ wrongly pronounced as
‘thayas’ would have sounded flat to the ears of a general Hindi reader.
Even if pronounced correctly the reader wouldn’t connect as natu-
rally as the readers in the West to the story of the repentant courtesan
Thais who later became St Thais. And second, pride or arrogance,
or ‘ahankar’ in Hindi, is, in any case, the virtual theme of the novel.
Paphnuce, throughout the tale driven by his holy fervour, inevitably
ends up following the whims of his egoistic pride instead of the good
advice given to him by the people he encounters.

III
In the end I would like to say a few words on translation into foreign
languages and promotion of our literature abroad. We all know that
much more foreign literature gets translated into our languages than
ours abroad, not because of any lack of interest of foreign countries in
our literature but because of the lack of conscious effort on our part to
make it known. Whatever little has crossed our shores has happened
by the courtesy of some incidental foreign writer, scholar or travel-
ler – Tagore for one, through Andre Gide and Yeats. While gathering
material for this chapter, I happened to see Premchand: A Western
Appraisal by Siegfried A. Schulz, who published a comparative study
of Godaan and Dickens way back in the 1980s. Schulz delivered a talk
on Premchand at the Indian Council for Cultural Relations in 1981 in
which he said that ‘this great novel (meaning Godaan) has not enjoyed
the love and admiration in the West it so richly deserves because people

114
 P remchand in F rench

have not been active enough to make it known there.’23 Towards the
end of his talk he added that ‘Gunter Grass complained, upon return-
ing to Germany from India, how little they knew, in Germany, of
recent and contemporary Indian literature.’ Finally he ended his talk
with the suggestion, ‘perhaps Grass should be asked to at least, take
a look at Premchand’s writings’.24 In the same context somewhere
someone else has also expressed a similar wish. An American scholar,
Robert O. Swan, had published a book on Premchand’s short stories
in 1969.25 Professor Ludo Rocher while reviewing Swan’s book says,
‘We hope that he will return to India to make a study of some of the
more recent Hindi writers who owe much to Premchand, but whose
works are decidedly of a higher quality than those of the pioneer; they
are moreover, completely unknown in America.’26
Such statements do not reflect very well on us. I have seen diplo-
mats of foreign missions based here in New Delhi take extra pains to
project their literature in our country, by meeting writers and trans-
lators, attending and organising book launches, giving informative
talks on their ‘genuinely’ eminent writers, sometimes even reciting
a selection of poems along with their English translation. I haven’t
noticed our diplomats posted abroad give any such importance to
home literature.

Notes
1 See for example, Nicole Balbir, La Chemise du Domestique de Vinod
Kumar Shukla, Paris: L’Eclose Editions, 2002; Nicole Balbir, Gange, ô
Ma Mère de Bhairava Prasâd Gupta, Paris: Gallimard, 1967; and Nicole
Balbir, Le Festin des Vautours de Mannû Bhandârî, Paris: L’Harmattan,
1993.
2 Nicole Balbir, Les Bienheureuses, Montreal; Paris: L’Harmattan, 1989.
3 Premchand, Deux Amies et Autres Nouvelles, Fernand Ouellet (trans. and
ed.), Montreal; Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996; and Premchand, Déliverance,
Fernand Ouellet (trans. and ed.), Montreal; Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000.
4 Premchand, Godan: Le Don d’une Vache, Fernand Ouellet (trans. and
ed.), Paris: L’ Harmattan, 2006; and Premchand, Rangbhûmi: Le Théâtre
des Héros, Fernand Ouellet (trans. and ed.), Paris: L’ Harmattan, 2012.
5 Catherine Thomas, Morphology of ‘Kahani’ in Premchand, unpublished
Ph.D. dissertation, University of Sorbonne, 1973.
6 Premchand, Le Suaire: Récits d’une Autre Inde, Catherine Thomas (trans.
and ed.), Paris: POF, 1975.
7 E-mail to me on 20 October 2012.
8 Premchand, ‘Kafan’, in Ramvilas Sharma (ed.), Premchand Rachanav-
ali [in Hindi: Collected Works of Premchand], 20 vols, Delhi: Janavani
Prakashan, 1996, vol. 15, p. 401.
9 Premchand, ‘Le Suaire’, in Le Suaire: Récits d’une Autre Inde, Catherine
Thomas (trans. and ed.), Paris: POF, 1975.

115
 S harad C handra

10 Premchand, Le Suaire, p. 5.
11 Premchand, Chiththi Patri (Letters), Amrit Rai and Madan Gopal (eds),
vol. II, Allahabad: Hans Prakashan, 1962, p. 93.
12 Ibid., p. 77.
13 Catherine Thomas, ‘Le Village dans la Foret: Sacrifice et Renoncement
dans la Godan de Premchand’, in Purusartha, 1975. Paris: Editions de L’
Ecole Des Hautes Etudes en Science Sociales.
14 Catherine Thomas, L’ashram de L’amour, Le Gandhisme et L’imaginaire,
Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Publications de
l’Université de Lille III, 1975.
15 Catherine Weinberger-Thomas, L’ Inde et L’Imaginaire, Paris: Editions de
L’ Ecole Des Hautes Ettudes en Science Sociales Collection Purusartha,
1988.
16 Catherine Weinberger-Thomas, Cendres d'immortalité: La Crémation des
Veuves en Inde, Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1996.
17 Premchand, ‘Introduction’ (to Ahankar), in Ram Anand (ed.), Premchand
Rachanavali [in Hindi: Collected Works of Premchand]; Introduction and
Conceptualization [‘margdarshan’], Ramvilas Sharma, 20 vols, Delhi:
Janavani Prakashan, 1996, vol. IX, Ahankar, p. 435.
18 Madan Gopal, Munshi Premchand: A Literary Biography, New Delhi:
Asia Publishing House, 1964, p. 347.
19 Premchand, Premchand Rachanavali, vol. 16, Ahankar, pp. 65–184.
20 Premchand, Shab-e-Tar Yani Andheri Raat (Translation of Maurice
Maeterlinck’s play Les Aveugles by Premchand in Hindi), Allahababad:
Hans Prakashan, 1962; pub. in Zamana, September–October, 1919.
21 Premchand, Premchand Rachanavali, vol. IX, p. 356.
22 Ibid., p. 440.
23 Siegfried A. Schulz, Premchand: A Western Appraisal, New Delhi: ICCR,
1981, p. 40.
24 Ibid., p. 41.
25 Robert O. Swan, Munshi Premchand of Lamhi Village, Durham: Duke
University Press, 1969.
26 Ludo Rocher, Review of Munshi Premchand of Lamhi Village, by Robert
O. Swan, The Journal of Asian Studies, 1970, 30(1): 225–6.

Bibliography
Balbir, Nicole, Gange, ô Ma Mère de Bhairava Prasâd Gupta, Paris: Galli-
mard, 1967.
Balbir, Nicole, La Chemise du Domestique de Vinod Kumar Shukla, Paris:
L’Eclose Editions, 2002.
Balbir, Nicole, Le Festin des Vautours de Mannû Bhandârî, Paris: L’Harmattan,
1993.
Balbir, Nicole, Les Bienheureuses, Montreal; Paris: L’Harmattan, 1989.
Gopal, Madan, Munshi Premchand: A Literary Biography, New Delhi: Asia
Publishing House, 1964.
Premchand, Chiththi Patri (Letters), Amrit Rai and Madan Gopal (eds), vol.
II, Allahabad: Hans Prakashan, 1962.

116
 P remchand in F rench

Premchand, Déliverance, Fernand Ouellet (trans. and ed.), Montreal; Paris:

L’Harmattan, 2000.
Premchand, Deux Amies et Autres Nouvelles, Fernand Ouellet (trans. and
ed.), Montreal; Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996.
Premchand, Godan: Le Don d’une Vache, Fernand Ouellet (trans. and ed.),
Paris: L’ Harmattan, 2006.
Premchand, ‘Introduction (to Ahankar)’, in Ram Anand (ed.), Premchand
Rachanavali [in Hindi: Collected Works of Premchand]; introduction and
conceptualization [‘margdarshan’], Ramvilas Sharma, 20 vols, Delhi: Jana-
vani Prakashan, 1996.
Premchand, Le Suaire: Récits d’une Autre Inde, Catherine Thomas (trans. and
ed.), Paris: POF, 1975.
Premchand, Premchand Rachanavali [in Hindi: Collected Works of Prem-
chand], Ramvilas Sharma (ed.), 20 vols, Delhi: Janavani Prakashan, 1996.
Premchand, Rangbhûmi: Le Théâtre des Héros, Fernand Ouellet (trans. and
ed.), Paris: L’ Harmattan, 2012.
Rocher, Ludo, Review of Munshi Premchand of Lamhi Village, by Robert O.
Swan, The Journal of Asian Studies, 1970, 30(1): 225–6.
Schulz, Siegfried A., Premchand: A Western Appraisal, New Delhi: ICCR,
1981.
Swan, Robert O., Munshi Premchand of Lamhi Village, Durham: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 1969.
Weinberger-Thomas, Catherine, Cendres d’immortalité: La Crémation des
Veuves en Inde, Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1996.
Weinberger-Thomas, Catherine, L’ashram de L’amour, Le Gandhisme et
L’imaginaire, Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Publi-
cations de l’Université de Lille III, 1975.
Weinberger-Thomas, Catherine, ‘Le Village dans la Foret: Sacrifice et Renon-
cement dans la Godan de Premchand’, Purusartha, 1975.
Weinberger-Thomas, Catherine, L’ Inde et L’Imaginaire, Paris: Editions de L’
Ecole Des Hautes Ettudes en Science Sociales Collection Purusartha, 1988.
Weinberger-Thomas, Catherine, Morphology of ‘Kahani’ in Premchand,
unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Sorbonne, 1973.

117
 7
FRENCH TRANSLATIONS
OF MUNSHI PREMCHAND’S
SHORT STORIES
A critical enquiry

Muhammad Faizullah Khan

Translation today is not merely a simple cognitive exercise, a process

by which a text written in a language is rendered into another. It is no
more a transparent medium through which readers gain insight into
other cultures, but as Andre Lefevere, Susan Bassnett and many other
translation theorists argue, it is a ‘manipulative’ activity that takes
place in a special social, cultural and historical context that informs
and structures it. In other words, while translating literature from one
language into another, the translator’s choice of the texts to translate
and his way of translating are inseparable from his perception of real-
ity and from the purpose with which he initiates the translation. The
following words of Susanne de Lotbiniere-Harwood, a feminist trans-
lator, make this argument more vibrant: ‘My translation practice aims
to make the feminine visible in language so that women are seen and
heard in the world.’1
This chapter intends to analyse the French translations of Munshi
Premchand’s short stories by French, Canadian and Swiss translators
and show that these translations have been considerably influenced
by the translators’ perception of Premchand’s literature, their views
of Indian society and the purpose with which they carried out the
translations. Keeping in view the objective of the chapter, I shall first
try to examine the themes of the short stories selected for translation
by the translators in question and show how the translators’ percep-
tion of Premchand’s writings and Indian society has influenced their

118
 F rench translations of M unshi P remchand

choice of texts to translate. I shall then make an attempt to study the

main strategies of translation deployed by the translators and see what
words/expressions have been omitted, added or altered in the transla-
tions and why.

French translations of Premchand’s

short stories: a thematic study
One of the most prolific writers on the Indian literary scene, Prem-
chand was introduced to Francophone readers in 1975 by French
translator Catherine Thomas, who translated eight of his short stories
and compiled them under the title Le Suaire: Récit d’une Autre Inde
(The Shroud: Stories of Another India). In 2007, Sebastien Mayor,
a Swiss translator, rendered into French the short story, ‘Nairashya’.
The translation appeared in the anthology Une Autre Vie: Un Siècle
de Nouvelles Hindi (Another Life: One Hundred Years of Hindi Short
Stories).2 Thomas and Mayor have undoubtedly done great service
to the cause of Hindi literature by translating Premchand’s writings
into French. However, a careful reading of their translations reveals
many interesting avenues for critical enquiries. Though Premchand’s
short stories are of a wide range and variety, a glance at the list of
translated stories reveals that certain types of themes have dominated
the selection for translation. The selected stories especially deal with
subjects like corruption [‘Namak ka Daroga’ (L’Inspecteur du Sel)],
plight of women [‘Saut’ (L’Epouse Rivale), ‘Nairashya’ (Nairashya)],
negative and hostile attitude of people towards the elderly [‘Boo-
dhi Kaki’ (La Vieille Tante)], pathetic condition of the untouchables
[‘Thakur ka Kuan’ (Le Puits du Thakur), ‘Kafan’ (Le Suaire)], cruelty
of the privileged classes [‘Sava Ser Gehun’ (Une Mesure du Blé)] and
extreme poverty [‘Poos ki Raat’ (Une Nuit d’Hiver), ‘Sava Ser Gehun’,
‘Kafan’, and ‘Thakur ka Kuan’]. As a result, they paint a unidimen-
sional view of India and present Premchand as a writer whose works
depict only the dark side of Indian society, whereas he has written a
large number of stories dealing not only with caste oppression, plight
of women and corruption but also with themes like communal har-
mony, women’s active participation in the freedom struggle, compas-
sion of the upper-caste Hindus in Indian society, child psychology and
many more.
Another French translator, Nicole Balbir, translated ‘Shatranj ke
Khiladi’ (Les Joueurs d’échecs) in 1987 for the anthology Litteratures

119
 M uhammad F aizullah K han

de l’Inde (Literatures of India)3 and ‘Kusum’ in 1989 for the anthol-

ogy Les Bienheureuses (The Blessed).4 Seven years later, in 1996, Fer-
nand Ouellet, a Canadian translator, translated ten of Premchand’s
short stories collected under the title Deux Amies et Autres Nou-
velles (Two Friends and Other Short Stories). In 2000, he brought out
another anthology entitled Deliverance which comprises the transla-
tions of sixteen short stories. In 2008, he translated twenty-six short
stories compiled under the title La Marche Vers la Liberté (March
towards Freedom). These translations delineate a rather different pic-
ture of Premchand’s literature and Indian society as the translators
look beyond the issues of exploitation of the untouchables, pathetic
subjugated condition of Indian women, extreme poverty and corrup-
tion, and include in their anthologies works dealing with themes like
communal harmony [‘Muktidhan’ (Le Prix de la Libération), ‘Fatiha’
(Fatiha), ‘Panch Parmeshwar’ (L’ultime Maître du Pancayat)], close
companionship of man and animal [‘Do Bailon ki Katha’ (L’Histoire de
Deux Boeufs)], child psychology [‘Idgah’ (Idgah), ‘Kazaki’ (Kazaki)],
women’s role in the Indian independence movement [‘Samar Yatra’ (La
Marche au Combat), ‘Juloos’ (Le Defilé)], positive side of the upper-
caste Hindus [‘Bade Ghar ki Beti’ (Une Fille de Grande Famille), ‘Lag
Dat’ (Rivalité), ‘Pariksha’ (Le Test)] and women who are strong and
confident and who refuse to bow down to injustice and exploitation
(‘Kusum’ and ‘Bade Ghar ki Beti’).
In fact, the selection of literary texts for translation is not done in a
vacuum. Besides the role of publisher and certain marketing factors,
it reflects the translator’s perception of the works of the author he
translates, his vision of the culture to which the author belongs and the
objective with which he initiates the translation. In the introduction
to her anthology, Catherine Thomas argues that Premchand’s writ-
ings project a pitiful image of Indian society.5 This opinion of Thomas
about the works of Premchand is clearly reflected in her choice of texts
to translate as the short stories of her anthology together highlight
only the negative aspect of Indian society.
Sebastian Mayor believes that Premchand’s literature presents a pes-
simistic view of India.6 As a result, he chooses to translate ‘Nairashya’
which deals with a very pessimistic theme. It tells the story of Nirupama,
a mother of three daughters, who undergoes sheer mental torture at her
in-laws’ house as she fails to give birth to a male child. She is tormented
so much by her husband and her in-laws that she dies of heart failure
immediately after delivering her fourth daughter. As for Nicole Balbir,
she wants to highlight through her translation the problem of dowry
demands faced by Indian women. But at the same time, she believes

120
 F rench translations of M unshi P remchand

that the condition of women in India is not irredeemably hopeless as

a large number of Indian women are well educated and strong willed.7
That is why she translated the short story ‘Kusum’ which deals with the
issue of dowry but its protagonist is a well-educated and strong woman
who refuses to live with her selfish and greedy husband. For Fernand
Ouellet, Premchand’s works throw light on all aspects of Indian society.
In the introduction to his anthology Deux Amies et Autres Nouvelles,
he opines that if Premchand’s writings attract readers even today, it is
because the writer talks not only about the issues of untouchability and
poverty in his writings but also about the concept of social progress,
the struggle of farmers and labourers against injustice and exploitation,
the emergence of nationalist movements in India and the influence of
Gandhi on freedom fighters.8 One can safely say that it is this view
of Ouellet on Premchand’s literature which pushed him to choose the
short stories dealing with such diverse themes.

French translations of Premchand’s short stories:

strategies and approaches
The views of Ouellet and Thomas on Premchand’s literature and
Indian society have influenced not only their choice of texts to trans-
late but also their way of translating. For instance, Ouellet perceives
Premchand as a writer whose works present India as a country char-
acterised by vast cultural and religious pluralism. The influence of this
view on Ouellet can clearly be seen on his translation strategy. In most
of his translations, he tries to highlight the traces of cultural and reli-
gious diversity present in the original texts. To this end, he keeps the
Urdu, Persian and Arabic words and the terms related to Islam and
Muslim culture in their original form and gives their meaning either in
the footnote or in the glossary.
Let’s see some examples:

ाँ किसीभीतरह
(फिर अल्लह
निबाहे
मियजाते है। )9
Pourtant, grâce à Allah, je réussis à subsister.10

मौलवी साहब उनसे हार गये थे और उन्हें सबक पढ़ाने का भार मुझ पर
डाल दिया था।11
Maulvi sahab s’était avoué vaincu et il m’avait chargé de lui appren-
dre ses leçons.12

ाँअगर
भिश्त
कोईके शेछक्क
र आ जाएछू ट तो
जाऍ,
मिय 13

Si un lion surgissait, miyān porteur d’eau perdrait courage.14

121
 M uhammad F aizullah K han

This strategy might bother certain readers as it forces them to consult

the footnotes or the glossary several times while reading but it allows
Ouellet to showcase the religious and linguistic diversity of Indian
society through his translations. In fact, in order to deeply understand
Indian culture, Ouellet made frequent visits to India and interacted
with the members of different religious communities. Besides, he
translated most of the short stories in close collaboration with Kiran
Chaudhry, professor of French at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New
Delhi. Interacting with the members of different religious groups and
working in collaboration with a native speaker of Hindi also seem
to have helped him paint a realistic picture of Indian society and
Premchand’s works through his anthologies.
Unlike Ouellet, Thomas is not much interested in this aspect of Indian
society. A look at her works – L’Ashram de L’amour: Le Gandhism et
L’imaginaire (1979) (The Ashram of Love: Gandhism and the Imagi-
nary), Cendres d’Immortalité: La Crémation des Veuves en Inde (1996)
(Ashes of Immortality: Widow-Burning in India) and L’Inde et Imaginaire
(1988) (India and the Imaginary) – reveals that she is more interested
in Hinduism, its rituals, its values, its violence and its myth. Therefore,
while she keeps in her translations the terms and the expressions related
to Hinduism in their original form, she chooses not to conserve the ele-
ments related to Islam or Muslim culture. As a result, she deletes the
traces of religious and linguistic diversity present in the original texts.

Examples:

Terms related to Hinduism:

महात्म ने भोजन किया, लंबी तान कर सोए।15
Le Mahatma dîna et dormit tout son saoul.16

ाँमहाराज,
दे द तुम्हरा जितना होगा यह 17

Maharaj, je vous rendrai tout ce que je vous dois dans ce monde-ci.18

ाँवहतो सब अपने ही भाई -बंधु है । ऋषि-मुनि सब तो ब्रह्ण ही है ।19

Le ciel est peuplé de mes frères et de mes semblables ; les rishi, les
muni . . .20

Terms related to Islam:

नौकरी मे ओहदे की ओर ध्यन मत देना। यह तो पीर का मज़ार है ।
निगाह चढ़वे और चादर पर रखनी चाहिए।21

122
 F rench translations of M unshi P remchand

Aussi en cherchant un emploi, ne te laisse pas éblouir par le titre ;

une charge est comme la tombe d’un saint : considère avant tout
les offrandes qu’elle apporte.22

उपरी आमदनी ईश्र दे ता है, इसी से इसमे बरकत होती है ।23

Le revenu d’appoint est un don du ciel, aussi confère-t-il l’abondance.24

कोई खैरात दे दे गा कम्ल?25

Crois-tu qu’on te fera la charité d’une couverture?26

It follows that a translated text can never be dissociated from its

translator. The translator introduces the source text in a certain way to
the target audience. He feeds his own beliefs, experiences and attitudes
into his processing of the text. In other words, when we read a foreign
text in translation, we don’t read the text as written by its original
author but we read the text as presented by its translator.

Notes
1 Susanne De Lotbiniere-Harwood, The Body Bilingual: Translation as a
Re-Writing in the Feminine, Toronto: Women’s Press, 1991, p. 112.
2 Nicole Pozza, Une Autre Vie: Un Siècle de Nouvelles Hindi, Gollion: Info-
lio, 2007.
3 Annie et Federica Boschetti Montaut, Littératures de l’Inde: Anthologie de
Nouvelles Contemporaines, Marseille; Paris: SUD, 1987.
4 Nicole Balbir, Les Bienheureuses, Montreal; Paris: L’Harmattan, 1989.
5 Catherine Thomas, L’ashram de L’amour, Le Gandhisme et L’imaginaire,
Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Publications de
l’Université de Lille III, 1975, p. 20.
6 Sebastien Mayor, 2 March 2009, unpublished interview.
7 Balbir, Les Bienheureuses, pp. 23–4.
8 Fernand Ouellet, ‘Introduction’, in Premchand (ed.), Deux Amies et
Autres Nouvelles, Fernand Ouellet (trans. and ed.), Montreal; Paris:
L’Harmattan, 1996, p. 7.
9 Premchand, ‘Tagada’, in Mansarovar, vol. 4, New Delhi: Rajkamal
Prakashan, 2001, p. 29.
10 Premchand, ‘Recouvrement’, in Premchand (ed.), Deux Amies et Autres
Nouvelles, Fernand Ouellet (trans. and ed.), Montreal; Paris: L’Harmattan,
1996, p. 165.
11 Premchand, ‘Muft ka Yash’, in Mansarovar, vol. 2, New Delhi: Rajkamal
Prakashan, 2001, p.135.
12 Premchand, ‘Vaine Reconnaissance’, in Premchand (ed.), La Marche Vers
la Liberté, Fernand Ouellet (trans. and ed.), Montreal; Paris: L’Harmattan,
2008, p. 40.
13 Premchand, ‘Idgah’, in Mansarovar, vol. 1, New Delhi: Rajkamal
Prakashan, 2001, p. 45.

123
 M uhammad F aizullah K han

14 Premchand, ‘Idgah’, in Premchand, La Marche Vers la Liberté, p. 253.

15 Premchand, ‘Sawa Ser Gehun’, in Mansarovar, vol. 4, New Delhi: Rajka-
mal Prakashan, 2001, p. 168.
16 Premchand, ‘Une Mesure de Blé’, in Premchand, Le Suaire: Récits
d’une Autre Inde, Catherine Thomas (trans. and ed.), Paris: POF, 1975,
p. 70.
17 Premchand, ‘Sawa Ser Gehun’, p. 170.
18 Premchand, ‘Une Mesure de Blé’, p. 73.
19 Premchand, ‘Sawa Ser Gehun’, p. 170.
20 Premchand, ‘Une Mesure de Blé’, p. 73.
21 Premchand, ‘Namak ka Daroga’, in Mansarovar, vol. 8, New Delhi:
Rajkamal Prakashan, 2001, p. 198.
22 Premchand, ‘L’Inspecteur du Sel’, in Premchand, Le Suaire, p. 26.
23 Premchand, ‘Namak ka Daroga’, p. 198.
24 Premchand, ‘L’Inspecteur du Sel’, p. 26.
25 Premchand, ‘Poos ki Raat’, in Mansarovar, vol. 1, New Delhi: Rajkamal
Prakashan, 2001, p. 42.
26 Premchand, ‘Une Nuit d’Hiver’, in Premchand, Le Suaire, p. 82.

Bibliography
Balbir, Nicole, Les Bienheureuses, Montreal; Paris: L’Harmattan, 1989.
Lefevere, André, Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary
Fame, London: Routledge, 1992.
Lotbiniere-Harwood, Susanne De, The Body Bilingual: Translation as a Re-
Writing in the Feminine, Toronto: Women’s Press, 1991.
Mayor, Sebastien, 2 March 2009, unpublished interview.
Montaut, Annie et Federica Boschetti, Littératures de l’Inde: Anthologie de
Nouvelles Contemporaines, Marseille; Paris: SUD, 1987.
Ouellet, Fernand, ‘Introduction’, in Premchand (ed.), Deux Amies et Autres
Nouvelles, Fernand Ouellet (trans. and ed.), Montreal; Paris: L’Harmattan,
1996.
Ouellet, Fernand, 10 March 2009, unpublished interview.
Pozza, Nicole, Une Autre Vie: Un Siècle de Nouvelles Hindi, Gollion: Infolio,
2007.
Premchand, Déliverance, Fernand Ouellet (trans. and ed.), Montreal; Paris:
L’Harmattan, 2000.
Premchand, Deux Amies et Autres Nouvelles, Fernand Ouellet (trans. and
ed.), Montreal; Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996.
Premchand, La Marche Vers la Liberté, Fernand Ouellet (trans. and ed.),
Montreal; Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008.
Premchand, Le Suaire: Récits d’une Autre Inde, Catherine Thomas (trans. and
ed.), Paris: POF, 1975.
Premchand, Mansarovar, 8 vols, New Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 2001.
Thomas, Catherine, Cendres d’Immortalité: La Crémation des Veuves en
Inde, Paris: Seuil, 1996.

124
 F rench translations of M unshi P remchand

Thomas, Catherine, L’ashram de L’amour, Le Gandhisme et L’imaginaire,

Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Publications de
l’Université de Lille III, 1975.
Thomas, Catherine, L’Inde et L’imaginaire, Paris: Editions de l’Ecole des
Hautes Etudes, 1988.

125
This page intentionally left blank
 Part II

PREMCHAND ON
TRANSLATION
Formulations and praxis
This page intentionally left blank
 8
PREMCHAND ON/IN
TRANSLATION

Avadhesh Kumar Singh

Lead in
More than a century has witnessed a surging interest in Munshi Prem-
chand’s fictional oeuvre. He indubitably is among the most celebrated
and translated fiction-writers of Hindi. His reputation as a novelist and
short-story writer has overshadowed his stature as a cultural and liter-
ary critic. The present endeavour is directed at studying Premchand as
a critic of translation. The title ‘Premchand in Translation’ presupposes
others’ active role in facilitating Premchand’s reception through trans-
lation of his writings and thereby leading to his literary fortune. To
me, it means that Premchand is always in evolution, as he is subject to
newer interpretations by every new translation in different languages
in India and beyond. Every act of translation is a matter of gain, not
loss. The only complaint in case of translation may be about either less
gain or more gain. It modifies the tradition by joining the tradition of
which the source text has already become a part. Let us suppose for a
while that no translation, in case of Premchand, was even attempted;
then the world of people who do not know Hindi or Urdu would have
remained deprived of new experiences contained therein. Also, Prem-
chand’s literary fortune would have also remained restricted to his
language(s) only with restricted circulation of his writings. The target
language would have been deprived of his world view manifested in
his works. Similarly, the issue of translatability is often associated with
translation whereas it is a problem of translator. Whether it is a myth
or reality or both or none at all depends on the translator’s compe-
tence and his commitment. Un/translatability is a translator’s problem,
not of the translation. Untranslatability is a myth. It is a reality for
those who find arthanirdharan (determination of meaning) a mythi-
cal proposition. In all major knowledge traditions, the issue has been

129
 A vadhesh K umar S ingh

discussed elaborately. The determinacy of meaning(s) by extricating

it/them from artha-doshas (blemishes), as have been enumerated by
Mammata in his Kavya Prakasha, makes the task of determining the
meaning and thereafter approximating it in the target language, or to
be precise translation, less difficult and mystical.1
Premchand began his career as fiction-writer in Urdu. Later he shifted
from Urdu to Hindi in order to reach the large Hindi readership. In
the early part of his career he had written novels in Urdu and trans-
lated them later to Hindi; for example, Bazaar-e-Husn as Sevasadan,
Gosha-e Afiat as Premashram and Chaugan-e-Hasti as Rangabhumi.
He translated Maurice Maeterlinck’s play Sightless into Hindi, pub-
lished in Zamana in 1919 as Shab-e-Tar Yani Andheri Raat, suggesting
that he translated it in Urdu and Hindi or in Urdu-laden Hindi, though
the script used in it was Devanagari. Moreover, he translated Jalwa-e
Isar as Vardan, which was published in 1921, and published Pratigya
in 1929 which was a re-translation into Hindi of Prema arthat Do
Sakhiyon ka Vivaha from Hamkhurma va Hamsavab. Also, he was
and is being translated and interpreted through his translations. Thus,
he was always, ever, in translation as a translator and a critic of trans-
lational activities, as he had to face different kinds of translational
issues at different stages of his creativity and consequent reception in
different languages. Admittedly, Premchand did not write systemati-
cally on translation. In fact, he wrote more on translation than he was
translated in his lifetime. He wrote sporadically on translation for dif-
ferent reasons on different occasions. His views on various aspects
of translations invite attention, as they have relevance for us after so
many decades, for the issues still persist. However, it is possible to
glean his views, strewn in his non-fictional writings, put them in a
perspective and infer patterns, and even contradictions, from them.

Premchand’s attitude towards translation

Premchand was pragmatic in his attitude towards translation. He
was convinced about the importance of translation as an instrument
of building bridges between countries, cultures, literatures and com-
munities. He had himself undergone this linguistic transition, as he
shifted from Urdu to Hindi. However, he was not a victim of linguistic
fanaticism. On the contrary, he fought against it throughout his life,
even within Hindi, for there was a concerted effort in his lifetime to
Sanskritise Hindi. He advocated for the golden mean, and he not only
advocated but practiced it too in the form of Hindustani. This golden
mean may be suitable for translation at least in Hindi. However, he

130
 P remchand on / in translation

had no misgiving about the place of translation in comparison to

creative writing. He acknowledged the significance of translation but
did not overestimate it.2 In an article called ‘Premchand ki Premlila
ka Uttar’ (Response to Premchand’s Love-Sports), published in Sam-
alochak (Sharad, Samvat; 1983),3 he expressed his views regarding
translation. He spoke in unalloyed terms:

One who has talent for original writing, would never trans-
late, nor would he ever wish to attain fame through transla-
tion. In the beginning of my literary career, I did quite a lot of
translation from English into Urdu. The reason for that is that
I was then incapable of original writing. All those translations
have evaporated because they did not have power to survive.4

Premchand’s observations regarding translation may startle us

today. He did not have any lofty opinion of translation as an act, and
he clearly stated that translation is attempted by those who cannot be
creative writers. Though his views might sound a little obsolete, they
reflect the simple truth that finds subscribers even today. But it can be
inferred from his observations that good translations do survive. But
which are good translations? Good translations are like good texts,
whose worth has been tested by time. Translations of texts, if they have
been accepted for a long stretch of time, would fall in the category.
In the same piece, Premchand discussed the issue of translation in
a different sense of reception of a literary work by another writer in
a different language which, at times, amounts to ‘translation’ of the
work as ‘plagiarism’ or theft. Premchand was aware of such charges
by some critics who had stated about the influence of Vanity Fair on
Rangabhumi. He accepted that he had read Vanity Fair in the year
1903 whereas he wrote Rangabhumi in 1924. The influence could
not have lasted so long. Moreover, he added with modesty that ‘the
place of Vanity Fair is in the sky and Rangabhumi is on the ground,
but that is Rangabhumi.’5 In fact, the criticism such as this betrays
the colonised mind-set of the natives who had concluded that their
native counterparts can never think independently, so they needed the
clutches of colonial masters. One such critic of Premchand was Babu
Brajratna Das who had claimed that the plot of a Premchand short
story was taken from Thomas Hardy. Premchand did accept the simi-
larity but supplemented his response in an equally subtle riposte:

What Thomas Hardy can see, is it not possible for others to vis-
ualise? There is nothing extraordinary in the plot of Hardy that

131
 A vadhesh K umar S ingh

may be inconceivable for a writer of Hindi. Moreover, Hardy

too was a mortal being, not a god. Also, when such events as
described in the story are found in daily life, am I bitten by a
mad dog that I’d go to Thomas Hardy to borrow it from him.6

Premchand was hurt by the charge of appropriation of credit of being

the source writer whereas he had translated the piece. The fault was
not his, but of the editor. In case of Rangabhumi, Premashram and
‘Abhushan’, it was a charge of appropriation as translation. It was
appropriation of the plot. He was offended by the fact that his own
native critics had done so due to jealousy. Influence and reception are
inevitable processes.

Translation as a means of enriching Hindi through

translation from other languages
Premchand’s views on language were marked by his linguistic catholic-
ity. He admired other languages but he loved Hindi. Consequently, he
recognised the importance of translation as an instrument of enriching
Hindi. In the essay ‘Sahitya ki Pragati’ (The Progress of Literature), he
noted the shift brought about in the ruchi (taste) of Hindi literature by
translation of the writings of the European writers like Maxim Gorki,
Anatole France, Romain Rolland and H. G. Wells and Indian writers
like Ratannath Sarshar (Urdu) and Saratchandra Chatterjee (Bangla),
without mentioning the word ‘translation’.7 He saw the advent of for-
eign writings through translation or direct reading in some cases as a
cause of development of a new ‘taste’ in new Hindi fictional literature,
and expanded the arena of readers’ delight by ‘trying to bring it to
our streets and lanes after bringing it down from the peaks of the
Mansarovar and the Kailash mountains’. Due to it, according to him,
ordinary characters like a drunkard or a gambler have replaced the
heads of states as subjects of literary interest. He subscribed to human
values and possibility of human regeneration with the possibility of
transforming a bad person into a good one not by hating and rejecting
him but with good behaviour marked by love and kindness.

Literature is an idol of whatever a man has – beautiful, grand,

reverential and delightful. It should give shelter in its lap to
those who are shelterless, downtrodden and unhonoured.
A mother loves her weak unintelligent and innocent sons
more than others. She takes pride in her worthy son. But her
heart bleeds for the unworthy.8

132
 P remchand on / in translation

Consequently, a prostitute:

[i]s not an object of humiliation but of respect and love. If the

seller of a cow for its slaughter is a criminal, the purchaser is
no less guilty. If the purchaser is respected in the society, why
should the seller be disrespected? The prostitute is a daugh-
ter, mother and wife. She too has been blessed with devotion,
respect and a sensitive soul. Her entire life is devoted to the
service of others.9

It was possible due to fresh influx of ideas from foreign lands. Prem-
chand, thus, proves the importance of adan-pradan, which, facilitated
by translation, can catalyse to a new movement in a literature.
However, Premchand did not overestimate the importance of trans-
lation. He did see translation as an instrument of enriching one’s own
language. But he was against indiscriminate use of translation, which
is what happened in the case of indiscreet translations of English detec-
tive novels, and of Bengali novels. In the essay entitled ‘Upanyasa’,
published in Samalochak (January 1925), he discussed the impact of
translation of novels in Hindi. He lamented the spree of publication
of detective novels after the phenomenal success of Chandrakanta.
According to him, the trend of detective novels had caught the imagi-
nation of Hindi readership to an appreciable degree:

European detective novels were translated and published in

Hindi. After the popularity of the detective novels; it was
thought that original novels would be written in Hindi but
the tide of Bengali novels intervened and it is still on. What-
ever novels – good or bad – were available in Bangla, were
translated without proper consideration. I have no objection
against enriching the treasure of one’s own language with the
jewels of some other languages because rich languages keep
translating works of other languages into them. However, is a
language worth anything if it has nothing that is its own but
only translations?10

Here Premchand sees translation as a means of enriching one’s lan-

guage but did not see it as the only and exclusive means of doing so,
for only translations cannot form the bedrock of a literature. The rea-
son he values an original work in Hindi is that it ‘at least is our own
work’.11 He opined that if the objective is to make Hindi a national
language, it cannot be attained by mere translations. Premchand

133
 A vadhesh K umar S ingh

favoured translation of the best from the world in Hindi. He saw no

point in translating only Bangla works in Hindi. If we have to trans-
late, why not translate from languages richer than Bangla?

Re/viewing translations: Premchand’s views

Premchand knew Urdu, Hindi, Sanskrit and English and the impor-
tance of translation in initiating and sustaining cultural dialogue
among languages and literatures. Keeping it in view, he took note of
translations from/into Urdu, Sanskrit and Hindi during his period.
Premchand reviewed translations from Sanskrit, Urdu and Persian into
Hindi. He reviewed them for different literary journals and magazines.
In the process he interpreted literary works under review and their
translations too, as he expressed his views on quality and relevance
of translation. One thing that stands out is that he did not approve of
excessive fiddling with the core sense of the source text in the name of
maintaining the metre while translating poetry.
Introductions or prefaces attain much importance in translation and
their studies. Much of translation theory has been inferred from the
prefaces and introductions. These spaces are used by translators for
different purposes – justification for translation, strategies employed
for translation and other ancillary issues. At times they have been
reduced to being mouthpieces of prejudices of translators. Premchand
critiqued and rejected such ‘Introductions’ or ‘Prefaces’ with justifi-
cations. Commenting on the translation of The Diary of a Turk by
Khalid, a Turkish youth, into Urdu by Maulavi Mohammad Hassan
Khan, he appreciated the book for its rather ‘innocent’ translation in
his review in Zamana (February 1906) but added:

One disturbing element that it has is its rather long introduc-

tion. The size of the turban should be in accordance with the
size of the head. Generally, the introduction is written to deal
with aims and objectives of the book. But Maulavi Moham-
mad Hassan Khan has made the introduction a debating
ground of cultural questions stretching to length which is only
a couple of pages less than the book.12

More than the length of the introduction of the book, Premchand’s crit-
icism was concerned with the contents and the propriety of the preface.
In it the Maulavi Sahib had expressed his distress at the state of Islam
in India but had used the space to put together only those thoughts on
Islam in India which, according to Premchand, had been discussed and

134
 P remchand on / in translation

repeated in the newspapers. Moreover, the views were against national

leaders like Justice Taiyabji, Justice Amir Ali and Sir Agha Khan who
favoured independence. According to him, the views were against the
prevailing national mood. However, he added that Maulavi Sahib
enjoyed the freedom to express his views but the place chosen by him
was not appropriate. He needed another book for the purpose.
Premchand saw translation from foreign literatures as the means
of enriching Hindi. But he was against indiscreet translations with-
out any thought about the quality of the work under translation. In
the same issue of Zamana, he reviewed the translation of Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe. He welcomed its translation in Hindi and Urdu
because the surfeit of translations of detective novels of novelists like
Reynolds, according to him, had done a lot of damage to Hindi. In the
translation of Robinson Crusoe, he saw something ‘encouraging’ and
‘heartening’ because only translations of classics would be able to aug-
ment the existing resources of a language like Hindi or Urdu.13 Some
of Premchand’s reviews were more than articles. His article ‘Kalidasa
ki Kavita’ (Kalidasa’s Poetry) is a review of the translation of Kali-
dasa’s Ritu Samhara into Urdu by Durgaprasad Suroor with the help
of one Mr. Shakir. But before doing so, Premchand read Sanskrit lit-
erature with perspicuity, Kalidasa’s poetic works and their translations
in Urdu in particular. Premchand the literary critic and Premchand
the translation critic are engaged in a duel to excel each other. The
result of the churning has come out in the form of critical pronounce-
ments that bear the mark of insightful understanding of tradition, and
its interpretation. He estimated Valmiki, Vyasa and Kalidasa as three
most famous poets of Sanskrit whose writings were complete history
of their ages: ‘Valmiki’s poetry is marked by a sense of duty and truth,
Vyasa leaned towards spirituality and devotion, and Kalidasa towards
beauty and love.’14
Of the three, the first two became an integral part of Hindu religion.
However, Kalidasa was forgotten but for the English education that
had made him equally popular in Europe and Hindustan. Premchand
must be alluding to the interest generated in Kalidasa by translation
of his Abhigyan Shakuntalam in English by William Jones and trans-
lation of others’ works as well. Then he compared the art and craft
of Kalidasa and Shakespeare and made subtle observations on them.
While discussing Kalidasa, he referred to translations of Shakuntala by
Raja Shiv Prasad and of Vikramurvashi by Maulavi Mohammad Aziz
Mirza. He found the translation of Shakuntala better because ‘it has
the rasa (relish) of original’15 as it has been translated from Sanskrit.
The translation of Vikramurvashi, however, did not have ‘the pleasure

135
 A vadhesh K umar S ingh

of the source’ because it was translated from the English translation.

Two things become clear: translation from the source is preferable;
along with comparing two versions of translations of the same text, as
is often attempted, comparison of translations of two different works
by the same writer or different writers on the basis of their effect is an
interesting area of study.
Notwithstanding his comparative assessment of Hindi and Urdu
translations in favour of direct translation, he welcomed the transla-
tion of the Sanskrit work into Urdu:

None of the four major works of Kalidasa had been trans-

lated into Urdu. For this I do not have complaints against
the Muslim literary figures. The Hindu gentlemen should be
ashamed of it because there are many Hindus who are inter-
ested in poetry and compose ghazals and qasidas and split
their heads in the quarrels on flowers and nightingales. But
they never strain themselves to enrich their communities and
languages with Sanskrit poetry. Urdu poetry is relished and
discussed generally by Kayastha-s and Kashmiris. But both
these communities are now miles away from the study of San-
skrit. However, recently there is inclination towards Sanskrit.
Therefore it is expected from them that in some time from
now we would perhaps be able to read Raghuvansha, Megh-
doot, and Kumarsambhava in Urdu.16

Since Ritusamhara deals with different seasons of India which has six
seasons against three in Urdu and Persian, for the convenience of the
readers Premchand provides the names of the Indian seasons corre-
sponding with Hindi and English months.
Premchand then discusses translations of Kalidas’s poem Ritusam-
hara by Lala Sitaram and Babu Devkinandan in Hindi, with its rep-
resentations into paintings by Babu Abanindranath Thakur of Bengal
and six paintings by Mr Dhurandhar of Bombay. This is also transla-
tion in the form of adaptation. They are followed by critical opin-
ions of historian Elphinstone and Monier Williams, the Indologist,
about it. Premchand refers to an earlier translation of three seasons
of Ritusamhara in prose by Maulavi Abdul Halim ‘Sharar’. ‘Sharar’
had expressed the following views about the poem in the magazine
Dilgudaz (June 1914):

Kalidasa, the Shakespeare of India, has composed six poems

about six seasons in his Ritusamhara which so beautifully

136
 P remchand on / in translation

showcases the seasons of Hindustan that the pictures of sea-

sonal details are painted before the eyes of the readers . . . The
collection of poems is marked by new similes, imagination
and composition which are more appropriate and effective for
Urdu literature, born in Indian than the English and Persian
literatures.17

Premchand lamented the fact that the Urdu writers did not pay heed to
the words of ‘Sharar’. Had they done so, it would have been better for
Urdu. However, Premchand remarks that ‘Sharar’ would have better
translated Ritusamhara into verse rather than in prose.
Premchand maintained that every act of translation is not only a test
of the translator’s ability to handle two languages but also a compara-
tive study of linguistic richness of two languages. The relative worth
of vocabularies of languages is compared and exposed. Premchand’s
interest in translation was not limited to reviewing and writing about
translation. He exhorted competent scholars to undertake translation.
He squandered no opportunity to do so. For instance, in the introduc-
tion to Hajrat Shakir Meeruti’s Akseer-e Sukhan,18 he had appealed to
‘Hindu’ poets of Urdu to translate Kalidasa’s poetry into Urdu. Con-
sequently, Hazrat Ashiq, an established poet of Urdu, was inspired to
undertake the translation of Kalidasa’s Meghdoot into Urdu as he had
acknowledged in the translation with the title Paike Abr. Premchand
reviewed the translation in Zamana (April 1917), and was pained at
the fact that the translation of a Sanskrit poem like Meghdoot was ‘a
new thing’ for Urdu literature, yet it had remained unnoticed by Urdu
newspapers and magazines. He opined that such indifference would
prove detrimental to the enthusiasm of other prospective translators
of Sanskrit.
Premchand favoured translation of poetry in poetic form but did
not like the translator to be impeded by the self-courted shackles of
metre. He applauded the translator for ‘a praiseworthy’ endeavour but
did not appreciate the translator’s decision to translate one shloka into
one metrical composition of three couplets each. In fact, Premchand
was aware of the criticism levelled against the translation in the review
of the book by Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi, the editor of Saraswati. He
had averred in this regard:

In my opinion it would have been better if the translator had

focussed on the expression of meaning rather than being lim-
ited by the shackles of poetic composition. Due to this limita-
tion, Hazart Ashiq, the translator, had to omit the sense of

137
 A vadhesh K umar S ingh

a shloka, as it could not be expressed in one metrical com-

position. On the other hand, in some places the meaning of
the shloka has been conveyed in two couplets. Due to it, the
translator had to complete the metre by adding one couplet
without any need for it.19

Premchand used the reviews to make us peep into the personal and
literary realities of the period. In the process of reviewing Paike Abr,
he made us aware of the reality of the Hindi world.

The Muslim brothers perhaps might not know that the state
of a Hindu writing in Urdu is not very enviable. Some con-
sider him ill-wisher of Hindi, and others consider him as an
encroacher on the world of Urdu.20

The statement informs us about at least one of the many possible rea-
sons that might have prompted Premchand to shift to Hindi or at least
provides us a perspective on his dual presence as a Hindi/Urdu writer
writing in Urdu in the early part of his career.

Translation for dialogue, not for discord

The review section in Volume III in Vividh Prasang is termed as Neer-
Ksheer (Water and Milk), which is a necessary attribute of translational
activities in choosing text for translation, reception of translation and
liberty that a translator has at his disposal among others. Transla-
tion of a religious text by a person from a different religion is a sensi-
tive issue. While reviewing translation of a chapter of the Koran as
‘Koran – Soor-e-Baqar’ by Ramchandra Verma and Premsharan Arya,
Premchand noted that Ramchandra Verma is a hafiz (one who has
learnt the entire Koran by heart) and scholar of Arabic and Prem-
sharan Arya would also be at least amil-fazil (educated scholar) of Ara-
bic. Only one sura (chapter) was translated with accompanying Arabic
script, followed by commentary. Here Premchand’s comments become
important, as he says that translation of religious texts requires valida-
tion from religious scholars who are trained in the field. He adds:

It cannot be accepted without the attestation of a Muslim

mustanad (authentic) alim, in the same way the tika (com-
mentary) of the Vedas edited by a Sanskritist Muslim. It can
certainly lead to acrimony between Hindus and Muslims.
God knows when these brethren would understand that

138
 P remchand on / in translation

a Koran enthusiast of Islam would like to see only such a

commentary, as would be attested and respected by Muslims.
Translations (anuvad) such as this would lead to nothing but
discord between the Hindus and Muslims. But there are such
creatures in this world, particularly in India who consider it
their national duty to reject views of others.21

Premchand here seems to be using the words anuvad (translation) and

tika (commentary) synonymously.22 He rejects such a translation as
lacking in propriety. A translation unattended by propriety becomes a
barrier instead of playing the role of a bridge. One has to take care in
case of translation of such texts as it may disturb feelings of the peo-
ple. Premchand was perhaps aware of the fact that the monotheistic
religions always resist translation of what people regard as the word
of God, because God alone knows the full import of His utterances.
Premchand’s opinion about good translation may be gauged from
the above views – that it should be capable of creating the rasa or
relishing effect of the source text and that its language should be sim-
ple but idiomatic so that even the general readers may understand
it. In reviewing translation of Victor Hugo’s novel in Hindi as Paris
ka Kubda by Durgadutt Singh (November 1931), he welcomed it
for the delight and literary enrichment, for not many translations of
French novels, excepting the translation of Hugo’s Les Miserables by
Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi among the few, were attempted in Hindi.
In the process of the review he dealt with a few issues that may be
relevant for our present purpose. Premchand yet again voiced his opin-
ion about translation. He considered translation as a copy, which can
never replace the original: ‘However beautiful translation might be, a
copy remains a copy. Unfortunately, we translate European works on
the basis of their English translation. Hence how can we even gauge
the worth of the original from the copy of a copy?’23
In the same review, he discussed a couple of other issues. The trans-
lator had entitled the work as Paris ka Kubda which according to the
original should have been Notre Dame ka Kubda. Perhaps the trans-
lator might have thought that Paris is more known to Hindi readers
in comparison to Notre Dame. But he was pleased to note that the
translator did not replace the names of the French places into Indian/
Hindi. Premchand was against re-contextualisation in translation.
It would be appropriate to know his views and justification:

I was happy to note that the names of characters and places

have been retained as in the original. He has not tried to

139
 A vadhesh K umar S ingh

Indianise them. Whenever such a thing has been attempted, it

has failed. By mere change of names, nationality or commu-
nity is not changed, for its roots are deeper. Then why should
everything be Indianised? It would mean that the Indian
readers do not relish narratives of other countries. Are we
so narrow-minded and poor in imagination? We see foreign
films with so much interest. Our educated society hates native
films. It is natural to be influenced by the things immediate
and near to one. But it is possible to love others’ children
along with loving one’s own sons. I propose to reject this style
of translation (anuvad-shaili) that renders every masterpiece
worthless in the process of Indianizing it.24

As a keen observer and follower of new literary creativity, Premchand

used reviews to receive non-Hindi literary and non-literary works in
translation on behalf of the entire community of readers. He was try-
ing to improve the taste of the people, and shape it through his general
observations and textual analysis. In the process he, at least, attained
the tag of being ‘well-read’.25
Premchand’s review of the translation of Omar Khayyam’s Rubai-
yat by Maithilisharan Gupt, a renowned poet of Hindi, stressed an
altogether different aspect of translation. He considered the book as
the most famous work in Persian literature. He referred to the state-
ment by Gupt in the introduction that he (Gupt) did not know either
Persian, the source language, or English, yet he translated it. Without
caring for the social prestige of the translator in his time, Premchand
remarked that despite the translator’s poetic skills, the translation has
no rasa (relish) in it. He appreciated the essay by Rai Krishna Das on
Khayyam and his poetry that preceded the translation by Gupt. Prem-
chand here reiterated his view on the status of translation in compari-
son to the original: ‘The viragmaya anurag that Khaiyam’s Rubaiyat
have in them is absent from the translation, and it cannot be achieved
in translation. The soul of the poet can be invoked only by/in the
original.’26 Despite that it seems that there is something like ‘pure’
(shuddha) translation in his mind which may be approximated as
something that tries to invoke the soul of the source text with the least
interference and liberties by the translator. From this criterion, not
only the translation of Khaiyam’s Rubaiyat by Gupt but also Fitzger-
ald’s translation, which was then considered a good translation, is
rejected. Pure translation for him meant respecting sacredness of the
source text, and no indulgence in liberties by the translator (though
the issue is: is such a translation possible?): ‘Even the translation by

140
 P remchand on / in translation

Fitzgerald is not “pure” (shuddha) translation. He has in many places

attempted translation by taking a lot of liberties (manmana).’27 Prem-
chand seems unconcerned with the politics of translation in the colo-
nial period, and the way the coloniser translators took liberty with
the source with the self-proclaimed objective of improving it. Prem-
chand’s judgements are highly restrictive for translation and may be
termed traditional.

Lead out
Premchand was a translator, who saw himself being translated both
literally and metaphorically. However, when we judge Premchand as
a translator of his own works, let us remember that Premchand was
a creative writer, so a creative translator too. That should not mean
that other translators are not creative at all. Everyone who handles
words or any other medium of art is creative. But there is a difference
of degree of creativity. Like a florist’s fingers get the fragrance and
pollen while handling flowers to make garlands of flowers, every gar-
dener’s fingers also get smeared with fragrance. But every gardener is
not a florist and vice versa. Every act of translation is located in time
and space. When Premchand wrote in Urdu, the time and space that
conditioned his choices – from the choice of text to be translated to
the corresponding equivalent words, phrases or sentences in the target
language – become altogether different from the time and space when
he translated it into Hindi or any other target language. It was a differ-
ent Premchand – handling a new medium, for a different readership.
It was an act of self-rewriting, and self-refashioning.
However, there is no point in over-reading Premchand as a trans-
lator. He was interested in translation as a means of enrichment,
extension and liberation from the limitations – of an individual and
tradition. His attitude towards translation was that of a pragmatist
and a traditionalist, if we wish to call him so. His views on translation
are significant, because they allow us to peep into the nature of dia-
logue that existed in the period among main languages – that is, Hindi,
Urdu, Sanskrit and English – particularly in the first four decades of
the twentieth century. His views, however scattered they might appear
today, are of archival significance because the present is the descend-
ent of the past. Though he was not a translation theorist, his views on
translation, strewn in his non-fictional writings, put together are at
least like the moon of the second day (Dooj ka Chand). It is up to us
to see chaudahavin ka chand (the moon of the fourteenth day) or the
poonam (the full moon) in them.

141
 A vadhesh K umar S ingh

Notes
1 For the discussion of artha, its nirdharana, and kind of artha-dosha-s, see
Avadhesh Kumar Singh, ‘Words and Beyond. . . .’, in Avadhesh Kumar
Singh (ed.), Revisiting Literature, Criticism and Aesthetics in India, New
Delhi: D. K. Printworld, 2012, pp. 37–40.
2 Also, see Premchand’s view on mental servitude in the article, ‘Manasik
Paradhinata’, Madhuri, January 1931; repeated in Premchand, Vividh
Prasang (Journalistic Writings of Premchand), Amrit Rai (ed.), 3 vols,
Allahabad: Hans Prakashan, 1962, vol. III, pp. 188–93. Hereafter ‘VP’.
3 Ibid., pp. 70–3.
4 Ibid., p. 70.
5 Ibid., p. 71.
6 Ibid., p. 72.
7 Chand, March 1933; VP III, p. 53.
8 Munshi Premchand, ‘ “Upanyasa” and “Sahitya ki Pragati”, Translated
into English by Avadhesh Kumar Singh’, in Avadhesh Kumar Singh and
Sanjay Mukherjee (eds), Critical Discourse and Colonialism, New Delhi:
Creative Books, 2005, p. 72.
9 Ibid., p. 73.
10 Ibid., p. 76.
11 Ibid., p. 79.
12 VP I, p. 51.
13 Ibid., p. 58.
14 Ibid., p. 216.
15 Ibid., p. 222.
16 Ibid., p. 222.
17 Ibid., p. 225.
18 Ibid., p. 244.
19 Ibid., p. 245.
20 Ibid., p. 248.
21 Madhuri, Magh Samvat 1981; VP III, p. 323.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid., p. 345.
24 Ibid.
25 Premchand was an avid reviewer, and extensively reviewed works of trans-
lation from Indian languages and English.
26 VP III, p. 347.
27 Ibid.

Bibliography
Nagendra and Gupt, Sureshchandra (eds), Hindi Sahitya ka Itihasa, Delhi:
National Publishing House, 1973.
Premchand, Shab-e-Tar Yani Andheri Raat (Translation of Maurice Maeter-
linck’s play Sightless by Premchand in Hindi), Allahababad: Hans
Prakashan, 1962; pub. in Zamana, September–October, 1919.
Premchand, ‘ “Upanyasa” and “Sahitya ki Pragati”, Translated into English by
Avadhesh Kumar Singh’, in Avadhesh Kumar Singh and Sanjay Mukherjee

142
 P remchand on / in translation

(eds), Critical Discourse and Colonialism, New Delhi: Creative Books,

2005, pp. 67–81.
Premchand, Vividh Prasang (Journalistic Writings of Premchand), Amrit Rai
(ed.), 3 vols, Allahabad: Hans Prakashan, 1962.
Singh, Avadhesh Kumar (ed.), Translation: Theory and Practice, New Delhi:
Creative Books, 1998.
Singh, Avadhesh Kumar, ‘Words and Beyond. . . .’, in Avadhesh Kumar Singh
(ed.), Revisiting Literature, Criticism and Aesthetics in India, New Delhi:
D. K. Printworld, 2012, pp. 37–40.

143
 9
PREMCHAND AND THE
POLITICS OF LANGUAGE
On translation, cultural
nationalism and irony1

Snehal Shingavi

‫ھم كو بھى كيا كيا مزے كى داستانيں ياد تھيں‬

‫ليكن اب تمهيد ذكر درد و ماتم ھو گئيں‬
– Rusva, Umrao Jan Ada

The epigraph to this essay is taken from the opening of Umrao Jan
Ada, Mirza Muhammad Hadi Rusva’s most famous novel, which
begins with a lamentation on the prospects of storytelling in the pre-
sent moment (the novel was published sometime between 1899 and
1905).2 The couplet explains that what once was an archive of the
pleasurable possibilities of fantastical fiction (maze ki dastaanen) has
now given way to the overwhelming immanence of dirges of pain and
mourning (dard-o-maatam); it famously signals the shift that will take
place at the end of the novel after the romantic escapades of the cour-
tesan and her lover are brought to an abrupt end with the declining
fortunes of the elite. The novel itself contains almost an innumerable
number of such ghazal couplets strewn throughout the conversation
between the eponymous courtesan and the author, all part of the elab-
orate pseudo-seduction that takes place between a now-aged Umrao
Jan and the ever-flirtatious Rusva. But opening the novel in this way
is, in part, Rusva’s acknowledgement that the novel understands itself
as straddling two traditions from the start or, more precisely, under-
stands itself as documenting one tradition about to be eclipsed by
another. The next fifteen years would reveal just how dramatic those
changes actually were.

144
 P remchand and the politics of language

Umrao Jan Ada has become important in the world of Urdu letters
precisely because of its self-conscious representation of the impact of
important historical changes on the forms of literary production: first,
the novel documents the transformations under way in North India in
the wake of the failed 1857 war for independence and the subsequent
decimation of Mughal and Nawabi power; second, it meditates on the
effect of that decline on Urdu literary institutions, especially the kotha,
which depended on that power for patronage. The changes taking
place in North India were not merely political and economic, but also
religious and social; even Rusva notices the pressures to censor and
mute his own narrative becoming ever more forceful, even as he slyly
challenges those same pressures; when discussing the bawdier perfor-
mances done in the cities, Rusva comments: ‘we are no reformers to
get worked up by these [obscene] customs.’3 The range of changes
taking place within an Urdu literary sensibility – in which the decline
of the aristocracy, the rise of British power and the growth of reli-
gious modernism and ancillary literary movements like the New Light
played a prominent part – was staggering, and one of the most pro-
found ways that these changes manifested was a temporary shift away
from the ghazal, now seen as part of the reason for the decadence of
Urdu’s cultural institutions, and towards prose with a more markedly
chaste idiom (a kind of inversion of the process that Umrao begins
her narrative with). This chapter is an attempt to tell part of the story
about the literary public in North India and the transition from poetry
to prose, from romance to realism, from elite to democratic sensibili-
ties, from pleasure to asceticism and from Urdu to Hindi, all of which
are involved in the production of what Rashmi Sadana calls a ‘literary
nationality’.4
Munshi Premchand’s contribution to that literary nationality has
long been understood as the domestication of the romance, in Gopi
Chand Narang’s formulation, by introducing ‘into it the living truth of
human existence’5 and in Ali Jawad Zaidi’s formulation, by enriching
it ‘with a robust sense of realism’,6 but in both instances the shift is
away from Umrao Jan Ada. When we turn to the history of ‘Indian’
literature (because Urdu still does not always make the cut) or Hindi
literature, then Premchand’s genealogy reaches through Tagorean
romanticism back to the religious epics in Braj and Khadi Boli, in
which Premchand’s progressivism is seen as a result of nationalist agi-
tation and Gandhian asceticism.7 So the movement in Premchand’s
fiction is away from romance doubly: away from the sprawling,
adventure-filled narratives that were more properly the provenance
of genres like the dastan (a process that Rusva begins, but does not

145
 S nehal S hingavi

complete), as well as away from the erotic and material rewards that
romance might offer the true adventurer in favour of the more sober
and less immediately tempting conclusions of the real. It is in this spe-
cific sense that the combined legacies of Umrao Jan Ada, the dastan
and the ghazal, all haunt Premchand’s novelistic representation of the
kotha, and all hang over his fictional courtesans as precisely the repre-
sentational norms against which Premchand is resisting and writing in
Hindi. Alternatively we might suggest that despite being a writer who
works in Urdu, Premchand is also abandoning many of the accreted
traditions so central to the canon of Urdu letters, not in some crass
deference to a communalist geist, but as a consequence of intellectual,
historical and market-driven responses to developments taking place
in colonial North India. But even so, critics have yet to disaggregate
which of the literary changes that Premchand introduced were devel-
opments within Premchand’s own artistic innovations in the novel, in
general, and which were responses to the newly differentiated reading
public that had begun to coalesce variously around Urdu and Hindi.
Understanding this requires asking a counter-factual: if the genre of
the novel about the courtesan, especially in North India, is closely con-
nected to the history of the ghazal, and if the primary way for aristo-
cratic men to receive their education in poetic culture would have been
in the kotha, why is Premchand’s novel about courtesans (Bazaar-e-
Husn in Urdu, Sevasadan in Hindi) so devoid of any reference to the
ghazal in particular or Urdu poetry in general? What had happened
in the intervening twenty years between Umrao Jan Ada and Prem-
chand’s novel(s) to shift the expectations and demands of the genre so
dramatically that Premchand need not have produced a single ghazal
or thumri in the entire novel? To put the problem as polemically as
possible, we might also ask how exactly Premchand, a novelist who
sets the standard for literary anti-communalism in South Asia, might
have participated, wittingly or otherwise, in the production of certain
politicisable boundaries between the world of the Urdu ghazal and the
world of the Hindi novel (I will ultimately argue that Sevasadan does
this more forcefully than Bazaar-e-Husn). Part of what this chapter
wants to interrogate is just exactly what was at stake in Premchand’s
famous shift from writing and publishing in Urdu (until around 1918)
and the decisive shift he made to publishing and writing in Hindi after
1924,8 all the more so since the shift seems to have taken place first in
a novel about courtesans and their relationship to an emergent bour-
geois nationalist culture in Benares.
The question still facing all Premchand scholars is whether the fic-
tion that Premchand produced in Hindi is a translation of what he

146
 P remchand and the politics of language

produced for his audiences in Urdu or not? Shall we call them revisions,
transcreations, reinterpretations or something completely different?
And if what is at stake in the move between Hindi- and Urdu-reading
public is in part a whole set of expectations about differentiable com-
munities, what does this do to our understanding of Premchand’s anti-
communalism? Such a discussion of Munshi Premchand’s fiction,
especially when dealing with his works that exist in both Urdu and
Hindi, is already made complicated by certain important facts. First,
as a writer who stands at the head of the novelistic tradition in both
Hindi and Urdu, Premchand has earned a reputation for being an anti-
communal writer, one sensitive to the cultural viability of both Hindu
and Muslim traditions as they have been conceived in the twentieth cen-
tury, and an anti-communal activist, one who spoke out against com-
munal violence as it began to become a regular feature of late colonial
India.9 This reputation, however, occasionally occludes the important
role that Premchand played in shifting the centre of gravity of North
Indian literary publishing from Urdu to Hindi and its consequences for
the communal politics of language so that ‘the Hindi Premchand’ and
‘the Urdu Premchand’ have now almost completely different critical
legacies.10 Second, Premchand’s own ideas about translation, his own
work as a translator and the proliferation of translations of his work
make theorising Premchand’s translatability a knotty problem, espe-
cially since Premchand tended to ignore his own advice when it came
to his translational practice but also because many translators follow
his example and translate Premchand without an eye towards his own
views on translation. Third, and perhaps most importantly, the criti-
cal and scholarly audience which is able to read in Urdu and Hindi
simultaneously and able to account for the varied critical reception
of Premchand’s Hindi and Urdu materials is infinitesimally small and
almost entirely insignificant in the scholarly corpus. One of the most
devastating legacies of Partition has been the separation of Urdu and
Hindi into two now almost completely separated literary traditions.
To make matters worse, Premchand’s own brand of cultural national-
ism, which was interested in interrogating the corrosive effects of Brit-
ish colonialism on Indian thought but also on defending Hindi as an
infant language, makes the work of translating Premchand as well as
theorising his shuttling back and forth from Urdu, at least, an ironic
project (if not an outright failure) from the start.
In order to understand Premchand’s unique intervention into both
the canons of Urdu and Hindi literature, we have to think about Prem-
chand as a writer who only makes sense under the sign of translation,
as a writer whose intellectual concerns are only made manifest by

147
 S nehal S hingavi

putting his translations (and translations of his works) at the centre of

our attention. In part this is a necessary corrective to the way that he
is more commonly read as either a Hindi or an Urdu novelist, despite
both critical traditions having knowledge of the other. But aside from
correcting a critical oversight, this attempt to highlight Premchand’s
concerns with translations and his understandings of what the work
of translation is helps us understand not only the contours of his lan-
guage politics but also his responses to the developments taking place
unevenly in the publishing world in late colonial India. Premchand’s
relationship to this problem of literary translation, I contend, is best
understood by looking carefully at the Bazaar-e-Husn/Sevasadan com-
bine, as it is his first serious attempt at writing a novel for two different
reading public simultaneously.11 There are three reasons for focusing on
this pair of novels at the expense of, say, his more frontal engagement
with translation theory or his own translations of novels from English.
First, the way that Premchand approached the question of English-
language communication and art under the yoke of colonialism was
fraught with contradictions. The problem that Premchand notices
is that Hindi was being crowded out by English and suffered from
being a largely derivative publishing field dominated by translations
into Hindi from the other regional vernaculars – Urdu, Bengali, Mar-
athi, Gujarati are the ones that he names in Sevasadan and hints at
in Bazaar-e-Husn – and the classical languages – especially, Sanskrit.
Most critics on the other hand notice this speech towards the end in
the novel and then assume that the primary problem that the novel
wants to contend with is one of Anglophone linguistic and cultural
hegemony:

And if intelligent people like you are devoted to English, a

national language will never be born . . . people have found a
lofty language like English and have sold themselves over to
it. I don’t understand why people think it honorable to speak
and write in English. I, too, have studied English. I spent two
years abroad and learned to speak and write from the best
English teachers, but I hate it. It feels like I am wearing an
Englishman’s soiled clothes.12

The temptation to read this kind of robust cultural nationalism as

the dominant strain in Premchand’s work obscures other important
literary debates about translation that the novel was also contend-
ing with, many of which do not fit the usual pattern of Premchand’s
putative nationalist credentials. The Premchand that emerges from a

148
 P remchand and the politics of language

more careful attention to translational politics is more contradictory

and provisional, as the battle-lines that would become more cleanly
defined the closer India got to independence were still poorly marked
and often obscure. These contradictions – between national and local-
level loyalties – also structure the ways that the novel expresses about
all politics, despite its straightforward and pious representational
modes, which have led to the oversimplified assignation of progressiv-
ism to Premchand’s work.
The second reason is the novel’s deep interest in Suman, a young,
Brahmin wife who turns sexlessly but still romantically to the kotha
as a solution to her dissatisfactions with her impoverished, married
life, is not only the terrain on which the novel’s gendered politics are
resolved but also the terrain on which it subconsciously deals with the
vexed inheritance of the Hindi novel from Urdu cultural institutions,
such that Suman’s itinerant and undirected transit through parental
home, marital bed, guest quarters of the Benarasi elite, the brothel, the
widow’s home, the servants’ quarters and finally the orphanage mark
also the novel’s politics and anxieties about genre, translation and the
status of Hindi aesthetics; another way of saying the same thing: this
is the arc of the transformation of the romantic inheritance of the
Urdu novel into the national Bildungsroman of Hindi. And finally,
Premchand is best understood as a novelist of translation, a novelist
both personally and thematically interested in translation, and some-
one who produced novels in the middle of cultural debates about the
problems and advantages inherent in translation, most importantly
because Sevasadan signalled the important shift from publication in
Urdu to publication in Hindi as demand, markets, education and poli-
tics made possible new, single-script readers in Devnagari. I want to
attend to these debates as they appear in Premchand’s Sevasadan, and
then attempt to think about the structure of the novel as thematically
interested in translation in a number of modes twinned together in the
novel as alternative possibilities: conversion and seduction, redemp-
tion and ruination, repentance and depredation, and transaction
and corruption. Whether the Brahmin wife can be reunited into the
Hindu jati after she has become a tawaif is also a question – to put it
polemically – of translation. To put the problem another way, are we
certain that cultural nationalism or anti-colonial aesthetics are resist-
ant to translation in precisely the ways that we imagine?
The debates about Anglophone culture in Sevasadan happen along-
side the more prominent debate in the novel about courtesans and
their relationship to an elite (read Muslim and Mughal) culture. A new
group of modernist, English-educated thinkers in the municipal council

149
 S nehal S hingavi

in Benares and a few liberal-minded religious personalities have com-

bined forces in order to remove the courtesans from Dalmandi in the
hopes of improving the lives of the citizens of Kashi. This puts them
at odds with the communal elements, both Hindu and Muslim (who
see the eviction of courtesans as a ploy to either to attack property
values or to reduce the number of Muslims in the city), and some of
the landed gentry and powerful industrialists, who are amongst the
courtesans’ best clients. The arguments that they advance against the
removal of the courtesans from the city variously interrogate whether
or not eviction is the best course for the municipal council to take, but
the debate also brings up the problem which is the intimate connec-
tion between the tawaif and a national literary and musical culture.
Throughout the course of the novel, a number of contradictory argu-
ments are advanced about the causes and solutions for the expansion
of the kotha and its ancillary cultural events: that the appreciation
and tolerance of courtesans is the result of a new, elite, modern (read:
English) education and that it is the uneducated, village people who
are the ones that supply the demand for courtesans, especially at wed-
dings; that courtesans are responsible for the preservation and spread
of national musical and poetic traditions and that the culture that the
courtesans control is decadent and responsible for the vice of prostitu-
tion; that courtesans are a part of the national and cultural heritage
and that courtesans threaten the most important national and cultural
institution, namely marriage; that spending money on mujras and con-
certs is swadeshi since it provides jobs for Indian musicians and the
like and that mujras and concerts bankrupt families during weddings
with unnecessarily lavish expenditures; that courtesans are pious and
reformable and that courtesans are only sinners and irredeemable; that
courtesans would not exist without patrons and that certain men and
certain women are natural-born sinners; that there is no difference
between the economic transactions of prostitution and marriage and
that marriage is always preferable to the kotha. The debate is socio-
logical, political and religious, but it is also a consequence of the mode
of Premchand’s novel, as a novel primarily organised by debate and
rhetoric – Sevasadan is, after all, one of Premchand’s most dialogic
novels with almost every chapter being the scene of some important
debate or another, almost always left unsatisfyingly resolved at best.
But the provisional nature of each of these debates, the way that
the novel presents arguments and ideas inconsistently from chapter to
chapter and the fact that despite our fondness for the reform-minded
members of the Benares municipal council, even they do not ultimately
agree on what it is that they are trying to accomplish or why – leaving

150
 P remchand and the politics of language

Suman, ultimately, very much alone – place the novel very impor-
tantly historically at the beginning of an ideological opening that the
novel only uneasily acknowledges. This is a novel still in search of
an ideology and an idiom: here is one of the first attempts of Hindi
trying to argue its case as an equal player in the world of Indian let-
ters. One such argument takes place during the debates in the Hindu
section of the municipal council. In the course of a touchy repartee
about whether financial losses should be suffered for the sake of moral
reform, Kumvar Aniruddh Singh, in a moment of bright irony, inter-
rupts the conversation and changes its direction by wittily attacking
Prabhakar Rao, the editor of the local paper Jagat:

Sir, you spend all your time in editing your newspaper. You
don’t have the time to enjoy the pleasures of life, do you? But
those of us who are carefree need some way to entertain our-
selves, don’t we? We can spend our evenings playing polo, our
afternoons napping, and our mornings in talk to government
officials or riding our horses. But what are we to do between
the evening and ten o’clock at night? Today you suggest that
we should evict the courtesans from the city. When tomorrow
you propose that every dance, concert, or party in this district
should have approval from his board, it will be quite impos-
sible to survive.13

When Prabhakar Rao suggests that Kumvar Aniruddh Singh should

read something if he needs entertainment, Kumvar sahib mocks the
importance of books altogether:

We [the rich] are debarred from reading. We don’t want to

become bookworms. We have already learned all of the things
that we need in order to lead a successful life. We know the
dances of Spain and France. You may not even have heard of
them. You can put me before a piano and I will play a tune
that will put even Mozart to shame. We know all about Eng-
lish morals and customs. We know when to wear solar topis
and when to put on a turban. We read books as well. You will
find that my bookshelves are filled with books, but I don’t rely
on them. This resolution will be the end of us.14

Aniruddh Singh is undoubtedly Premchand’s favourite character in

these debates, as his most important function seems to be to expose
the hypocrisy and stupidity of the people around him – and it is clear

151
 S nehal S hingavi

that Premchand has contempt for most of the council members, whose
rhetorical flourishes are so incommensurate with their own personal
ethics. The moral heroes of the narrative – Padamsingh, a lawyer, and
Vitthaldas, a social worker – are characterised by their perfect ear-
nestness and sincerity, while the members of the municipal council
are, more or less, all hypocrites and opportunists. Aniruddh Singh,
the wealthiest zamindar in the district, brings a patrician irony that
cuts through the posturing of the nouveau bourgeois who populate
the council. Here, Aniruddh Singh caricatures the self-interestedness
of the people around him by translating it into an ironic exposé of
his own lifestyle. The basic position – that the taste for luxuries must
be indulged and that there is nothing of value in literature that isn’t
better realised in real life, even when describing rare, foreign things –
are clearly ridiculous propositions, as is the self-satire of the lives of
the idle rich. But the ironic translation is perfectly misunderstood by
everyone, who, as Kumwar Singh points out, cannot see the way that
their class interests dictate their feigned moral outrage. Later in the
novel when Padamsingh attempts to win Aniruddh Singh over to his
position because he believes that the zamindar actually wants courte-
sans to continue working in Benares, he learns that Aniruddh Singh’s
position has been misrepresented to him by the other members of the
Hindu council.
Aniruddh Singh responds to the charge that he has opposed the
resolution to move the courtesans out from Dalmandi, thus:

I expended all my energy in support of your resolution.

I didn’t think that the opposition deserved a second thought.
I handled it all with a touch of irony. (Remembering). Yes,
that possibility exists. I know. (Roaring with laughter again)
If that’s the case then you must see that the municipal council
is filled with simpletons. Surely, you understand my sarcasm.
Some people must have misunderstood. It’s strange that none
of the most learned and respected municipal council commis-
sioners understood my simple irony. Shame! What a terrible
shame!15

When Padamsingh reflects on Aniruddh Singh’s explanation, he thinks,

‘If these men were so easily fooled, they are thick headed. But Prabha-
kar Rao was fooled as well, and that doesn’t make sense. It seems as
if his daily translations have worn out his brain.’16 Translations, here,
are responsible for the diminution of an ironic, nuanced sensibility,
because they reduce the translator to a mere, literal amanuensis rather

152
 P remchand and the politics of language

than raising his/her abilities as a creative, original thinker. Too much

translation, the argument seems to go, dulls the literary refinement of
any linguistic community.
The joke, though, about translations only makes sense in context,
and it derives much of its power from the fact that Padamsingh is
not a mean-spirited man, so his biting jab at Prabhakar Rao is all the
more poignant because it is so out of his character. What, though, is
the problem with translation, here? It is of course one thing to be tone
deaf to irony (and it must be said that it is impossible to mistake the
irony because the rest of the novel is so plainspoken), but it is another
thing altogether to understand the practice of translation as responsi-
ble for the inability to read between the proverbial lines. The inversion
that Premchand is making, interesting because it is so unusual, is that
translations make one unable to see creativity in one’s own language,
that they make one believe that all innovations happen elsewhere and
must be smuggled into one’s own language and that they permanently
retard the development of a genuine literary sensibility. Translation
into Hindi is necessarily the acknowledgement of the hegemony of
other languages. Disavowing translations, then, becomes the idiosyn-
cratic formulation of Premchand’s cultural nationalism. If, as post-
colonial scholars, we normally attribute the practice of translation to
the colonial apparatus and its attempt to exert power and authority
over vernacular languages, Premchand here accepts a variant of the
argument put forward by Derrida, Spivak and Benjamin variously that
translation involves an acknowledgement of the otherness of the other,
a necessary defamiliarisation of the self in favour of a more ethical
approach to the politics of speech and access to media and power. At
the same time, though, Premchand’s position is also different in that he
seems to be arguing that translations into Hindi actually hurt the abil-
ity of Hindi to develop its own literary sensibility. Translation here is
not a risky ethical manoeuvre that might raise the status of the voice-
less or a procedure which necessarily tramples over the rights of the
subaltern, but a process of undermining the very language into which
a literature is being translated.
The joke had really been established when Aniruddh Singh had only
a few lines before it is argued that translations were ruining Hindi:

It’s really a shame that the country that produced priceless

epics like the Ramayan, gave birth to wonderful poetry like
Sursagar, has to rely on translations for even ordinary novels.
In Bengal and Maharashtra, where they have a strong tradi-
tion of music, they haven’t lost their sense of beauty. They still

153
 S nehal S hingavi

have wonderful imaginations and an aesthetic sense. I have

stopped reading Hindi novels altogether. The translations
aside, there is really nothing of worth other than a few plays
by Harishchandra and a few things such as Chandrakanta
Santati. This must be the most pitiful literature in the whole
world. And worse, there are some individuals who have trans-
lated a couple of English novels with the help of Bengali and
Marathi translators and who think that they are prominent
literati in this country. One such man generated a word-for-
word translation of Kalidasa’s plays, and now he considers
himself the Hindi Kalidasa. One scholar translated two books
by Mill, not himself, but with the help of Marathi and Guja-
rati translators, and he thinks that he has single-handedly
revived Hindi literature. I think that all these translations are
ruining Hindi literature. Originality never has a chance to
thrive.17

The problem with translation is determined by a specific set of histori-

cal realities that were produced by the material realities of publication
at the turn of the century. Premchand’s own fear that inferior trans-
lations were overwhelming the market as well as inferior talent for
Hindi prose is here represented as a distaste for translations in general,
despite the fact that Premchand had already established himself as an
important translator in his own right, from many of the languages
here objected to. That the clearly awful Chandrakanta Santiti is held
up here as a marker of the rich talent in Hindi prose is some index
of how much Premchand was struggling to make the case for Hindi’s
vulnerable power: every other vernacular language had a more seri-
ously established reputation, while Hindi’s had to be manufactured
anew. That this is happening precisely in the middle of the debates
about the abolition of the kotha should force us to reconsider just how
contradictorily Premchand argued for a liberal view of courtesans and
a conservative view of the kotha.
The arguments, that Hindi is in bad shape and that translation of
great works from other languages into Hindi is ruining Hindi’s chances
at producing great literature, are aimed at Hindi’s chief competitors,
not singularly identified as English. In fact in some ways, the argu-
ment is at least also aimed at Urdu, since as Kumwar Aniruddh Singh
argues, everywhere one goes now in Benares, all one hears are ‘ghazals
and qawwalis’.18 And the problem is also the decline in musical tradi-
tions in North India. In so doing, Premchand is merely advocating for

154
 P remchand and the politics of language

a kind of linguistic and literary autarky that we might associate with

the cultural nationalism of swadeshi and its demand for Indian-origin
commodities, only Premchand is narrowing the field not to India but
to the Hindi-speaking belt of the north, and to the Hindu jati. This is
also the reason that he has to stretch backwards in time to the Bhakti
period of Tuslidas and Surdas, because the contemporary scene is so
‘pitiful’. But the argument is also a fairly conservative one when it
comes to linguistic mixing or aesthetic sensibility. Many of the trans-
lations are good because the original languages have aesthetic quali-
ties, while many of the translations are bad because they substitute
creativity in Hindi for the borrowed creativity of others. It is pos-
sible perhaps that Premchand could have written the lines ironically,
except they do not all appear in Bazaar-e-Husn, where presumably
they would have clearly marked the novel’s Hindi-centric and perhaps
even Hindu-focused ideological ambitions. The version in Bazaar-e-
Husn is far more gentle:

How unfortunate it is that the same people who produced

a peerless work like the Ramayana now have to depend on
translations even for light literature. In Bengal and the Deccan
the tradition is still alive, so the people there are not wanting
in feeling.19

The problem about the different treatment of Urdu and Hindi in

what is putatively the same novel is compounded by the fact that every
passage about translation and about Hindi literature is expanded
and more developed in Sevasadan than its corresponding passage in
Bazaar-e-Husn, which can only serve to highlight just how important
both of these questions were on Premchand’s mind as he rewrote the
novel for a new reading public. In Bazaar-e-Husn, for instance, the
same passage where Aniruddh Singh explains his ironic intervention to
Padamsingh reads very differently from the one in Sevasadan:

‘You probably misunderstood me. In my speech I said eve-

rything in my power to support you; what else could I do?
In fact I thought it useless to talk seriously with those who
were opposing your scheme. Instead, I adopted a style of sat-
ire and ridicule; (remembers) ah, yes, I see (laughs aloud) if
that is so I’d say that the Municipal Board is made up of fools.
They probably didn’t even understand my satire! The city of
Benares does not have a single discerning individual among

155
 S nehal S hingavi

the enlightened, cultured, and wise members of its Board!

I am very sorry indeed that you misunderstood me. Please
forgive me. I agree with your proposal entirely.’
When Padam Singh left Kanwar Sahib’s house he felt as
refreshed as though he had been on a pleasant outing. His
host’s warmth and geniality had captivated him.20

In the intervening years between Bazaar-e-Husn and Sevasadan, the

contours and complexities of publishing in Hindi (as opposed to Urdu)
must have become far more pronounced for Premchand. If the prob-
lem in Bazaar-e-Husn is merely the stupidity of municipal councils in
general, the problem has clearly shifted by Sevasadan to include cru-
cially the deleterious impact of those dreaded translations. That this
comment could only be made later and in Hindi also reveals just how
differently Premchand understood the newly differentiable readers he
was encountering. But this is not reducible to the problem of hiding
certain political commentary from certain readers; the deficiencies of
Hindi were palpable to Premchand precisely because he had such an
intimate knowledge of the publishing and literary culture in Urdu. In
a letter to Imtiaz Ali Taj, composed around the same time as both
novels, Premchand writes:

उर्द मे रसाले और अखबारात तो बहुत निकलते है, शायद ज़रूरत से ज़्यदा,
इसलिए की मुसलमान एक लिटरे री कौम है. और हर तालीमयाफ्त शख्
अपने तई मुसन्नफ़ होने के काबिल समझता है. लेकिन पब्लशरो का अक्र
कहत है. सरे कलम-रोए-हिन् मे एक भी ढंग का पब्लशर मौजूद नही. बाज़
जो है उनका कदम और वजूद बराबर है, क्ोकि उनकी सारी कायनात चंद
रद्द नावल है, जिनसे मुल् या ज़बान को कोई फ़ायदा नही.21

Here, Premchand’s complaint is about the silliness of the publishing

agenda that Hindi publishers pursue, as their entire universe is com-
posed of a few trashy novels (sari kaayanaat chand radde naval hain)
while the world of Urdu is marked by sophistication and refinement.
The elision that he makes here, though, is of interest, because Urdu
becomes a metonym for Muslim (musalmaan ek literary qaum hai).
Many of the terms by which Premchand would begin to distinguish
the failures of Hindi vis-à-vis Urdu could easily later be utilised for an
agenda that would have horrified Premchand.
One index of just how decisive a shift was being made in the world
of Hindi letters was that Aniruddh Singh’s argument about the rela-
tionship between Hindi and the other, more established literatures
in India was repeated, almost verbatim, in the Hindi presses which

156
 P remchand and the politics of language

reviewed the novel initially. One reviewer, Kalidas Kapur, compared

the literary scene in Hindi before Premchand to a garden overrun by
foreign plants:

सं
ाँ स र-भरहै।केइधर
मौजूद भले-बु र ये
देखि पौधे
तो यह
बंगाली बंकिम
और रविन्द के साहित्-सुमनो की कलमे है, उधर गुजरात से लायी हुई
सरस्तीचन्द की बेल है। कही ह्यगो और ड्यमा के ऐतिहासिक उपन्यसो के
कलमे लगाने की कोशिश हो रही है। कही कु छ सज्जन अंग्रजी साहित् के कू ड़े-
कचरे से वाटिका को सुशोभित करने का प्रयत्न कर रहे है। एक-आध कोने मे
छिपे हुए, इने-गिने साहित्-प्रमी अपनी सच्च साहित्-सेवा का बीज बोते
दिखाई देते है।22

The thankless labour of nurturing indigenous flora eventually bears

the fruit of a fine literary tradition; the reference to ‘साहित्य-सेवा’ (liter-
ary service) could only be a nod to the ending of Sevasadan itself: the
sublimation of sexual desire and material wants in the sublime devo-
tion to divinity in service. The hope, Kalidas Kapur concluded, was
that novels like Sevasadan would fertilise the soil well enough that
there would be a day when ‘there would be no shortage of Thackerays,
Dickenses, Scotts, and Rabindras in Hindi literature’.23
Premchand’s position would not easily fit in with the dominant
ways we have of thinking about linguistic politics in postcolonial lit-
erary studies; the cultural nationalist proposition is understood easily
enough, but that the risk is not from excessive translation of Hindi
but the dependence on other languages and literatures whose already
established literary credentials threaten the weaker, new markets of
Hindi makes the mapping of this onto a colonial problematic diffi-
cult. Part of this has to do with the fact that while Premchand seems
to have had a robust critic of colonial domination on India, it was
not the only problem that he saw in North India, which was cleft by
all manner of religious, class and political power bases that preyed
on the weak. The novel is also written at a moment when modern
communalism was in its earliest stages, and so the debate with Mus-
lim cultural institutions is still part of the repertoire of nationalist
renewal. The decentring of the colonial problematic for Premchand
was also in some ways a reflection of the idea that colonialism did
not appear to be waning in the years before the national agitations
and world wars.
Social reform threatened culture inasmuch as that culture depended
on the institutions which held up the exploitative social and sexual
relations in any economic arrangement; put another way, the feverish
need to defend a cultural tradition comes at the expense of an ability

157
 S nehal S hingavi

to critique the economic and sexual institutions which maintain that

tradition. But the reason why the novel can so easily abandon the
kotha is because its cultural capital no longer comes from the poetic
traditions that the kotha curates. This is in part what makes Sevasadan
interesting: in a novel about courtesans, there is relatively little Urdu
poetry, as there would have been in a novel like Mirza Rusva’s Umrao
Jan Ada. In the place of the Urdu ghazal, Premchand turns to the Braj
and Awadhi poetry of an earlier moment in Hindi’s literary history to
represent the music of courtesanal seduction and temptation; once the
kothas have been displaced from the centre of Benares, the poetry and
song that the novel captures are in a newly minted modern standard
Hindi and the texts are much more about nationalist abnegation than
about desire. In many ways, Sevasadan is already a post-Mughal, post-
Urdu and importantly a post-courtesanal novel, born of a certain kind
of ideological moment in which social reform had already displaced
one set of cultural institutions and created literary sensibilities that
were removed from the world centred on the kotha. As an aside, very
little in Sevasadan happens in the kotha; it is mostly a scene of comedic
anti-seduction and religious or moral instruction. All that remained
was for the formation of a new tradition, the selection of a new canon
through which Hindi could claim that it had never really deviated from
the standard. And that is despite the fact that the novel was initially
written in Urdu. Saving Suman from the kotha is also about rescu-
ing Hindi fiction from the supposed decadence of Urdu institutions –
which is the way that we understand Hali and Azad’s interventions
into Urdu literary criticism at the turn of the nineteenth century – even
as the novel is forced to acknowledge the actual power and promi-
nence of the Urdu scene as well as the seductions of other languages.
This is perhaps where understanding Premchand as a novelist under
the sign of translation is helpful in allowing us to cut through some of
the hagiographic modes of thinking about Premchand and to under-
stand the real contradictions that he faced. The weak position of Hindi
was like the weak position of feminism in India in the early twentieth
century, and sexual and literary reform would often require rearguard
political positions, especially the patronising and paternalistic solu-
tions that are put forward in the novel. None of this is meant as an
argument about Premchand’s latent communalism or anti-feminism;
it is meant rather to demonstrate that it is only when we think about
the risks of translations, and the ways that translation is not merely
an exercise in colonial domination or cultural chauvinism, that we can
bring out the ideological and aesthetic force of a novel like Sevasadan.

158
 P remchand and the politics of language

Notes
1 A version of this article was published in the Annual of Urdu Studies
(Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia, University of Wisconsin-
Madison), No. 28, 2013.
2 Zaheer Fathepuri puts the publication date at 1899, while Khushwant
Singh insists the novel was published first when Rusva was 48 (putting the
date of publication at 1905). See Mirza Mohammad Hadi Ruswa, Umrao
Jaan Ada, Zaheer Fathepuri (ed.), Lahore: Majlis-i Taraqqi-yi Adab, 1963;
and Mirza Mohammad Hadi Ruswa, Umrao Jan Ada, Khushwant Singh
and M. A. Husaini (trans.), Hyderabad: Disha Books, 1993.
3 Ruswa, Umrao Jan Ada, p. 27.
4 Rashmi Sadana, English Heart, Hindi Heartland, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2012, p. 177.
5 Gopi Chand Narang, Urdu Language and Literature: Critical Perspec-
tives, New Delhi: Sterling Publishers Private Limited, 1991, p. 127.
6 Ali Jawad Zaidi, A History of Urdu Literature, New Delhi: Sahitya
Akademi, 1993, p. 412.
7 Prabhakar Machwe, Modernity and Contemporary Indian Literature,
New Delhi: Chetana Publications, 1977. It is important in this respect
that Premchand’s novel was never tainted with the charge of ‘obscenity’
which so many other novelists who dealt with themes of female sexuality
explicitly faced. The story of how this contributed to the development of a
reading public in Hindi is taken up by Charu Gupta, Sexuality, Obscenity,
Community: Women, Muslims, and the Hindu Public in Colonial India,
New York: Palgrave, 2001, especially chapters 1 and 2.
8 Harish Trivedi, ‘The Urdu Premchand: The Hindi Premchand’, Jadavpur
Journal of Comparative Literature, 1984, 22: 104–18.
9 Alok Rai, Hindi Nationalism, Hyderabad: Orient Longman Private Lim-
ited, 2000, p. xiii.
10 Trivedi, ‘The Urdu Premchand’.
11 Even though Bazaar-e-Husn was completed first, it was published after
Sevasadan, making the problem of ‘translation’ all the more vexed, as
both texts were undergoing revisions at around the same time as he tried
to make them ready for publication. This process was even more pro-
tracted in the case of Bazaar-e-Husn since it was much more difficult for
Premchand to convince a publisher to undertake the task of publishing
the novel. For more on this, see Madan Gopal, Kalam ka Mazdoor: Prem-
chand, Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan, 1965, especially chapters 11 and 12.
12 Premchand, Sevasadan, Snehal Shingavi (trans.), Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2005, p. 193. In every instance available, I have offered citations
from the extant English translations of Premchand’s novels to allow read-
ers access to the works in English. Source materials in Hindi and Urdu
have been cited in the bibliography, as well.
13 Premchand, Sevasadan, p. 140.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid., p. 163.
16 Ibid., p. 164.
17 Ibid., p. 163

159
 S nehal S hingavi

18 Ibid., p. 160.
19 Premchand, Courtesans’ Quarter: A Translation of Bazaar-e-Husn, Amina
Azfar (trans.), Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 155.
20 Ibid.
21 Cited in Gopal, Kalam ka Mazdoor, p. 99.
22 Ibid., p. 94.
23 Ibid.

Bibliography
Gopal, Madan, Kalam ka Mazdoor: Premchand, Delhi: Rajkamal Prakashan,
1965.
Gould, William, Hindu Nationalism and the Language of Politics in Late
Colonial India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Gupta, Charu, Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims and the
Hindu Public in Colonial India, New York: Palgrave, 2001.
Machwe, Prabhakar, Modernity and Contemporary Indian Literature, New
Delhi: Chetana Publications, 1977.
Narang, Gopi Chand, Urdu Language and Literature: Critical Perspectives,
New Delhi: Sterling Publishers Private Limited, 1991.
Premchand, Courtesans’ Quarter: A Translation of Bazaar-e-Husn, Amina
Azfar (trans.), Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Premchand, Kulliyat-i Premcand, Madan Gopal (ed.), 24 vols, New Delhi:
Qaumi Kaunsil Bara-e Furogh-i Urdu Zaban, 2000.
Premchand, Sevasadan, Snehal Shingavi (trans.), Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2005.
Premchand, Sevasadan, Varanasi: Sarasvati Press, 1960.
Rai, Alok, Hindi Nationalism, Hyderabad: Orient Longman Private Limited,
2000.
Ruswa, Mirza Mohammad Hadi, Umrao Jaan Ada, Zaheer Fathepuri (ed.),
Lahore: Majlis-i Taraqqi-yi Adab, 1963.
Ruswa, Mirza Mohammad Hadi, Umrao Jan Ada, Khushwant Singh and M.
A. Husaini (trans.), Hyderabad: Disha Books, 1993.
Sadana, Rashmi, English Heart, Hindi Heartland, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2012.
Zaidi, Ali Jawad, A History of Urdu Literature, New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi,
1993.

160
 10
TRANSLATION AS NEW
AESTHETIC
Premchand’s translation of Shab-e-Tar
and European modernism1

Madhu Singh

Early-twentieth-century literature in India was marked by its ‘trans-

actions with modernity, in some cases engaging with the ideology of
European modernism, in others producing its own formal solutions
to the problems of disorder, violence, and mimetic lack’.2 Historically
a period of strong nationalist upsurge and political upheavals, it also
witnessed a wave of cosmopolitan avant-garde cultural practices in art
and architecture. Given that many of the Hindi and Urdu writers were
exposed to Western literature, either in English or in translation, dur-
ing this period, Premchand’s encounter with Maurice Maeterlinck’s
(1862–1936) symbolist-absurdist play Les Aveugles (1890) or The
Sightless as Shab-e-Tar (Dark Night) was mediated by English and
thus followed the same trajectory. Translated as early as 1919, the play
is about twelve unnamed people, all sightless and inmates of an insti-
tution or shelter home, hopelessly stranded in an ‘ancient’ forest one
dark night. Anxiously awaiting the arrival of their guide, an old priest,
to lead them to shelter and safety, they are unaware that he has been
lying dead all along. Capturing an intense mood of isolation and fear,
the play foreshadows the Brechtian anti-mimetic world of Waiting for
Godot written more than half a century later.
Located against that background, this chapter explores how and why
Premchand’s translation of a foreign text should be seen as a ‘new aes-
thetic’. Also, given that Premchand kept a close watch on each major
event of national or international importance, was Shab-e-Tar, pub-
lished four months after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, a camouflaged

161
 M adhu S ingh

protest against British oppression and censorship? And, lastly, this

chapter also deals with Premchand’s translational praxis in the context
of Shab-e-Tar.

I
The beginning of the twentieth century witnessed a proliferation in
translation activities and it was also through the translation of Euro-
pean literature that Indians encountered European modernism. How-
ever, it was primarily English literature that was being translated and
less of literatures from other European languages. In her survey on
‘readerly’ preferences during the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, Priya Joshi observed that the Indian reading public stuck
to the ‘good books’ of fiction by Scott and Dickens which the colo-
nial authorities wished them to read.3 Other popular choices were
Fielding, Thackeray, Swift, Bulwer-Lytton and Collins, among oth-
ers, which continued to be read and translated throughout the next
century.4 In fact, as Sisir Kumar Das points out, during the 1920s
there was a sudden spurt of interest in Scandinavian authors in Ben-
gal, and some of the non-British writers and playwrights such as
Moliere, Ibsen, Maeterlinck and Maxim Gorky were being read and
translated.5 Urdu literature too had a fair share of European drama-
tists through translations of Goldsmith, Sheridan, Alexander Dumas,
Schiller, Maeterlinck, Ibsen and Shaw. Das observes that Maeterlinck,
a hugely influential playwright of the symbolist school, had ‘cast a
spell on the Indian audience as he did on the contemporary West-
ern theatre’.6 Deeply symbolic in nature, his plays were in sharp con-
trast to the ‘robust realism of Ibsen’7 and hinted at the uncertainty of
reality.
As mentioned earlier, Shab-e-Tar is a translation of the English ver-
sion of Maeterlinck’s play. Of the two versions available in English –
Richard Hovey (1894) and Laurence Alma Tadema (1895) – Premchand
took up Tadema as his source text. Shab-e-Tar came out serially in the
September and October 1919 issues of Munshi Dayanarayan Nigam’s
monthly Urdu newspaper Zamana, published from Kanpur. Four dec-
ades later in 1962, Amrit Rai published Shab-e-Tar in book form from
Hans Prakashan, Allahabad. Surprisingly, Das’s comprehensive com-
pendium History of Indian Literature 1911–1956 inadvertently fails
to mention either The Sightless or its translation, though a brief para-
graph is devoted to Maeterlinck’s other plays translated into Indian
languages. Das stated that some of Maeterlinck’s other works were

162
 T ranslation as new aesthetic

also translated but we do not have any information about any of them
being staged.8 Maeterlinck’s masterpiece was thus subsumed under the
category of ‘other works’.
In the 1962 version of Shab-e-Tar, the Arabic/Persian script was
replaced with Devanagari, a Hindi subtitle was appended and difficult
Urdu words were glossed in footnotes. Perhaps Amrit Rai believed
that in the newly emerged post-Partition nation, Premchand’s readers
would now mainly be Hindi-speakers. Also, the new generation of the
1960s, by and large, was no longer bilingual or conversant in both
Hindi and Urdu. In the preface to the collection of Premchand’s short
stories Gupt Dhan, Amrit Rai admitted that: ‘Urdu se prapt kahaniyon
ko jiyon ka tiyon chap dena hindi ke pathkon ke prati anyaya samajh
kar main ne unko hindi ka jama pehnaya – Munshiji ki apni hindi
ka, yani jahan tak mujh se ho saka’ (Publishing those Urdu stories
in Hindi would have been an injustice to the Hindi readers, so I gave
them a Hindi colour – in Munshiji’s own Hindi to the extent that
I could possibly do it).9 On the contrary, in the preface to Shab-e-Tar,
Rai mentioned that ‘Shab-e-Tar jiyon ka tiyon apne Urdu rup mein
prastut kiya ja raha hai – han, kathin shabdon ka arth futnot mein
de diya gaya hai’ (Shab-e-Tar is presented here as it was originally,
in Urdu, with meanings of difficult words provided in footnotes).10
Rai’s preface to Shab-e-Tar also brings to light two important facts:
first, that Premchand was also translating another of Maeterlinck’s
plays, Pelleas and Melisanda, in Hindi; and second, that Premchand
had admitted that The Sightless and Pelleas and Melisanda were his
favourite works. It was pretty obvious that Premchand held French lit-
erature in high esteem for he admits this in his introduction to Ahankar
(1925), his Hindi translation of Anatole France’s novel Thais (1890):
‘In Europe, the delightful literature of France is the best of all.’11 Amrit
Rai further notes that the translation of Pelleas and Melisanda and
the Hindi edition of Shab-e-Tar could not be found anywhere.12 Who
knows if they got published at all or were lost in oblivion like many of
Premchand’s other manuscripts?
Coming back to Maeterlinck’s The Sightless (1890), the symbolist
avant-garde play was written under the influence of the pessimistic
philosophy of Schopenhauer who asserted that life without pain is
meaningless. The suffering body unfolds as the inner place of discovery
and as the central locus of the meaning of existence. The philosophy
of the unconscious of Eduard von Hartmann, who sought to reconcile
two conflicting schools of thought, rationalism and irrationalism by
emphasising the central role of the unconscious mind, also influenced

163
 M adhu S ingh

him. A brief account of the play is as follows: Twelve unnamed blind

people (six men and six women) are hopelessly stranded on a deso-
late island anxiously waiting for their leader, the priest, to lead them
to safety, unaware that he has been dead all along. The sound of sea
waves, falling leaves, rising wind and the flapping of the night birds
punctuate the silence. Their senses take fright in that world of sight-
less disquiet and they grope in the dark as a tempest gathers and snow
falls. A dog, then, leads them to where the priest ‘mortally still’ leans
against an oak tree. The group of men and women tremble in the
silence and chill of the night. Then comes the sound of hurrying feet
and someone approaching in the eerie silence. The steps draw closer
and then stop. The sightless people (and the readers, too) wonder:
Whose footsteps are those? Why did they stop? Who is it that has
sought them in the night and in the snow? Was he/she a deliverer,
a guide? To the late nineteenth-century audiences, the parable might
sound familiar: Had God really died, as Nietzsche had proclaimed,
leaving humans to fend for themselves? Translator and critic Richard
Hovey, however, points out that the intruder is Death, that the play is
the symbol of a ‘World lost in the dark forest of unfaith and unknowl-
edge’.13 The dead priest lying in the midst of the devotees who had
little faith symbolically stands for religion/church. Through the slow
uncertain groping of reason, in vain they seek for a guide in animal
instinct, in the newborn future that cannot yet utter its revelation.
Written at the turn of a new century, The Sightless raised quite a few
probing questions: What would the new century bring? Will the young
born on the threshold of the new century be able to ‘see’? Will they
be able to comprehend what is coming their way (metaphorically as
footsteps from the future)?
By bringing these queries to the Indian context, Premchand too dis-
played his anxiety about the future of his fellow countrymen under
colonial subjugation. His translation of The Sightless at this critical
juncture of anti-colonial nationalism brought to the fore a number of
uneasy questions: Did the play hint at the despair of the nation through
the allegory of twelve blind men who were clueless about their future,
oblivious of the fact that there was no one left to lead them to safety
and security? Was this in any way symbolic of the failure of the Indian
leaders who promised but failed to deliver, for they themselves were
(figuratively?) incapable to do much for the people suffering under
colonialism? Can the notion of blindness be applied metaphorically
to the vision displaced under colonial control? Whether these are
mere conjectures or carry some element of truth can only, at best, be
explored.

164
 T ranslation as new aesthetic

II
Premchand’s translation may be seen as a ‘new aesthetic’ in the con-
text of Shab-e-Tar. My humble submissions are as follows:
Shab-e-Tar was one of the earliest examples of an encounter with
Western modernism in India and a revolutionary advance in Urdu
drama.14 I wish to submit that though Homi Bhabha’s notion of ‘time-
lagged colonial moment’15 within modernity might support the argu-
ment that modernism was a late phenomenon in India, Shab-e-Tar
inaugurated a modernist moment in Urdu literary imagination almost
simultaneously with its ‘moment’ in a Europe marked by new experi-
ments in literary and cultural practices. As far as modernism in art in
India was concerned, Partha Mitter in his work Triumph of Modern-
ism: India’s Artists and the Avant-Garde (2007) locates the ‘conveni-
ent entry point’ for modernism in the year 1922 when an exhibition
of Bauhaus artists whose works symbolised ‘the graduation of Indian
taste from Victorian naturalism to non-representational art’16 was held
in Calcutta. The first generation of Indian modernists owed an intel-
lectual and formal debt to the Bauhaus and their modernist aesthetics.
In this sense, the modernist impulse in Urdu almost coincided with
modernism in Bengal, a vibrant centre of intellectual and artistic ten-
dencies among Bengali intelligentsia and cultural aficionados.
The symbolists’ refusal to depict the empirical world as a reaction
against realism and Impressionism was embedded in the wider cultural
and political anxieties of late nineteenth-century Europe. As a symbol-
ist play situated in the political anxieties of the period, Shab-e-Tar
showed that truth was beyond the sensory world, and it could only be
perceived through a rich use of allusory symbols and a reflective state
of mind. Premchand’s age was one in which social reform and change
had become a burning concern with intellectuals, yet when he trans-
lated this play, adapting its unique cultural and historical subtext, he
was virtually entering another domain of creativity. This was the ‘new
aesthetics’ inspired by the Belgian symbolists who were more socially
and politically engaged with the working class than their French coun-
terparts. In fact, Premchand was moving along the same trajectory
as politically motivated directors, such as Stanislavski and Vsevolod
Meyerhold (1874–1940) who crafted Maeterlinck’s plays and other
symbolist works as productions aiming at political change. In the
words of Sara Rai, by that time Premchand had begun to subscribe
to Bolshevist ideas and it was the vision of a revolutionary future –
that of a government controlled by the proletariat, as in Russia – that
began to dictate his attacks on the Indian reality.17

165
 M adhu S ingh

Literature and ideology were aesthetically combined in Shab-e-Tar.

The play may be seen as a camouflaged/discrete act of resistance against
colonial control and repression through the mode of increased surveil-
lance on Indians. Indian colonial history informs us that the Censor-
ship Act of 1876 had become a legal mechanism of imperial control
over anti-colonial plays. Under such circumstances and also because of
Premchand’s prior encounter with censorship [his earlier work Soz-e
Watan (The Dirge of the Nation, 1909) was confiscated and banned],
it was pretty much certain that he could not have protested in a man-
ner other than this. Due to the threat of censorship clamped over the
media after the Jallianwala Bagh incident, Premchand was discretely
protesting against the British regime and presumably also against the
Indian leadership whose vested interests were camouflaged behind their
nationalist aspirations. In fact, as early as February 1919, Premchand
was pained to observe the selfishness of the leaders of the Swaraj
movement and had warned them: ‘There is no reason for the public to
prefer your governance to the governance of the foreign rulers.’18 Like
the blind people in the play, he believed Indians now needed another
guide to lead them out of the atmosphere of gloom and despair because
their leader had become too old and infirm and could no longer ‘see’.19
In this thinly veiled reference to Gandhi, Shab-e-Tar appears to have
anticipated and supported Premchand’s later change of opinion about
him. In an article published on 16 April 1934 and collected in Viv-
idh Prasang (1978), Premchand admitted his disillusionment with the
failure of Gandhi’s Satyagraha movement and clearly called for the
‘despiritualization of national politics’ and political realism. He also
hinted that ‘Mahatmaji’s voice is not very dependable.’20 The other
reason why Shab-e-Tar should be seen as ‘a distinctly political act’ is
governed by the fact that ‘the choice of a text not part of the literature
of the colonial power, constituted an attempt towards the liberation of
Indian literature from the tutelage of the imperially-inducted master
literature [. . .]’.21 By deliberately taking up the translation of a play
in a language other than the coloniser’s, Premchand was subverting
imperial linguistic hegemony and control.

III

Premchand and his translational praxis

A comparative reading of Maeterlinck’s The Sightless and Premchand’s
Shab-e-Tar reveals that the latter is a close and direct translation of
Maeterlinck’s play. Like its source text, Shab-e-Tar, too, is a drama

166
 T ranslation as new aesthetic

of minimal action, silence, and ‘mood studies of fear resulting from

the mysterious intrusion of death’.22 The text under consideration is
Amrit Rai’s Urdu/Hindi version republished in 1962, in the preface of
which Rai clearly stated that no changes had been made whatsoever in
the form, content or language except the script.23 A comparison with
the Urdu version appearing in volume 15 of Kulliyat-e Premchand
showed that indeed there were no variations between the Urdu and
Hindi texts.24 So what remains now is to see how similar or different
Premchand’s translation is from Maeterlinck’s English version.
Believing that all acts of translation are an attempt to mediate
between cultures, texts and nationalities, I wish to focus on some of
the issues related to Shab-e-Tar as a translated text.
The title of the play The Sightless or The Blind was adapted as
Shab-e-Tar or Andheri Raat in order to highlight the atmosphere of
the play – of darkness, gloom, despair and silence – rather than the
visual impairment of the characters. Read metaphorically against the
context of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and its aftermath in particu-
lar, the title seems appropriate and justified. We can safely presume
that Premchand deliberately and intentionally chose this title over the
original French or the English version. Second, shab-e-tar (dark night)
is a Persian expression, not very commonly used in Urdu, and carries
a stronger and more profound connotation of darkness. It is a known
fact that Premchand’s Urdu contained a liberal sprinkling of Arabic
and Persian words.
Given that ‘metaphrase is an unachievable ideal’25 and hence com-
plete equivalence is unattainable, it is important to look into Prem-
chand’s lexical choices. In his introductory note to the play, Premchand
used the term dervish26 for ‘priest’ as in the expression ‘a very old
priest’, which may not be an exact equivalent for ‘sage’ or ‘ascetic’. The
footnote in Hindi explains it as sanyasi. The word dervish is deployed
only once; thereafter it is replaced by Hindi substitutes such as sadhu,
sadhuji, mahatmaji, and svamiji, which sound pretty close to the Eng-
lish word priest.27 Similarly, the Urdu and Hindi words nabina and
andha/andhi have been deployed interchangeably throughout the text.
Keeping in mind the fact that it was Amrit Rai who brought out the
Urdu play using the Devanagari script, readers might have assumed
that the Hindi equivalents were introduced by him. In that case, the
translated text of Shab-e-Tar would have become thrice removed from
the original French! But this is not so. Even in the original Urdu text,
Premchand has made use of these Hindi substitutes, perhaps to bring
in a colloquial touch and also to adhere to the social convention by
adding an honorific ‘ji’.

167
 M adhu S ingh

The expression in Tadema’s English version, ‘his hair, of a most sol-

emn white, falls in stiff and scanty locks upon a face more illumined
and more weary than all else that surrounds it in the intent silence of
the gloomy forest,’28 has been translated by Premchand as ‘uske nurani
aur safed bal uske cehre par bikhre hue hain’.29 This collocation of the
word nurani bal does not seem idiomatically exact. This usage sounds
more plausible in connection with the mystic halo or radiance on the
face of a Sufi saint, for example. Similarly, in the expression ‘time to go
back to the asylum’,30 the word asylum has been translated as khan-
qah, which means a ‘monastery,’ not a ‘shelter house’ as intended in
the French play. It is to be remembered that when Maeterlinck wrote
his plays, people who were visually impaired were placed under the
organised supervision or assistance of institutions. The word khanqah
is semantically dissimilar. Another expression that seeks attention is
the use of the word khvabgah in place of ‘refectory’ as in the follow-
ing dialogue:

Third Blind Man: I prefer staying in the refectory by the coal-

fire; there was a big fire there this morning.31

Urdu Version:

Tisra Nabina: Mujhe to apni khvabgah men kole ke samne

baithna ziyada pasand hai. Aj subah khub ag raushan thi.32

It is quite surprising that Premchand opted for khvabgah for the lexical
item ‘refectory’. Was it done intentionally to make the context sound
more appropriate in the receiving language? The expression ‘coal-fire’
has been changed to just ‘coal’ when other options could easily have
been introduced. Similarly, the Urdu substitution of ‘barf ke tukre’33
in the statement ‘It begins to snow in great flakes’34 would have been
improved considerably with the use of ‘barf ke gole’. It is interesting
to note another instance of unusual collocation in the Urdu version:
The expression ‘kali sardi’ used for ‘great cold’, though indicative of
the heightened intensity of gloom and hopelessness that the translator
intended to capture, is not a commonplace usage. These are examples
of lexical choices deployed in the target text that do not correspond to
the original usage in Maeterlinck’s English version.
The recurrent reference to ‘dead leaves’ in Maeterlinck indicates
his constant preoccupation with death. Premchand makes use of the
phrase ‘murda pattian’ only once and thereafter he uses the phrase
‘sukhi pattian’ throughout the play, which is inadequate to bring

168
 T ranslation as new aesthetic

out the original connotation. But this is a typical problem related to

language and does not in any way cast aspersion on the translator’s
competence. In this case, a literal rendering would have been inap-
propriate. This raises the question of the translatability of a text and
proves that absolute correspondence between languages is not pos-
sible. However, there are only a few instances where lexical choices
seem to be contested in Shab-e-Tar. On the whole, there are no major
departures from the English version that affect the content, form or
flow of the English version, but rather, only minor deviations that have
been pointed out as an academic exercise in comparative analysis.
Bassnet and Trivedi believe that the ‘lesser position’ granted to
translation in comparison to the original work in the literary hierar-
chy reflects the hierarchic opposition between the European coloniser
culture and the colonised culture.35 To avoid sounding like a deriva-
tive and appellative ‘copy’ of the European text (though not a text of
the master’s language and culture), Premchand made use of cultural
adaptation in his translation. The other reason was the transference
of cultural references so that the translated text closely conformed
to the culture of the target language. In other words, the success of
translation depends largely on the extent of its appropriation into the
translator’s own language and the degree of its domestication into the
translator’s own culture.36 The expression ‘you can pray by-and-by in
the dormitory’37 is thus translated as ‘tum log bavarcikhane men jakar
namaz parhna’.38 Another instance of cultural adaptation is in Prem-
chand’s deployment of the word mahal for ‘parish’. Consequently, ‘we
are all three of the same parish’39 has been translated as ‘Ham tinon ek
hi mahal se hai’,40 and ‘praying’ has been translated with the expres-
sions ‘dua karna’ and ‘namaz parhna’.41 Should all these cases be con-
sidered as instances of situational equivalence, cultural adaptation and
creative deviance?
In Shab-e-Tar, Premchand largely adhered to lexical, stylistic and
semantic equivalences. The following dialogue between the oldest
blind woman and the oldest blind man is about the missing priest and
his purpose in bringing them out in the open. The characters are all
unnamed personages and their problems may be seen as the tragedy of
man seized by the inscrutable powers that control his destiny.

The oldest Blind Woman: He said too that we ought to know

something of the little Island we live in. He himself has never
been all over it; there is a mountain that no one has climbed,
valleys which no one likes to go down to, and caves that have
not been entered to this day. He said, in short, that one must

169
 M adhu S ingh

not always sit waiting for the sun under the dormitory roof; he
wanted to bring us to the sea-shore. He has gone there alone.42

Urdu version:

Sab se Buddhi Andhi ‘Aurat’: Vo kahte the ke ham jis jazire

men rahte hain uska kuch hal zarur janana cahiye. Unhon ne
khud bhi pura jazira nahin dekha hai. Yahan ek aisa pahar hai
jis par koi nahin charh saka, aisi vadian hain jahan koi nahin
jana pasand karta aur aisa ghar hai jis men aj tak koi dakhil
nahin ho saka. Algharaz un ki mansha thi ke ham logon ko
aftab ke intezar men hamesha khanqah ke zer-e sayah baithe
rahna munasib nahin. Is liye vo ham ko sahil tak lana cahte
the. Vo vahan tanha gae hain.43

As the play comes to an end on a fearful and sinister note, the child
begins to wail in the dark while the elders try to pacify him:

The Young Blind Woman: Oh! How he is crying! – What is it? –

Don’t cry – Don’t be afraid; there is nothing to be afraid of; we
are here all about you. – What do you see? – Fear nothing –
Don’t cry so! – What is it that you see? – Tell us, what is it that
you see?44

Urdu version:

Naujavan Andhi ‘Aurat’: Uf! Kitni zor se rota hai. Kya hai!
Mat ro beta! Daro mat! Darne ki koi bat nahin hai. Ham sab
tumhare pas hain. Tum kya dekh rahe ho? Daro mat! Is tarah
mat ro! Tum kya dekhte ho? Ham se batlao akhir yeh kya
cheez hai.45

The translation, here, maintains a stylistic equivalence which has

also been observed in the case of idiomatic expressions. And finally,
the eerie silence is pierced by the desperate wail of the child as the
unknown figure stands before them, though the silence communicates
more than that sound.

The Young Blind Woman: Who are you?

[Silence]
The Oldest Blind Woman: Have pity on us!
[Silence. The child cries more desperately.]46

170
 T ranslation as new aesthetic

Urdu version:

Naujavan Andhi ‘Aurat: Tum Kaun ho?

Sab se Buddhi Andhi ‘Aurat: Hamare upar reham karo!
(Khamosh)
(Sannata hai. Bacca gala phar phar kar rone lagta hai.)47

These closing lines are examples of literal and semantic correspond-

ence and capture the dramatic rising tension – the moment of terror,
amazement, hysterical fear, Death or even Death-in-life. They affirm
Maeterlink’s belief that ‘[t]here is a tragic element in the life of every
day that is far more real, far more penetrating, far more akin to the
true self that is in us than the tragedy that lies in great adventure’.48
On the whole, the translation presents a new concept of Maeterlinck’s
‘tragedy of everyday life’49 which also arises from the blind inmates’
uncanny ability to sense the coming of Death.
To conclude, translation requires an act of the imagination as well
as the translator’s linguistic competence. Being equally proficient in
English and Urdu, Premchand adhered to the lexical, semantic and
stylistic equivalences without compromising on the spontaneity and
grace of the target language. Shab-e-Tar is a reliable representation of
the original text – its language, poetics, tradition and cultural context.
Finally, Mukherjee argued that ‘[w]hether one translates or transcre-
ates, the original work is renewed by being rendered into another lan-
guage,’ and this is ‘the least we may expect when we regard translation
as new writing’.50 Appropriating Mukherjee’s concept of ‘new writing’
as ‘new aesthetics’, I wish to conclude that Shab-e-Tar may be seen as
an effective engagement with world literature and specifically with the
renewing of the aesthetics and politics of Maeterlinck’s play.

Notes
1 A version of this article was published in the Annual of Urdu Studies
(Department of Languages and Cultures of Asia, University of Wisconsin-
Madison), No 28, 2013.
2 Supriya Chaudhuri, ‘Modernisms in India’, in Peter Brooker, Andrzej
Gasiorek, Deborah Longworth, and Andrew Thacker (eds), The Oxford
Handbook of Modernisms, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010,
p. 954.
3 Priya Joshi, ‘Reading in the Public Eye: The Circulation of British Fic-
tion in Indian Libraries, c. 1835–1901’, in Stuart Balckburn and Vasudha
Dalmia (eds), India’s Literary History: Essays on the Nineteenth Century,
New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004, p. 309.
4 Ibid., p. 307.

171
 M adhu S ingh

5 Sisir Kumar Das, History of Indian Literature, 1911–1956: Struggle for

Freedom, Triumph and Tragedy, New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1995,
p. 57.
6 Ibid., p. 58.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Amrit Rai, ‘Preface’, in Premchand Amrit Rai (eds), Gupt Dhan, Alla-
habad: Hans Prakashan, 1962, p. 6.
10 Amrit Rai, ‘Preface’, in Premchand (ed.), Shab-e-Tar, Allahabad: Hans
Prakashan, 1962, p. 5.
11 Cited in Harish Trivedi, ‘India, England, France: A (Post) Colonial Trans-
lational Triangle’, Meta: Translators’ Journal, 1997, 42(2): 407.
12 Rai, ‘Preface’, Shab-e-Tar, p. 5.
13 Richard Hovey, ‘Symbolism and Maeterlinck’, 2000, n.p. Originally
published in The Plays of Maurice Maeterlinck, Chicago: Herbert S.
Stone & Company, 1894, pp. 3–11, http://www.theatrehistory.com/misc/
maeterlinck002.html (accessed on 20 November 2012).
14 Ram Babu Saksena, A History of Urdu Literature, New Delhi; Madras:
Asia Educational Services, 1990 (first published, 1927), p. 363.
15 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994,
p. 250.
16 Partha Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-
Garde, 1922–1947, London: Reaktion Books, 2007, p. 15.
17 Sara Rai, ‘Realism as a Creative Process: Features of Munshi Premchand’s
Ideology’, Social Scientist, 1979, 7 (12): 35.
18 Premchand, Vividh Prasang (Journalistic Writings of Premchand), Amrit
Rai (ed.), 3 vols, Allahabad: Hans Prakashan, 1962, vol. I, p. 267. Here-
after ‘VP’
19 Premchand, Shab-e-Tar, Allahabad: Hans Prakashan, 1962, p. 17.
20 VP II, pp. 257–8.
21 Trivedi, ‘India, England, France’, p. 407.
22 John Gassner and Edward Quinn (eds), The Reader’s Encyclopaedia of
World Drama, New York: Dover Publications, 2002, p. 541.
23 Rai, ‘Preface’, Shab-e-Tar, p. 5.
24 Premchand, Kulliyat-e Premchand [in Urdu: Collected Works of Prem-
chand], Madan Gopal and Rahil Siddiqui (eds), 24 vols, New Delhi:
Qaumi Council bara’e Furogh-I Urdu Zaban, 2000–5, vol. XV, pp. 1–28.
25 Vinay Dharwadkar, ‘A. K. Ramanujan’s Theory and Practice of Transla-
tion’, in Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi (eds), Postcolonial Translation:
Theory and Practice, London; New York: Routledge, 1999, p. 116.
26 Premchand, Shab-e-Tar, p. 2.
27 Ibid., pp. 12, 16, 33, and 54.
28 Maurice Maeterlinck, Pelleas and Melisanda, and The Sightless: Two
Plays, Laurence Alma Tadema (trans.), London: Walter Scott Publishing
Co. Ltd., 1895, p. 169.
29 Premchand, Shab-e-Tar, p. 2.
30 Maeterlinck, Pelleas and Melisanda, and The Sightless, p. 171.
31 Ibid., p. 191.
32 Premchand, Shab-e-Tar, p. 30; Premchand, Kulliyat-e Premchand, vol. XV,
pp. 10–11.

172
 T ranslation as new aesthetic

33 Premchand, Kulliyat-e Premchand, vol. XV, p. 63.

34 Maeterlinck, Pelleas and Melisanda, and The Sightless, p. 234.
35 Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi, ‘Introduction: Of Colonies, Cannibals
and Vernaculars’, in Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi (eds), Postcolonial
Translation: Theory and Practice, London; New York: Routledge, 1999, p. 4.
36 Sujit Mukherjee, Translation as Discovery, Hyderabad: Orient Longman,
1981, pp. 81–2.
37 Maeterlinck, Pelleas and Melisanda, and The Sightless, p. 173.
38 Premchand, Shab-e-Tar, p. 14.
39 Maeterlinck, Pelleas and Melisanda, and The Sightless, p. 197.
40 Premchand, Shab-e-Tar, p. 4.
41 Ibid., p. 14.
42 Maeterlinck, Pelleas and Melisanda, and The Sightless, p. 184.
43 Premchand, Shab-e-Tar, p. 24; Premchand, Kulliyat-e Premchand,
vol. XV, p. 8.
44 Maeterlinck, Pelleas and Melisanda, and The Sightless, p. 235–6.
45 Premchand, Shab-e-Tar, p. 64; Premchand, Kulliyat-e Premchand,
vol. XV, p. 27.
46 Maeterlinck, Pelleas and Melisanda, and The Sightless, p. 238.
47 Premchand, Shab-e Tar, p. 67; Premchand, Kulliyat-e Premchand,
vol. XV, p. 28.
48 Maurice Maeterlinck, ‘The Tragical in Daily Life’, in Alfred Sutro (trans.),
The Treasure of the Humble, London: George Allen, 1905, p. 97.
49 Ibid., p. 97.
50 Mukherjee, Translation as Discovery, p. 83.

Bibliography
Bassnett, Susan and Trivedi, Harish, ‘Introduction: Of Colonies, Cannibals
and Vernaculars’, in Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi (eds), Postcolonial
Translation: Theory and Practice, London; New York: Routledge, 1999,
pp. 1–18.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994.
Chaudhuri, Supriya, ‘Modernisms in India’, in Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gasiorek,
Deborah Longworth and Andrew Thacker (eds), The Oxford Handbook of
Modernisms, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, pp. 942–60.
Das, Sisir Kumar, History of Indian Literature, 1911–1956: Struggle for Free-
dom, Triumph and Tragedy, New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1995.
Dharwadkar, Vinay, ‘A. K. Ramanujan’s Theory and Practice of Translation’,
in Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi (eds), Postcolonial Translation: The-
ory and Practice, London: New York: Routledge, 1999, pp. 114–40.
Gassner, John and Quinn, Edward (eds), The Reader’s Encyclopaedia of
World Drama, New York: Dover Publications, 2002.
Hovey, Richard, ‘Symbolism and Maeterlinck’, 2000, n.p. Originally pub-
lished in The Plays of Maurice Maeterlinck, Chicago: Herbert S. Stone &
Company, 1894, pp. 3–11, http://www.theatrehistory.com/misc/maeter
linck002.html (accessed on 20 November 2012).

173
 M adhu S ingh

Joshi, Priya, ‘Reading in the Public Eye: The Circulation of British Fiction in
Indian Libraries, c. 1835–1901’, in Stuart Balckburn and Vasudha Dalmia
(eds), India’s Literary History: Essays on the Nineteenth Century, New
Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004, pp. 307–9.
Maeterlinck, Maurice, Pelleas and Melisanda, and The Sightless: Two Plays,
Laurence Alma Tadema (trans.), London: Walter Scott Publishing Co. Ltd.,
1895.
Maeterlinck, Maurice, ‘The Tragical in Daily Life’, in Alfred Sutro (trans.),
The Treasure of the Humble, London: George Allen, 1905, p. 95.
Mitter, Partha, The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-
Garde, 1922–1947, London: Reaktion Books, 2007.
Mukherjee, Sujit, Translation as Discovery, Hyderabad: Orient Longman,
1981.
Premchand, Kulliyat-e Premchand [in Urdu: Collected Works of Premchand],
Madan Gopal and Rahil Siddiqui (eds), 24 vols, New Delhi: Qaumi Council
bara’e Furogh-I Urdu Zaban, 2000–5.
Premchand, Shab-e-Tar, Allahabad: Hans Prakashan, 1962.
Premchand, Vividh Prasang (Journalistic Writings of Premchand), Amrit Rai
(ed.), 3 vols, Allahabad: Hans Prakashan, 1962.
Rai, Amrit, ‘Preface’, in Premchand and Amrit Rai (eds), Gupt Dhan,
Allahabad: Hans Prakashan, 1962, p. 6.
Rai, Amrit, ‘Preface’, in Premchand (ed.), Shab-e-Tar, Allahabad: Hans
Prakashan, 1962, p. 5.
Rai, Sara, ‘Realism as a Creative Process: Features of Munshi Premchand’s
Ideology’, Social Scientist, 1979, 7(12): 32–42.
Saksena, Ram Babu, A History of Urdu Literature, New Delhi; Madras: Asia
Educational Services, 1990 (first published, 1927).
Trivedi, Harish, ‘India, England, France: A (Post) Colonial Translational
Triangle’, Meta: Translators’ Journal, 1997, 42(2): 407–15.

174
 11
EXPERIENCING PREMCHAND
THROUGH TRANSLATION
OF THREE STORIES
Culture, gender, history

Baran Farooqi

In this chapter, I propose to discuss my experience of translating three

of Premchand’s Urdu short stories. Each of the stories presents trans-
lation difficulties or problems of one kind or another, some of them
being specific to a particular story, or type of story. By ‘difficulties or
problems’ I don’t mean ‘mechanical’ problems, like translating kinship
terms or names of foods or sweets, or names and descriptions of male
or female garments. By using the term ‘mechanical’ I don’t suggest
that those kind of problems do not test the translator’s knowledge
of the culture. The translator has to keep making decisions regarding
translatability and cultural flavour even in such cases. Some cases need
nothing more than literal translation – if a word that conveys the lit-
eral sense is available in the output language. In other cases, the trans-
lator has to find an appropriate set of words in the output language,
even if her choice of words gives only an approximation of the original
sense; or then leave the word as it is, using that useful tool, the italics;
or providing what I call an explanatory translation; or (perhaps that’s
the worst of all bad options) inserting a footnote to explain the word
that was left untranslated.
Take, for example, the word chaval: we can happily translate it into
English as rice; but then what about mitha chaval? ‘Sweet rice’ won’t
do here, obviously. Zardah is another kind of sweet rice, but the term
‘sweet rice’ is even less appropriate here. And gila chaval leaves the
poor translator at her wits’ end. Difficulties of this sort are ‘mechani-
cal’ only in the sense that, more often than not, a literal translation
or a recourse to a good dictionary can solve the difficulty. My real

175
 B aran F arooqi

problems relate to what may be called routine questions in the theory

of translation:

1 Should the translator be faithful to both word and intent?

2 Is it possible to privilege intent over the words?
3 To what extent is the translator an interpreter?
4 Further, can the interpreter/translator escape interpreting accord-
ing to the cultural/historical moment in which she lives?
5 Can the interpreter/translator avoid seeing the input text in the
context of the admittedly intricate cultural/historical but very real
moment a great storyteller, in this case Premchand, is helping create?

I
Now here are some tentative answers that I framed before, or while
translating these stories, or other fiction texts in Urdu. The word
translation/translator has similar words in many languages. Arabic
has a long and glorious history of translations during the first couple
of centuries or more of the Abbasid rule, and an equally long history
in Spain under the Umayyids. In Arabic, the word tarjuman means
‘translator, interpreter’ which became tarjemahan in Indonesian, tarju-
man in Turkish. The latter became the English ‘dragoman’ to mean a
‘professional interpreter’. But the word ‘dragoman’ didn’t come into
English directly. From Arabic, it first entered Middle French and from
there to Middle English. This shows the long reach of Arabic in the
realm of translation. The sense of translation as interpretation is so
strong in Arabic that none of the medieval translations from Greek
and Sanskrit into Arabic are literal. The ‘translator’ freely interprets,
putting in his own words to interpret what the original means.
To come back to what we can now call home territory, English, we
know that ‘to translate’ originally also meant ‘to change the appear-
ance of, to alter’, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Bottom is trans-
lated into a donkey. As Quince tells Bottom: ‘Bless thee, Bottom, bless
thee! Thou art translated!’ I think it cannot be gainsaid that the mod-
ern sense of ‘translation’ has not entirely lost its Shakespearean sense.
In French, we have traduction and version: both have an underlying
sense of ‘carrying’ or ‘transporting’. Italian has traduzione and trans-
ferimento. The influence of the original sense of transportation is clear.
There are, thus, at least the following options before a translator:

1 She should treat the text as paramount, and should privilege eve-
rything in it, including form, prosody, rhyme and so forth, thus

176
 E xperiencing P remchand

denying that translation is transportation except in the flimsiest

sense of ‘transporting’ a text to mean that a text which was not
‘available’ in a certain language has now been ‘brought’ to the
readers in that language. I found that there is no such thing as the
‘paramountcy’ of a text. The literary text is an organic structure,
not divisible in artificial compartments. Can anyone say where the
tree ends and the leaf begins?
2 She should treat ‘literary values’ as less important than the ‘con-
tent’; since ‘literary values’ (whatever that may mean) are in any
case unattainable in translation, so she should not really do more
than a most mechanical ‘transportation’; thus, poetry should be
rendered in plain paraphrase, and that too in prose. In the Italian
and French senses of the word, these options become the only
options; never mind that no translator ever takes them. In trans-
lating Premchand, I found that poetry and prose present the same
kinds of problems to the translator: it is naïve to hope that while
poetry is untranslatable, except in the form of a soulless prose
rendering, prose lends itself more easily to translation.
3 The translator should give priority to the ‘literary effectiveness’ of
the translated text; all the rest is secondary, if not unimportant.
But the question here is: can the literary effectiveness of a text be
transported without its essential formal and semantic quality? For
example, can the literary effectiveness of a dialogue presented in
a local dialect (as is often the case with Premchand, who uses a
mixture of Bhojpuri and Avadhi) be transported/translated/repre-
sented in the output language? I, therefore, don’t really accept the
proposition about translating, or not being able to translate, the
‘literary effectiveness’ of a given text.
4 The translator should treat translation as rendering the spirit and
style of the text. As the noted poet Rilke is known to have com-
mented, it’s only with love that one can grasp or even make a fair
judgement of a work of art. So what is needed is to immerse one-
self in the age and culture which produced the text, and that is not
possible without love.

This is a proposition which has more to do with metaphysics than

the actual, mundane, activity of translation. For when ‘immersing’
herself in the age and culture which produced the text, the transla-
tor runs two risks: (a) she may get so immersed that she may drown
and lose her bearings and may possibly be disconnected with the
language and idiom of her own culture and language, and (b) The
translator, instead of immersing herself in the text could end up being

177
 B aran F arooqi

a curious though well-intentioned curator of the text who pries it

open, but only as a dead, mummified object, not as something living
and contemporary.
It is not necessarily Premchand alone who can suffer through such
procedures. There are numerous examples of poor nineteenth-century
translations into English from the Sanskrit or Arabic because the trans-
lators earnestly tried to bring alive what they actually perceived to be
dead and gone. In many ways, Premchand’s world also is unattainable
by us and, in fact, even unimaginable by those of us who were born
after India became independent, and became two countries. Most of
us believe that Premchand’s ‘village’ (that is, the one he portrayed in
his fiction) was something like a monolithic, unchanging world whose
inhabitants were the same all over India. Writers, like Balwant Singh
who idealised the ‘village’ of Punjab or Phaneshwar Nath Renu who
wrote about a certain part of Bihar and created what is called anchalic
(regional) fiction in Hindi, tell us about ‘villages’ different from those
of Premchand.

5 The translator should approach the text with love, but should
try to fashion it in her own literary image. Such an approach,
as is obvious, makes the original text entirely unrecognisable in
translation and subservient to the translator’s whims. My own
experience taught me that one should not hold on too stubbornly
to the idea of ‘literary equivalence’ when it comes to translating
texts from Persian or classical Urdu or any culture that is virtu-
ally unreachable to the reader from a different time, place and
culture. Dryden criticised all translators, but his own translation
of Aeneid is widely regarded as a seventeenth-century poem by
Dryden, rather than a Latin poem by Virgil. Similarly, Pope’s Iliad
is a magnificient eighteenth-century poem in English heroic pen-
tameter, but not a poem by Homer translated into English. It was
a common joke in those days to refer to Pope’s translation of Iliad
as ‘Pope’s’ Iliad!

A modern theory in fact supports the praxis of Dryden and Pope

when it proposes for the translation to reflect on the literary values of
the translator’s age. There is no way for a translator to reproduce a
text and also its age. Each age needs its own generation of translators
to carry out the task of interpretation, which is inevitable. It is obvi-
ous that I found such a theory attractive; I also realised that practising
this precept assiduously would bring me very near what I, like every-
body else, had been scoffing in Dryden and Pope. I therefore needed to

178
 E xperiencing P remchand

produce a Premchand who was not dated but who also in some way
represented what I understood him to be saying in each of the three
stories that I was translating.

II
Let me now look at the three Premchand stories that I translated.
I translated from Urdu, though I did not hesitate to consult the
Hindi versions too wherever I felt that the Hindi version might help
in deciding my choice. I found that the three stories are woman-
centric, and date from different stages of Premchand’s career. Perhaps
for this reason, or perhaps for reasons that we can never know, each
one of them can bear different interpretations. ‘Khoon-e Hurmat’,
which I have translated as ‘Sanctity’s Murder’, was first published in
1919 in the journal Subh-e Umid; it was published in Hindi in the col-
lection Gupt Dhan II; but its title was changed to ‘Izzat ka Khoon’.
The next story is ‘Falsafi ki Muhabbat’; I’ve translated it with the title
‘Philosophic Love’. This was first published in 1921 in Hindi. The
Hindi story figures in Mansarovar VI as ‘Tyagi ka Prem’. The third
story, ‘Malkin’, which I translated under the title ‘Mistress’, was pub-
lished in the year 1931 in the Hindi monthly Vishal Bharat with the
title ‘Sada Mohini’. It is included as ‘Swamini’ in Mansarovar I and as
‘Malkin’ in the collection Vardat (Urdu).
Since I was translating into English, I couldn’t help thinking of
some of my great predecessors, though they had not necessarily
translated those stories: Gordon Roadarmel, David Rubin and most
particularly Alok Rai who translated Premchand’s novel Nirmala
and the ‘Introduction’ and ‘Afterword’ that he wrote for it. Alok
Rai, I felt, had full commitment to the manners and mores of modern
English but was also aware of his own engagement with the text as
a reader/translator/interpreter located in his specific moment of his-
tory. Needless to say, Alok Rai is reluctant to meddle with the ‘mean-
ing’ of the text, and tries not to stay too near to the inevitable act of
‘interpretation’.
That Premchand’s best-known works can be described as texts of
social realism is a commonly accepted opinion. His delineation of
character was nuanced, and he was no stranger to idea of ‘complex’
characters. It, however, seemed to me that he struggled to convert into
viable, well-rounded stories the socio-political discourse of his times
and didn’t always succeed, at least much as a reader of nearly a cen-
tury later would expect. Doubtless, he couldn’t shut himself in a social
vacuum and write as if social and political realities didn’t exist. But he

179
 B aran F arooqi

seemed to me to be overly fond of making a point, and making it more

forcibly than was perhaps warranted from a fiction-writer. This was
exactly what his own poetics of fiction demanded, but which is likely
to grate on the sensibility of a reader in the twenty-first century.
Premchand was keenly aware of the great task he was helping to
perform – the framing of an Indian national cum nationalist con-
sciousness, trying to come to grips with the shapes and sounds that
should define the emerging Indian nation. As Alok Rai observes,
thinking and shaping common experiences and creating meaning out
of diverse social facts and events were tasks that Premchand had set
himself. In Alok Rai’s words, these narratable (and therefore mean-
ingful) experiences were once ‘invented, created anew’ and about
such writers as Premchand ‘one can legitimately say that they ful-
filled, even without presuming to do so, the young Stephen Dedalus’s
prescription: “to forge, in the smithy of my soul, the uncreated con-
science of my race” ’.1
The reason why I have been at pains to establish Premchand’s cre-
dentials as one of the shapers of the Indian nationalistic conscience
in the first quarter of the twentieth century, at least in the Hindi and
Urdu speaker’s psyche, is that, as his translator, I was also his reader
who found contradictory strains of meaning in his narrative. These
stories thus acquire a dialectical tension of their own and reveal a com-
plexity of vision and imagination, quite opposed to the simple didactic
narrative which would be without contradictions which Premchand
was perhaps attempting, and which was easier to translate.

III
It was clear that, on the critical question of subordina-
tion of female sexuality, the interests of the empire and
nation were not necessarily in opposition.2

The first story (chronologically) is ‘Khoon-e Hurmat’ or ‘Sanctity’s

Murder’. It is narrated by Zubaidah, a young woman, who is mar-
ried to a man who is head over heels in love with her and so she
finds her life a delight, a ‘garden of pleasure’. Judging from the tone
at the beginning, the story feels almost like an Urdu verse romance,
specifically, a masnavi, transferred into the short-story genre. It is to be
remembered that all such verse romances were intended to be read or
recited orally. This served to heighten the air of drama and exaggera-
tion of an oral verse romance, and helps recede into the background

180
 E xperiencing P remchand

the imperatives of a psychologically subtle narrative. The story fol-

lows the usual, probable path. The husband, Saeed, soon stops loving
her and actively neglects her. We soon find that he has fallen into the
clutches of a prostitute who is apparently both beautiful and equally
cruel. This woman moves into the marital house. Zubaidah knows
that this is intended to break her pride and gloat over the fact that
Saeed is now in another woman’s power. Premchand constantly refers
to her as hasina (the alluring, beautiful woman). Very soon, the two
start inflicting cruelties on Zubaidah, going even to the extent of tying
her up and whipping her. The hasina is thus an almost demonised
figure, or at least a maniac who loves to wield her enormous power
over Saeed.
It is difficult to say whether Premchand, at any juncture, pauses to
consider the possible source of the ‘power’ that the hasina wields over
her man. If it comes from her pronounced sexuality, or her ‘beauty’
and sex appeal, it follows that in a woman, sexuality or the ability
to exercise or exploit her sex appeal is something evil and corrupt. It
seems that for Premchand, when it comes to the woman, the standard
of moral conduct is what could be termed ‘sexual rectitude’, if not
downright frigidity. The woman’s morality is anchored to the domain
of the body. It is possible that in Premchand’s view, the concept of
Indian womanhood as understood and stated by the great leaders of
the Indian national movement was of the woman’s ‘spiritual purity’
which meant little more than her rising ‘above’ the pollution caused
by sexuality and erotic desire. Premchand seems to be endorsing this
idea here, caught in his nationalist reformist zeal of improving the lot
of women. Thus, so long as the woman practices ‘sex’, though not
necessarily enjoying it, or does not use her sexuality as an engine of
control over her man, there is no scope for her to enjoy real power in
the world.
Zubaidah, after being humiliated to the very uttermost, decides to
wreak revenge on Saeed. In order to achieve her purpose, she must
break free from her role of the wife and ascend the steps of the kotha,
or the red light district, and drown her husband in humiliation by
adopting the persona and vocation of a prostitute. This she does. As
evening descends and the street becomes alive with visitors and pas-
sersby, among those who pass through the prostitutes’ well-lit and
noisy lanes, is Saeed, riding in his phaeton. Their eyes meet. The next
day, the news reaches her of Saeed murdering his beautiful and cruel
(perhaps unwomanly) woman and then committing suicide.
Zubaidah now says, ‘This typically masculine sense of honour
revived the love in my heart for Saeed.’ She returns to her matrimonial

181
 B aran F arooqi

home which she had left only four days ago and muses thus about
herself and her life:

A sigh escaped my lips. It was not that I was grieving over

Saeed’s suicide, for I could never forgive his criminal insen-
sitivity and blatantly masculine woman-chasing till dooms-
day even. What I regretted was the fact that the craze for this
woman had got the better of him. I can judge by the condition
of my heart at present, that the wounds of Saeed’s infidelity
and cruelty will heal in due course, and I might even forget
about my gross humiliation. What will remain, however, is
the mark of his short lived love, which is now the sole anchor
of my life.3

The story ends here. We, or at least I, can see that the picture Prem-
chand paints of the woman here couldn’t get more stereotypical. She
appears before us first as a simple middle-class Muslim girl, eager to
please, faithful, a docile wife eligible for the love of her husband but
also jealous, unforgiving and revengeful to the core! After all, isn’t an
unforgiving revengeful attitude the very hallmark of women? Prem-
chand seems to be saying. Zubaidah regards the protection of the
purity and modesty of body as her sacred womanly duty. Her body,
pure and unsullied by the shadow even of another man, is the most
precious gift that she can give to her husband. The act of becoming a
prostitute ruins her husband’s honour and she admires him for trying
to redeem it. The contradiction that runs through the entire story and
which Premchand apparently overlooks is that it is the docile helpless
woman who is capable of taking corrective action and not the empow-
ered male, who is in the snares of another corrupt woman. Besides, the
moral burden of the story indicates that acquiring agency (even if it is
that of a prostitute) is permissible if it has a higher purpose behind it.
Therefore, the good woman is exploited, not because she is the weaker
vessel, but because she chooses to deny any other agency to herself
than that of love and self-sacrifice.
It may be pertinent to remind ourselves of the incident at Barisal
very nearly a century ago where Gandhi refused to allow nearly 200
prostitutes of that place to take part in the non-cooperation move-
ment until they publicly renounced their profession. To quote Radha
Kumar in The History of Doing, ‘Gandhi’s emphasis on the ennobling
qualities of motherhood sought explicitly to curb or subdue the most
fearsome aspects of femininity, which lie in erotic or tactile domains.’4

182
 E xperiencing P remchand

The difficulty, for me, in translating ‘Khoon-e Hurmat’ was in

accepting, or least being in sympathy with, Premchand’s idealis-
tic notions of womanhood and reconciling them with what actually
seems to happen in it. In spite of what he did to Zubaidah, it is Saeed
who fulfills his ‘masculine’ destiny by killing the woman who was
‘evil’, and then committing suicide leaving his wife-turned-prostitute
to face the world. Actually, for me, Zubaidah won my admiration and
approval only when she let her emotional hurt and pride to avenge the
injustice that she had suffered. She does this by using her ‘erotic and
tactile abilities’, the only weapon that is available to her. There was
every risk of my translation beginning to sound hollow if the dialectics
of power and sex were not captured delicately enough, even though a
delineation of such dialectics was not what Premchand was apparently
aiming for.
It seems to me that Alok Rai (who is, incidentally, Premchand’s
direct descendant) faces the same kind of dilemma in translating Nir-
mala. In India, the cult of the ‘ennobled poor’ and the idea of pov-
erty as a spiritually enriching experience magically transform ‘worse’
into ‘better’. A similar cult is that of the ‘angelic victim’. As Rai, in
the ‘Afterword’ to his translation of Nirmala, says, woman, as vic-
tim, is both ‘damaged’ and ‘undamaged’; ‘wronged but essentially
unharmed, both needing salvation and deserving of it’.5 Rai says that
this kind of ‘valorization of the victim’ serves to make ambiguous
and manageable the critique of victimising societies, and my experi-
ence of translating these stories makes me entirely agree with this.
I found that in Premchand’s stories, many a time, the angelic victim
doesn’t come across as exploited or victimised; she ruptures the dis-
course of the nobility of suffering and breaks free of the shackles of
her constructed image of ‘sublime victimhood’; she then becomes the
exerciser of her personal wishes, desires or choices. Her victory seems
to bring her the light of freedom, and not the pale glow of ‘sacrificial
virtue’.
What happens to the originally nationalistic ‘glorious mother’ type
discourse at such a time? That is the problem the translator faces in
many of Premchand texts. I shall further clarify this through the exam-
ple of the two stories that I now proceed to discuss, though in some-
what less detail. ‘Falsafi ki Muhabbat’ or ‘Tyagi ka Prem’, translated
as ‘Philosophic Love’ by me, is the story of Lala Gopinath, the son of
an affluent business family. He always has shied away from commer-
cial activity and has always shown a keen inclination towards philoso-
phy. That Premchand hasn’t much sympathy with him despite all his

183
 B aran F arooqi

earnest intentions towards social service and nation building becomes

apparent by the tone of the omniscient narrator. To quote from the
story:

He was the last person to be interested in fiction, poetry, or

creative writing of any kind. Chances were, that he hadn’t read
even a single work of fiction in his entire life. He regarded the
reading of such creative writing as not just a waste of time but
also harmful for one’s mental health. Added to this, he had
no dearth of national fervour in him, and had great interest in
social service schemes.6

Another description of Lala Gopinath further on in the story runs thus:

Many years passed. Lala Gopinath was now regarded as one of

the respected citizens of the city. He was a source of compassion
for the poor, and a patron of the needy. Having crossed thirty
years of age, marriage had become a raging subject in his life.
Gopinath had been postponing the issue all along, but matters
had reached a head now. One day his father issued the ultima-
tum of consuming poison if he refused again. ‘At no cost will
I tolerate disrepute. This will certainly lead to taint one day.’
Gopinath was caught in a fix. Weeks passed without his being
able to resolve the issue. Community and the self were battling
with each other. Marriage meant the narrowing of one’s con-
cerns and restricting one’s vast world within the four walls of
the home. Becoming as good as dead for the community and liv-
ing life only for the family. He considered it an insult to descend
from his elevated station now. Besides, he somehow knew that
he didn’t have what it takes. Qualities like effort, tolerance,
persistence and forbearance required for earning a living had
become extinct in him. Social service too had its share of run-
ning around and effort, but pretences of selflessness and elevated
thinking could still be maintained. It’s a pride to beg for one’s
community but a shame to nurse a desire for returns for one’s
labour. Having a family would rob him of all his independence
and carefree lifestyle. One single child’s illness could easily out-
weigh all the worries of an entire community. Social service was
an extremely suitable excuse for such shortcomings.7

Lala Gopinath remained unmarried; but he did get involved with a

widow called Anandi. Anandi is a devoted teacher and social worker

184
 E xperiencing P remchand

in the girls’ school that Lala Gopinath has helped set up and now
manages. Even as Anandi and Gopinath acknowledge love (or sex-
ual attraction) for each other and enter into a relationship, Gopinath
begins to distance himself from Anandi and her activities in the school
and becomes severely critical of all that she does, finding fault with
her all the time. Of course, he continues to frequent her quarters dur-
ing the night. Anandi, meanwhile, worships Lala Gopinath as she has
always done even before they had developed a relationship.
Finally, when she is pregnant with his baby, he professes his inability
to do anything about her baby and advises her to go to Mathura to get
herself delivered of the baby. Since she is ill and weak, she keeps post-
poning her departure (she doesn’t carry out Gopinath’s orders, thus
exhibiting resistance despite being weak), until one night, the baby is
born somewhat prematurely. Hearing the cry of the baby, Gopinath,
who is in the house at that time, rushes out and doesn’t venture for a
good three months to go revisit even the neighbourhood where Anandi
lives. Meanwhile, Anandi is sacked from the school and has to move
out into far poorer quarters and manages to keep herself and her baby
alive with the money she earns from translation! Interestingly, Prem-
chand himself has shown high regard for translation as an activity of
both intellectual and economic value by showing Anandi to be making
a living through translation. He, however, fails to give us the details of
what and for whom Anandi translates!
When Gopinath tiptoes into Anandi’s house one night after three
months, he says:

Anandi, I’m not fit to show my face. I didn’t know I’d turn
out to be such a moral weakling, so cowardly and so shame-
less. But my lack of moral strength, and my brazen shame-
lessness, could not protect me from disrepute. Whatever
disrepute I could earn, and whatever losses the movements
I was spearheading could bear, have already taken place. It’s
impossible for me to show my face to the public now and nei-
ther can the community trust me ever again. Despite all this,
I don’t have the courage to own responsibility for my actions.
Earlier, I was least bothered about the narrow minded con-
cerns of society but now I shudder at every step for the fear
of it. I curse myself for remaining aloof from you while you
go through trials and face destitution and defamation alone.
You go through such trying times and I stay away, as if it’s
no concern of mine. Only I know what I go through. Count-
less number of times did I resolve to come here and then lost

185
 B aran F arooqi

courage. It is now apparent to me that all my philosophy is

just eye-wash. I don’t have the strength to practice it and am
a mere bundle of words. I am a lifeless clod of oppressive
thoughts, absolutely insensitive, but, without you, my life is a
curse. I can’t live without you.8

Anandi’s eyes are moist when she replies. She tells him that she bears
no grudge against him. Rather, she regards him as her devta and it is
her ardent wish that he should allow her to set her eyes on him at least
once a day. It is obvious that Premchand is demonising the shallow,
selfish and pompous philosopher, and almost apotheosising Anandi,
who neatly fits the category of the ‘angelic victim’. Lala Gopinath is
projected as the exploiter of Anandi, who is innocent and vulnerable.
When the story ends, the situation has hardly changed for the two
of them. What is worthy of note, however, is Premchand-narrators’s
parting comment, which runs like this:

Fifteen years have elapsed since that day but you can still find
Lala Gopinath sitting privately in Anandi’s room every night.
He’s willing to die for false appearances, and Anandi can give
her life for love. They both suffer disrepute. However, people
view Anandi with comparative sympathy, while Gopinath has
lost all favour in their eyes. Agreed, some of his close friends
still respect him and are willing to excuse him for this human
failing. But the general public is not half as tolerant.9

I have italicised the narrator’s remark that ‘Anandi can give her life
for love’. For to my mind, Anandi is Premchand’s portrait of the ideal
Indian woman: a widow in this case (because this helps to establish
his position in favour of widow remarriage, and it also emphasises the
hypersexuality of the woman, any woman, in fact). Anandi is also an
innocent victim, weak, easily exploited and yet the very epitome of
selfless love. To my twenty-first-century sensibility, the story demands
the question: If Anandi is so weak and vulnerable, why is she and not
Lala Gopinath the actant here? Why is she bolder in matters of love,
be they of the body, or of the heart and mind? Anandi worships her
estranged paramour, but in a ‘spiritual’ way, apparently; then why
isn’t spirituality enough for her and why can’t it keep her from suc-
cumbing to the desires of the flesh? Can she be tainted (read: permits
herself to be sexually exploited) and untainted (read: angelic) at the
same time?

186
 E xperiencing P remchand

At least to me, that’s what the story seems to be saying: Yes, she
is both flesh and spirit. So how do I bring to life her character, or
Premchand’s image of her, in my translation? My reading of the story
is radically different from the ‘innocent/sinner’ duality which doesn’t
seem to trouble Premchand. To me, the story is an indictment of the
shallowness, hypocrisy and selfishness of Gopinath (who seems to me
to represent the men in the society about which Premchand is writ-
ing). Though not all, yet certainly some elements of the society forgive
Gopinath, and those who don’t forgive do not punish him actively.
They just sever relations with him and pretend that he doesn’t exist.
I think some of this comes through, however weakly, in my translation.
My last story for discussion is ‘Malkin’, which I have translated
as ‘Mistress’. It was difficult for me to decide whether I should say
‘Mistress of the House’ or just ‘Mistress’. The commonest connota-
tion of the word ‘mistress’ in modern English has nothing to do with
the notion of a ‘mistress’ being the chief executive of the household.
I still preferred ‘mistress’ for reasons that will be apparent from the
analysis below.
This story is again about a young widow called Rampyari who is
given the charge of her matrimonial home by her father-in-law, Shiv-
das, at the demise of her husband. Shivdas took this step as an act of
consolation for her, thinking that it would help ‘dry the widow’s tears’.
However, at the end of the story, we find the mistress of the house on
the brink of entering into a relationship with Jokhu, her ploughman,
who has practically moved in with her after she has been left alone
in the house because of the migration of all the other members of the
family to the city. Thus she is a ‘mistress’ in both senses. Going back
to where the story began, we find that Premchand shows the newly
widowed Rampyari to have a strange fascination for the keys of the
store room, which meant control over the economy of the house:

When Shivdas had left, the ‘mistress’ picked up the keys. Her
heart felt an overwhelming sense of authority and responsibil-
ity. The grief of her husband’s separation dimmed for a while.
Her younger sister and brother-in-law were both out at work.
Shivdas had also gone out. The house was completely empty
and she could open the storeroom without any fear. She was
curious to discover the hidden treasures of the store.10

Gaining authority to run the house, Rampyari becomes a fastidious

and devoted mistress; she takes pains to save and garner every single

187
 B aran F arooqi

penny for the good of the household and run it smoothly without any
financial straits. She is so earnest at her task that her own sister, who
is also her sister-in-law (they are two sisters married to two broth-
ers), begins resenting her. Despite her obvious power, the ‘mistress’
nevertheless has her share of angst when she overhears her sister and
brother-in-law talk cheerfully about routine matters to each other, as
any wife and husband do, without any realisation that such friendly
chit-chat is not available to a woman who has no husband, even if
she practically rules the house. She feels the anguish of loneliness and
deprivation yet more when the babies come, and the married couple
enjoy the joint pleasures of parenthood:

Pyari felt a surge of tears in her throat and her body started
trembling at the effort of suppressing it. The loneliness of her
widowhood stood ready to devour her like a dangerous ani-
mal. Her imagination began to grow a garden of desire in the
barren garden of her life.11

As the years pass, Shivdas dies; her sister Dulari’s children are now
growing up. Dulari and her husband decide to leave the village and
migrate to the city. The most obvious excuse is their desire to gain bet-
ter means of livelihood and a better education for the children. Pyari
is ultimately left alone to take care of both the fields and the home.
Assisting her in this task is Jokhu, the ploughman who had previously
been a laid-back and inefficient fellow. Jokhu soon changes his ways
and starts to give her both his care and his help, and perhaps more.
I quote from the last section of the story:

Jokhu didn’t know what fretting was. If one was free from
work, one could relax, and sleep. Why the hell should one
fret? He said, ‘Go to sleep if you feel uneasy. You will fret even
more if I stay at home. I can think of nothing but eating when
I’m idle. This debate is delaying my work and the clouds are
gathering fast.’
Pyari said, ‘Okay, you can go tomorrow. Stay a while today.’
Jokhu said resignedly, ‘Here, I’m here now. Tell me what
you have to say.’12

‘Pyari’ (who has all along been referred to as Rampyari but Prem-
chand now prefers to call her Pyari) then initiates a conversation with
Jokhu about the need for him to get a wife for himself. On his refusing
to consider getting married for he doesn’t ever hope to get a woman

188
 E xperiencing P remchand

of his choice, she persuades him to reveal the qualities he wants in his
prospective bride. On much cajoling, Jokhu says:

‘Okay, listen. I want her to be like you. Modest, the way you
are, intelligent, just like you, she should cook like you and be
as thrifty. As pleasant a personality as yours. I’ll marry only
some one who is like this. Or else, I’ll remain like I am.’
Pyari’s face flushed with joyful bashfulness. Moving away
a little, she said, ‘Go on, you are a rogue. A heart-stealer!’13

‘Malkin’ thus seems to problematise what we had hitherto believed

that Premchand thought himself to be: conscience-keeper of the nation,
‘forging in the smithy of his soul’ and valoriser of renunciation and
self-sacrifice, who refuses to look at ‘immoral matters’ with any degree
of approval. But to me, all this seems to be missing in Rampyari’s
character. Premchand seems to acknowledge that to desire (or even to
desire sex and sexual companionship) is human. If this is ‘weakness’,
then all human beings, however saintly, are weak. Premchand does
not forge for his heroine any mystic moments of supernatural energy;
rather, he explores her psychological conflicts with unflinching daring.
His vision of self-sacrifice and abnegation of the normal joys of life as
intrinsically ‘womanly’ seems to break down in this story.
As Premchand’s translator, I do not think it necessary to read the
story as a nuanced account of the existence of conflicting psychologi-
cal states of mind only when I am sure that that was what Premchand
had intended here. I feel I am entitled to read the story as I read it
here, regardless of what Premchand may or may not have intended.
Another and better-known story of Premchand, ‘Naya Vivah’ (Second
Marriage) comes to mind. It has an even more ambiguous, almost
mysterious ending. To my mind, the best way to translate stories like
‘Malkin’ and ‘Naya Vivah’ would be to heighten the ambiguity and
suggest that Premchand’s ideal of womanhood seems somewhat com-
promised in the stories.
The lessening of Rampyari’s grief for her husband’s death on get-
ting the prized keys could mean that a husband’s death need not be
the end of the world for a young widow if she gets new power and
freedom, or is even allowed to retain her former position in the house-
hold. She may have authority as well as respect in the family but she
may still crave something more. Her need for emotional and physical
companionship need not be exclusive of her desire for control and
authority in her home. The text strongly suggests that even the most
well respected of widows (and this widow has all the power in the

189
 B aran F arooqi

house) may have desires, and they should not be demonised for having
them. The implied invitation to Jokhu into her emotional and sexual
life is a bold and natural act on her part and is not a function of her
frustration or bitterness at her sister’s family’s departure for the city.
Can we say finally that our translation of this story should treat the
heroine of the story as a being, who, despite her widowhood and all
the ‘feminine’ traits Premchand ascribes to her, is also a sexual being?
I think we should. I, at least, do.

Notes
1 Alok Rai, ‘Foreword’, in Premchand (ed.), Nirmala, Alok Rai (trans.),
New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999, p. viii.
2 Janaki Nair, ‘The Devadasi, Dharma and the State’, in Mary E. John (ed.),
Women’s Studies in India: A Reader, New Delhi: Penguin, 2008, p. 549.
3 Premchand, ‘Khoon-e Hurmat’, in Madan Gopal (ed.), Kulliyat-e
Premchand, 13 vols, Delhi: NCPUL, 2001, vol. 7, p. 328. All translations
from Urdu have been done by me.
4 Radha Kumar, The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Move-
ments for Women’s Rights and Feminisim in India, 1800–1990, New
Delhi: Zubaan, 1993, p. 2.
5 Alok Rai, ‘Afterword: Hearing Nirmala’s Silence’, in Premchand, Nirmala,
Alok Rai (trans.), New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 201.
6 Premchand, ‘Falsafi ki Muhabbat’, in Madan Gopal (ed.), Kulliyat-e
Premchand, vol. 8, p. 515.
7 Ibid., p. 518.
8 Ibid., p. 530.
9 Ibid., p. 531.
10 Premchand, ‘Malkin’, in Madan Gopal (ed.), Kulliyat-e Premchand, vol. 7,
p. 389.
11 Ibid., p. 396–7.
12 Ibid., p. 404.
13 Ibid., p. 405.

Bibliography
Kumar, Radha, The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements
for Women’s Rights and Feminisim in India, 1800–1990, New Delhi:
Zubaan, 1993.
Nair, Janaki, ‘The Devadasi, Dharma and the State’, in Mary E. John (ed.),
Women’s Studies in India: A Reader, New Delhi: Penguin, 2008, pp. 544–52.
Premchand, ‘Falsafi ki Muhabbat’, in Madan Gopal (ed.), Kulliyat-e Prem-
chand, 13 vols, Delhi: NCPUL, 2001, vol. 8, pp. 515–31.
Premchand, ‘Khoon-e Hurmat’, in Madan Gopal (ed.), Kulliyat-e Premchand,
13 vols, Delhi: NCPUL, 2001, vol. 7, pp. 319–28.

190
 E xperiencing P remchand

Premchand, ‘Malkin’, in Madan Gopal (ed.), Kulliyat-e Premchand, 13 vols,

Delhi: NCPUL, 2001, vol. 7, pp. 388–405.
Rai, Alok, ‘Afterword: Hearing Nirmala’s Silence’, Nirmala, Alok Rai (trans.),
New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 197–211.
Rai, Alok, ‘Foreword’, Nirmala, Alok Rai (trans.), New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1999, pp. vii–xi.

191
This page intentionally left blank
 Part III

PREMCHAND AND
CINEMATIC ADAPTATION
Two stories
This page intentionally left blank
 12
IN QUEST OF A
COMPARATIVE POETICS
A study of Sadgati

Nishat Haider

Literature and cinema, as institutionalised sites of memory, are

especially relevant in the works of postcolonial creative writers and
film-makers since they represent the possibility of creating a counter-
narrative/history as an alternative to the hegemonic majoritarian or
official discourses. This chapter endeavours to build such a narrative
with reference to Sadgati (Deliverance), a fifty-minute film adaptation
of Munshi Premchand’s eponymous Hindi short story that Satyajit Ray
made in late 1981 for Indian television. Aligning visual and languages
codes in real time on screen, the telefilm Sadgati shows callous exploi-
tation of a low-caste tanner, Dukhi, by the Brahmin priest Ghashiram
(performed by Om Puri and Mohan Agashe, respectively, in the film) in
a small Indian village. By studying one medium’s translation, transmis-
sion, transformation and appropriation of the other, I not only wish to
enhance our understanding of both media, but also hope to contribute
to studies of comparative poetics and cross-media cultural translation.
Throughout the chapter, my discussion functions in all the registers –
philosophical, linguistic and political – in which adaptation/translation
as a practice works in India. If at any point I seem to dwell on more on
any one of these, it is for a purely strategic purpose.

Framing the frame: caste, identity and representation

The postcolonial hermeneutics of reading and interpretation pro-
vides with a critical apparatus and a register with which to best trace
the liminal position that Dalits occupy in India even today, as being
both the past-in-the-present and the present-in-the-past of Indian

195
 N ishat H aider

historicity.1 As an alternative to the Hegelian and positivist Rankean

model of history, Stoler and Strassler indicated that ‘memory as a
repository of alternative histories and subaltern truths,’ which resists
the totalising impulse of ‘official memory’ (what Guha describes as
‘historiography powered by statehood’), is increasingly becoming
significant as a potential, oppositional archive that allows access to
hitherto muted voices. From the epistemological point of view, a self-
reflective and recuperative approach involving the inclusion of the
‘Other’ implies a reconstruction and deconstruction of the frames of
representation which are competing with each other in social/cultural
memory narratives. In this chapter, for the purpose of analysing Prem-
chand’s ‘Sadgati’ and its cinematic adaptation by Ray, I take historic-
ity to imply ‘effective history’. As Foucault declares, ‘effective history
affirms knowledge as perspective’; it may be seen as a radical kind of
‘presentism’, which we may be able to work from.2 Thus the study
of historicity of Premchand’s ‘Sadgati’ and its cinematic adaptation
includes questions about how the adaptation worked, why the text
was adapted and who did the adaptation. This approach recognises
a dialectical relationship between the intratextual sphere (modes and/
strategies of representation within the textual form and its translation)
and the intertextual sphere (social and political contexts that include
both national discourses and gender/caste relationships of power
within which texts circulate).

Theorising adaptation: literature on screen

Adaptation, the process of re-mediations in the form of intersemi-
otic transpositions from one sign system (e.g. words) to another (e.g.
images), has always been central to the process of film-making. Since
almost the beginning, adaptations have been studied as translations
and transformations, as selections and specifications, as re-imaginings
of literature. The problem with most writing about adaptation as trans-
lation, James Naremore argues, ‘is that it tends to valorise the literary
canon and essentialise the nature of cinema’.3 The move from the liter-
ary to the filmic or televisual has even been called a move to ‘a willfully
inferior form of cognition’.4 But this hierarchy involves, what Robert
Stam calls, iconophobia (a suspicion of the visual) and logophilia (love
of the word as sacred).5 Even Christian Metz, the semiotician, believed
that ‘ “cinematographic language” is first of all [concerned with] the
literalness of a plot’.6 But Professor McFarlane, Thomas M. Leitch and
Walter C. Metz and others present film as having a separate identity
and separate aesthetic principles. In general, theorists cannot stand

196
 I n quest of a comparative poetics

to be limited by ‘literal’ constraints and would not therefore readily

admit to being impressed by a merely ‘literal’ adaptation. This is one
reason why an adaptation has its own aura, its own ‘presence in time
and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be’.7
The problem of claim or ownership of an adapted text, correspond-
ing to the process of adaptation itself wedged between novel and film,
is indeterminate. While semiotic theory privileged the text over the
author and, in doing so, pronounced the death of the author (owing
to the interventions of Barthes and Derrida in literature), the heavily
theorised medium specificity of the auteur theory excluded the author,
but enabled the auteur.
The paradigms of the relationship between visual culture and litera-
ture have changed significantly since the 1950s. Tracing the trajectory
of adaptation studies one could detect two tendencies. On the one
hand, the scholarship often takes a formalist approach. The aim is to
evaluate the aesthetic excellence of a film, either in terms of its faithful-
ness to the original or in terms of its innate values. On the other hand,
many scholars propose a model informed by recent theories such as
semiology, intertextuality and reception. Hence the emphasis in adap-
tation studies has shifted from the subject of fidelity to the source
text to the flow and negotiations between texts. As early as the 1980s
and 1990s, Dudley Andrew, Barton Palmer, James Naremore and
Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo showing a combination of
theoretical, aesthetic and historical considerations make a call for
adaptation studies to take a sociological turn. Emphasising the inter-
textual or transtextual notion of adaptation, Barton Palmer in ‘The
Sociological Turn of Adaptation Studies’, argues that ‘the sociological
turn means that we no longer ask how the adaptation (pre)serves the
source, but how adaptation, as a general phenomenon of intersemiotic
relations, serves the cinema’.8 Based on the concept of discourse pro-
moted by Michel Foucault, Casetti, instead of viewing art as ‘modes
of expressions’, suggests we consider ‘both film and literature . . . as
sites of production and the circulation of discourses; that is, as sym-
bolic constructions that refer to a cluster of meanings that a society
considers possible (thinkable) and feasible (legitimate)’. To him, what
is important for a film adaptation is ‘the new role and place that the
later event takes on within the discursive field, more than the abstract
faithfulness that it can claim with respect to the source text’.9
Compared with the plenitude of English scholarship on adaptation
in Western movies, scholarship on non-mainstream Indian adaptations,
in Indian or in Western languages, is meagre in number. Commercial
cinema and television in postcolonial India have always engaged with

197
 N ishat H aider

the issues of history and polity on their own terms, which is predomi-
nantly majoritarian. Though the question of socio-religious identity is
important to the understanding of Indian cinema as a site for a postco-
lonial imagining of identity, the issues of caste divisions and untouch-
ability have not had a considerable representation. In Indian films, the
politics of representation/misrepresentation of the marginalised castes
both comply with and extend the relations of power between the Brah-
min mind and the Shudra body. This demystification should, in M.S.S.
Pandian’s words, be a ‘critique of the modern for its failure as well as
an invitation to it to deliver its promises’,10 and work towards a critical
modernity that grounds itself in identity politics that emerges from the
politics of difference under conditions of inequality. It can be asserted
the power structures of culture industry are not accessible to the Dalits
at the levels of hegemonising majoritarian, dominant, intellectual and
discursive representations and its politics. Though Dalits have been
‘documented’ in the genre of documentary, but since films representing
Dalits are constrained by budgetary limitations and restricted audi-
ences, the commercial, mainstream film industry has largely insulated
itself from the question of Dalits. In fact, Ray was commissioned by
the Doordarshan to adapt Premchand’s harrowing short story on the
plights of Dalits to a telefilm.
The issue here is to analyse and establish how indeed the upper-caste
Ray has re-configured the politics of representation of the otherised
Dalits in the film Sadgati. However, it must be conceded at the outset
that I will avoid listing the changes made by the film-maker, but will
choose those changes that are historically or culturally significant, and
which unravel the film-maker’s strategies. This chapter addresses the
socio-political implications of cinema exploring caste issues and the
perceived casteism of the Indian films and how that plays out when
literature is reworked into film.

Premchand: literary realism and the

crisis of caste in ‘Sadgati’
Premchand in his inaugural address, ‘Sahitya ka Uddeshya’ (‘The Aim
of Literature’), at the first meeting of the Progressive Writers Associa-
tion in Lucknow in 1936, defines literature, as ‘jeevan ki aalochana [a
criticism of life]’.11 Challenging the inherent elitism of an often upper-
caste and upper-class anti-colonial movement, Premchand offered ‘to
support and defend those who are in some way oppressed, suffering
or deprived’.12 When one looks at the Hindi and Urdu literature that
emerged in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and in the early

198
 I n quest of a comparative poetics

twentieth century, the silence with regard to the life experience of

the untouchable Hindu lower castes or Dalits is nearly total. Prem-
chand inaugurated social realism in Hindi and Urdu fiction, which has
become almost synonymous with the democratisation of gaze. The
story of ‘Sadgati’ is located in a small North Indian village. It narra-
tivises the exploitative relationship between a manipulating Brahmin
priest, Pandit Ghasiram, and a suffering untouchable, servile lower-
caste tanner, Dukhi. Being a chamar (someone who works with hides
and skins of dead animals and who is therefore considered polluted
to study Hindu scriptures and observe religious rites himself), poor
Dukhi needs the approval and blessings of the Brahmin priest to set an
auspicious date for his daughter’s marriage. The narrative opens with
Dukhi making preparations to go to the Brahmin priest in order to
request him to visit his abode to bless his daughter. Dukhi instructs his
wife Jhuriya and daughter Dhaniya to anticipate their arrival in the
afternoon. Since Ghasiram is well aware that Dukhi desperately needs
his religious advice in deciding a propitious date and time for his
daughter’s marriage, he exploits poor Dukhi by extracting free labour
from him. Having no other option, Dukhi complies with the orders of
the Brahmin priest to complete various chores. He begins by sweeping
the outside of the house, then lifting heavy sacks of wheat and finally
to split open a thick trunk of a tree and chop it into firewood. How-
ever, Dukhi’s sorrows are made much worse when Ghasiram catches
Dukhi asleep in the afternoon sun exhausted from fatigue and hun-
ger. Enraged by Dukhi’s seeming dereliction of duty, Ghasiram scolds
him and forces him back to work. In one last moment of desperation
Dukhi attempts to chop the wood but he is overcome by hunger, wea-
riness and exhaustion. Dukhi falls and succumbs to death. Horrified
at his sudden death, Ghasiram pleads to the lower-caste workers to
remove the body but they ignore his command, as they had been pro-
voked into inaction by a Gond, a tribal, who was witness to the pain-
ful end of Dukhi caused by the Brahmin’s cruelty and apathy. When
Jhuriya discovers her husband is dead, she breaks down and mourns
his loss but even she cannot move his body. Finally, to avoid being
directly implicated in the death of Dukhi, the upper-caste Ghasiram,
using ropes and a stick to touch the body, drags the corpse away from
the village, dumping it in a field of rotten carcasses. In a final act of vit-
riolic caste politics, Ghasiram decontaminates the ground upon which
Dukhi died and the corpse lay with droplets of holy water.
Premchand’s credo, epitomised by adarshonmukh yatharthavad,
which means ‘idealistic realism’, was premised on creating both social
critique and utopian vision. Theorising the concept of poetic justice in

199
 N ishat H aider

his analysis of Hindi Dalit critique of Premchand, Alok Rai conceptu-

alises it (poetic justice) as ‘the underlying idea of imagined, aesthetic
worlds being, somehow, compensatory and corrective’, which is one
mode via which to read the Dalit response to Premchand, who is never
radical enough and whose characters are never angry enough.13 When
Alok Rai interprets the demands made by Dalit writers that fictional
texts demonstrate caste assertion and caste radicalism as ‘poetic justice’
or ‘prescribed militancy’,14 this seems, says Gajarawala in Untouchable
Fictions, more like a debate about historical potentiality.15 But pre-
scribed militancy is no less ideal, no less utopian, no less ideological
than the ‘prescribed sympathy’ that Rai himself describes as a form of
imprisonment ‘in hegemonic systems of representation, in the narra-
tives of other people’.16 In her analysis of Dalit aesthetics challenging
traditional aesthetics and offering a critique of ‘hierarchies of language
and privilege’, Laura Brueck studied Dalit chetna (Dalit, or caste, con-
sciousness), ‘as a strategy for Dalit critical analysis, a kind of “test” by
which Dalit critics can judge the “dalitness” of any work of literature,
whether written by a Dalit or non-Dalit’.17 However, the model of Dalit
chetna as a marker of anti-casteist, anti-feudal and anti-capitalist posi-
tion, in creative production as well as criticism, in which political praxis
translates into a range of aesthetic strategies, often devolves into a fairly
reductive debate on Dalitness: identity, authenticity and purity.18
Premchand’s works and Dalit characters anchor a discourse of sym-
pathy. Alok Rai reads Premchand’s short stories as ‘the literature of
conscience’, which makes a plea to recognise ‘the otherness of oth-
ers’, ‘an effort to represent the poor unglamorised, an act of penitence
directed at the arrogant presumptuousness of the insensitive reform-
ers who had wanted to remake the poor in their own petitbourgeois
image’.19 Describing Premchand’s difficulty to ‘invent’ the ‘guilty
reader’ who occupied the central place in the literature of conscience,
Alok Rai says:

such an invention requires not only an awareness of social

wrong but also, crucially, a sensitivity to the tides and limits
of contemporary social consciousness. The implicit contract
that binds author and reader is that the writer will not push
beyond – or too far beyond – an acceptable and, eventually,
even desired level of moral discomfort.20

The complex economy of guilt and vindication in this moral transac-

tion is dubious because weeping over the conditions of the wretched
and the miserable becomes for the guilty reader too an acceptable and

200
 I n quest of a comparative poetics

even sufficient form of moral action and a form of moral vindication.

Deconstructing pity and sympathy while working within the Gothic
novel as well as on colonial, missionary and abolitionist discourse
from Britain, Amit Rai traces sympathy as a crucial eighteenth-century
European ideological formation, ‘one that implies a distantiation and
othering from the wretched and largely inert object as well as a gen-
dered project of mastery and violence’.21 Ascribing Premchand’s works
and Dalit characters to discourse of sympathy, Alok Mukherjee writes,
‘Unable to imagine the untouchable Other out of existence, Brahminical
literature now sought to confine it within a discourse marked by “sym-
pathy” and “compassion.” ’22 The Dalit literary movement has rejected
the sympathetic discourse crucial to Premchand’s realism because the
realist narratives aestheticise and elide Dalit identities, which are not
only produced but also deconstructed by the act of writing.
The dominant tendency in the analysis of nationalist literatures/nar-
ratives is to treat the literary text/narrative as a historical document
unmediated by genre conventions, a transparent vehicle of discourses
and ideologies. Though Dalit realisms are clearly indebted to forms
of social realism – speaking, in its formalistic expression, to Zola,
Tolstoy and Dickens, via Premchand and Mulk Raj Anand in India –
that have characterised Indian fiction in the twentieth century, but
a realism that originates as a protest literature will trace a different
trajectory than that derived from the standard narrative of Western
developmentalism that coincides with the Enlightenment and teleo-
logical narratives of progress.23 Commenting on the ideological and
aesthetic constraints of the realism that he (Premchand) employed in
his ouevre, Gajarawala in Untouchable Fictions says, ‘Premchand as
an object of literary interpretation is in a bind, produced in large part
by his attempt at “idealistic realism”, his fiction was to be recogniz-
able, in every aesthetic and political sense, despite its “newness”, while
also being socially conscious, progressive, political.’24 Since realism is
derived from rationalism and empiricism, the Kannada critic Naga-
raj observes, it was best confined to the discernible and the histori-
cal and hence it was inadequate to satisfactorily assimilate ‘the lower
caste cosmologies’.25 The Dalit critique of Premchand should therefore
be read along with a wide-ranging review of progressive realism, the
framework of civil society and social critique.
It is indeed ironic that Premchand’s ‘Sadgati,’ a narrative about
the Dalit exploitation, is dogged by charges of misrepresenting them
according to the paradigms of Dalit literary movement. But this situ-
ation also invites us to consider the manner in which Satyajit Ray
reconfigures it through his enunciation in the visual medium. At this

201
 N ishat H aider

juncture it is particularly useful to recall Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The

Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1935), a nota-
ble guide to the current argument about writing and filming, in which
he argues that the mechanical or technological arts have the effect of
destroying what he called the ‘aura’ of the traditional work of art, the
original artefact, whether it be a painting or a novel. The work of art
ceases to be single and ceases to be ‘authored’. Since film technologies
require their own skills and invent their own methods and models of
art and creative activity, driven along by the changing technologies, it
is significant to probe and explicate the way in which the use of the
camera in Ray’s adaptation of Premchand’s ‘Sadgati’ shapes the inci-
dent or drama, so we watch not only what is reproduced and enunci-
ated but also how it is reproduced and enunciated.

Framing Sadgati
Satyajit Ray revisits/recasts the Dalit question in his filmic adaptation
of Premchand’s short story ‘Sadgati’, in a manner that transforms its
storied status. Ray’s adaptation reveals not only the power of selec-
tion, but also the social and aesthetic logic that frames the film. If we
are to make broader social and political claims about Dalits’ rights
of protection and entitlements to ‘livable’ life,26 it can be asserted
that such frames are operative in Sadgati. In the film, certain lives
are perceived as lives while others’, though they are apparently liv-
ing, fail to assume perceptual form as such. The film elicits recogni-
tion of the bodies that look and the bodies that are seen, and of the
material and historical embodiment of vision, and thus foreground
representation as a field of struggle. Paradoxically, the structures that
frame Ray’s critical vision are the very structures with which such cri-
tiques and visions must compete. Since a film is an autonomous (and
not a closed) entity which sets up in a deictic relation to the viewer,
Ray adopted enunciation to the production of cinematic texts which
function as narrational mediation between film’s codic virtuality and
viewers’ placement (e.g. ‘subject positioning’) within the circuitry of
cinematic representation. In Sadgati, Ray deployed enunciation as a
tool to retrieve and enframe the occluded utterances and hence the film
activates a more politically critical spectator. The question whether
and how a viewer participates in the film’s ‘text productivity’ or acts
as fringe bystander to a scene connects it to the ideological role that
enunciation has played in Sadgati. Ray casts enunciation as communi-
cation, embodied in the signifying materiality of the text. Enunciation,
an act by which a person uses the possibilities of language to realise

202
 I n quest of a comparative poetics

a discourse and performs the shift from virtuality to manifestation,

allows a film (1) ‘to take form and manifest itself’, (2) to present itself
as text and to offer this specific text, and (3) to offer this specific text
in a specific situation.27 In Sadgati, Ray brings enunciation back to the
issue of discourse.

Filming ‘Sadgati’ through the lens of Satyajit Ray

The film Sadgati spans a day in the life of Dukhi, a chamar by caste and
a grasscutter by occupation. The story is based on the simple desire of
Dukhi to have the Brahmin priest, Pandit Ghasiram, decide an auspi-
cious day for the engagement of his daughter, Dhaniya, a little girl who
is seen playing hopscotch. The opening shots of the movie Sadgati,
which include the titles, consist of what Casetti calls ‘metadiegetic’
narration, since it includes the names of the film’s makers and oth-
ers whom we can take as originators of the film as a whole. Then
there is the (strongly) implied enunciator with the camera conjuring
up the story space with Dukhi cutting grass in a field near his hut,
visually providing expository information that subsequent segments
will elaborate. Dukhi, the protagonist, is an ‘infra-diegetic narrator’
because he is entirely confined to the story space of the film. He is not
a ‘full delegate’ of the enunciation since his power to prompt shots
from his perspective can be revoked, can be made to alternate with
objective views, and so on. With the appearance of this infra-diegetic
narrator figure, the film’s discourse becomes ‘plural’ and potentially
‘fragmentary’.
In his screen adaptation of ‘Sadgati’, Ray enunciates the wretched
situation of Dukhi and the pandit’s unquestionable religious author-
ity over the lower caste by the framing of stark contrasts. The pivotal
contrast of the film is that between Dukhi, the untouchable, and Pan-
dit Ghasiram, the village Brahmin priest, but there are also incidental
contrasts to be drawn between Dukhi’s home and that of Ghasiram’s,
and between Dukhi’s wife (played by Smita Patil) and daughter (Richa
Mishra) and Ghasiram’s wife (performed by Gita Siddharth) and son.
Ray shows the pandit’s narcissism in his endless obsession with his
own caste-marked reflections in the mirror than with the gods before
whom he performs these daily rituals of puja. When Dukhi comes
to invite him, he sets up a number of tasks for Dukhi. At first he is
asked to sweep the verandah, an act that Ray follows with the deft
movement of camera. Then Ghasiram instructs him to carry sacks
of rice husks from one shed to another, and Ray, in a few skillful
camera movements, makes us feel Dukhi’s mounting anxiety. Finally,

203
 N ishat H aider

while Ghasiram delivers a religious homily to console a young vil-

lager whose wife has just died, he commands the ailing and emaciated
Dukhi on that very hot summer afternoon to split a log of wood with
a blunt axe.
Ray’s enunciation of the brutalising inequality of the Hindu caste
system and the stark exploitation of the Dalits in Sadgati can be seen
in ‘a series of indices internal to the film’, what Casetti organises under
the term ‘the gaze’.28 The gaze organises a perspective, a place, a point
of view, a pivot around which to organise images and sounds and gives
them coordinates and form. The gaze not only is some optical point of
view, an indicator of subjectivity, but also entails camera location or,
more broadly, the ideal position of an observer witnessing the scene
projected on the screen.29 Commenting on Ray’s creative imagining of
Dukhi’s trapped condition (as he sets about doing his assigned labour
for the Pandit) through his lens, Darius Cooper says,

Ray visually depicts this Untouchable as being constricted by

the space all around him: We see him framed within narrow
enclosures of the cowshed or gazing through the confining
areas of windows and doors. Ray’s camerawork highlights
the tanner’s victimization. We see Dukhi constantly pass-
ing under two predominant gazes: one of the papier-mache
demon Ravana and the other of this village’s flesh-and-blood
incarnation of Ravana, the Pandit. Ray adds to this surveil-
lance an additional, ironic twist, as we observe our earthly
Ravana lazily relaxing on his swing and delivering a lecture
on generosity from the Gita to a select group of devotees
while, within his own courtyard, a man has been reduced to
a beast of burden.30

Ray illustrated his engagement with the Dalit issue by ‘discreetly low-
angled shots of the Brahmins so as to make them just a little larger
than life size and high angles for the chamars, so as to make them
imperceptibly smaller by comparison’.31 Ray’s competent editing jux-
taposes Dukhi’s almost manic attack on the tree outside with shots
of the pandit calmly enjoying his meals inside his home. The camera
swoops down on Dukhi working on the tree trunk like a man pos-
sessed with one frenzied stroke after another with his axe, cursing and
hurling profanities. The log of wood becomes a virtual character in
the film, a mute and an inexorable evil demon. The audience witnesses
Dukhi’s futile task and his growing agony from the various vantage
points of other characters. First, an older man, a Gond, from a hut

204
 I n quest of a comparative poetics

nearby moved by his plight advises him that he must at least demand
food from the Brahmin. The contrast between the self-interested Brah-
min priest and the reasonable and humane Gond is now made clear by
Ray after Dukhi’s death in just a couple of shots. While we see Gha-
siram run in horror from the dead untouchable chamar, the audiences
watch the Gond stooping alongside a fellow human being, one whom
he knows to have undergone pain and deprivation most unfairly, feel-
ing Dukhi’s torso to try to find a pulse. With this simple contrast of
images, the superstitious and inhumane Brahmin is instantly dimin-
ished. Yet another witness to Dukhi’s growing agony, a ‘silent’ specta-
tor dexterously caught by Ray’s lens, is Ghasiram’s son, a little boy
with a perpetually alarmed look, who continues to watch, and it is
he who witnesses Dukhi’s terrible passing away. While the film ends
with the pandit cleansing his house with holy water, in Premchand’s
narrative the gnawing of Dukhi’s corpse by the scavengers is followed
by Ghasiram’s purification of his house, which the death of a ‘chamar’
has made impure.
In the film Sadgati, as opposed to Premchand’s narrative, we dis-
cern some signs of disturbing effects and pain in the upper-caste char-
acters. This aspect of the adaptation comes out specifically through
a comparison of the last section of the story and the film. In Prem-
chand’s story, when Ghasiram informs his wife about Dukhi’s death,
she serenely replies, ‘Hoga kya, chamraune mein kehla bhejo, murda
utha le jaayein [Nothing would happen. Send a message to his people
to get his dead body removed]’.32 In the film, too, the Brahmin’s wife
speaks these lines, but there is a slight expression of guilt and fear
about their role in Dukhi’s death, albeit it originates primarily from
fear of the police. While in the short story Ghasiram’s wife has an
unapologetic attitude and acerbic tone throughout, in the movie she
starts showing signs of guilt and panic towards the end. Some crit-
ics have read this as ‘a transmutation’, rendering a kind of humanity
to the Brahmin family while in the source text there is none. In the
movie, Ray makes his enunciatory position evident by reaffirming and
extending the priest’s identification with that rakshasa (giant) Ravana.
In a few shots, Ray shows him dozing tranquilly in his room under the
framed image of his many gods, as giants are apt to do, after having
consumed his latest victim. This idea is artfully accentuated when Ray
cuts from the sleeping pandit inside to Dukhi’s corpse as it lies outside
in the rain. Traumatised Jhuriya then enters that literally untouchable
space and starts berating her dead husband for leaving her and her
daughter alone. Ray’s camera now moves inside the domestic/religious
space of the pandit’s house. His own wife enters and, paralleling the

205
 N ishat H aider

weeping woman outside, starts to scold her husband for not doing
anything about the untouchable’s dead body, which is ‘polluting’ the
environment and preventing the Brahmins of the village from fetching
water from the well. The ending of the film shows the rain-soaked
corpse of Dukhi on the ground at the break of dawn. Revealing Gha-
siram’s ingenious solution to the disposal of an untouchable’s body,
Ray shows his execution of it in a way that is very horrifying. At
first a hooked stick appears on the entire screen, which is followed
by a close shot of Dukhi’s head and shoulders, played on by a flash
of lightning with the sound of thunder in the background. There is
then a cut to someone bending over and pulling something and from
the man’s gleaming white dhoti and the sacred thread of the Brahmin
hanging from his neck we can deduce that this character is Pandit
Ghasiram. With a hook-shaped stick he lifts Dukhi’s right leg and then
slips a noose around it, tightening it at the ankle. Then he proceeds
to haul and yank the dead body of Dukhi and as the body is thrown
among the animal carcasses on the dumping ground, the metaphor of
one caste having devoured another is, in itself, powerfully conveyed.
Though Dukhi is gone and his ‘polluting’ presence has been eliminated
already, Ghasiram circles the log with the axe stuck in it and, as he
does so, carefully he sprinkles holy water on it from a small brass pot
in his hand and chants Sanskrit shlokas in a bid to purify himself and
his surroundings.
The ethical vision of Ray in portraying the traumatic life of Dukhi
in Sadgati is articulated as much through what he leaves unseen
as through what he shows directly. Ray opens up a space for us to
explore conflicting ideas about what it means to bear ethical witness.
In Sadgati, the lack of agency of the Dalit character Dukhi as a victim
of social and structural conditions and institutional exploitation ren-
ders him as abject. In Sadgati, the viewer is called upon to witness the
atrocities that India has inflicted upon an entire population. A filmic
text is not only a product of the political and social histories from
which it appears to originate, but also a product of individual aesthetic
choices on the part of the film-maker, and a complex matrix of tastes
and preferences exercised by the audiences, which may not necessarily
be nationally or culturally demarcated.33 The task of deciphering of
signs and of the processing of intelligibility – what might be called the
task of the translator – is, however, carried out within the film Sadgati
not merely by the professional actors, but also by the film-maker Ray
who, like the witnesses (in the film) and like the translator, constitute
second-degree witnesses (witnesses of witnesses, witnesses of testimo-
nies). Ray in the film and Premchand in the story are in fact agents of

206
 I n quest of a comparative poetics

the process of reception, agents whose reflective witnessing and whose

testimonial stances aid our own reception and assist us both in the
effort towards comprehension and in processing some perspectives
on the philosophical and historical significance of these testimonies.
By rejecting the narrator and the communication model of narration,
Ray confers too much autonomy upon the spectator in constructing
filmic meaning via social, spatial and discursive frames through which
identities are constituted. This overlay of frames at the intersections
of the material and discursive realms provide a conceptual model to
study the social consequences of caste system and to enable the audi-
ence to imagine concerns about power and agency at the heart of this
adaptation.
Representation is never either wholly personal or social, but a con-
stant and elusive mediation in at least two senses of the term: as an
image (a creative gesture) and an interpretation (a political gesture).
Both the fictional and visual texts of Sadgati forge a language that
depicts the realities of the Dalit life worlds through a postcolonial
aesthetics that ‘disrupt, question, and resist various forms of domi-
nation’.34 Postcolonial artists in aestheticising the erasure of bodies
risk reaffirming the rhetoric they wish to expose. Though Meenak-
shi Mukherjee in ‘His Films, Their Stories’ insists that Satyajit Ray,
in keeping with Premchand’s ‘deliberate erasure’ of himself, ‘abstains
from putting his individual stamp on the film Sadgati, which he filmed
with the maximum economy of detail’,35 at several moments in the
film Ray’s enunciative process leaps into the foreground and becomes
distinguishable.

Conclusion
In their roles as postcolonial artists, both Premchand and Ray endeav-
our, through their respective creative abilities, to indict the forces of
caste system, as it existed. Notwithstanding the critiques aimed at
Premchand and Ray, everyday ontologies are reborn under our gaze, if
not from out of our own discourses. As compared to Ray’s cinematic
portrayal of Dalit characters, Premchand’s Dalit characters mostly
lack access to expressive rhetoric of any sort. Characterised by failure,
lack and inadequacy, most of the Dalit-speaking subjects are silent suf-
ferers who bend beneath the lashes of undeserved fate, and encounter
expressivity or volubility in others without counter-poising their own
expressions of suffering. Hence Ray’s cinematic treatment and enun-
ciation of Dalit experiences might then be an aesthetic remediation of
an experience whose greatest sufferers were politically and culturally

207
 N ishat H aider

mute. Ray’s Sadgati combines the thematic and narrative persistence

of Premchand’s story with material variations, with the result that the
film adaptation is not a simple or reductive reproduction that loses the
Benjaminian aura. At every moment, the film indicates a point where
it can anchor its own moves and find a response; it directs its looks
and voices, beyond the limits of the scene. It is at this position, or
interface – between spectator-as-interlocutor and film-as-text – that
Ray makes his original intervention into the filmic enunciation. Ray’s
enunciation returns us to the site of cinematic representation, which
boldly insists that it is no different from cinematic ‘communication’,
which decisively puts him on the opposite side to those who deeply
suspect the very concept of representation of Dalit situation and issues.
The film Sadgati offers itself to sight, that is, the filmic text becomes a
site of suggestions that, to a certain extent, the viewer must complete.
The viewer actively constructs what she/he sees: she/he chooses some
specifics of the image and ignores others, and finds fissures in narrative
by filling in factual information, through construal extrapolation, that
the film allows but does not furnish.

Notes
1 Debjani Ganguly, Caste and Dalit Lifeworlds: Postcolonial Perspective,
New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan, 2008, p. x.
2 Michel Foucault, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Donald Bouchard
(ed.), Language, Counter Memory, Practice, Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 1977, p. 156.
3 James Naremore, ‘Introduction’, in James Naremore (ed.), Film Adapta-
tion, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000, p. 8.
4 Charles Newman, The Postmodern Aura, Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 1985, p. 129.
5 Robert Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell, 2000,
p. 58.
6 Cited in Robert T. Eberwein, A Viewer’s Guide to Film Theory and Criti-
cism, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1979, p. 189.
7 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Repro-
ducibility’, in Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (eds), Selected
Writings Vol. 4 1938–1940, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2003, p. 214.
8 R. Barton Palmer, ‘The Sociological Turn of Adaptation Studies: The
Example of Film Noir’, in Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (eds),
A Companion to Literature and Film, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004,
p. 264.
9 Francesco Cassetti, ‘Adaptation and Mis-Adaptations: Film, Literature,
and Social Discourses’, in Robert Stam and A. Raengo (eds), A Compan-
ion to Literature and Film, Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell, 2004,
p. 82.

208
 I n quest of a comparative poetics

10 M.S.S. Pandian, ‘One Step Outside Modernity: Caste, Identity Politics and
Public Sphere’, Economic and Political Weekly, 2002, 37(18): 1739.
11 Premchand, ‘The Aim of Literature’, in Francesca Orsini (trans.), ‘Appen-
dix’, in David Rubin, Alok Rai, and Christopher R. King (trans.), The
Oxford India Premchand, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004.
12 Ibid.
13 Alok Rai, ‘Poetic and Social Justice: Some Reflections on the Premchand–
Dalit Controversy’, in Rajeev Bhargava, Michael Dusche, and Heimut
Reifeld (eds), Justice: Political, Social, Juridical, New Delhi: Sage, 2008,
p. 152.
14 Ibid., p. 154.
15 Toral Jatin Gajarawala, Untouchable Fictions: Literary Realism and the
Crisis of Caste, New York: Fordham University Press, 2013, p. 67.
16 Rai, ‘Poetic and Social Justice’, p. 165.
17 Laura Brueck, ‘Dalit Chetna in Dalit Literary Criticism’, Seminar Web
Edition 558 (2006), http://www.india-seminar.com/2006/558/558%20
laura%20r.%20brueck.htm (accessed on 25 December 2013).
18 Gajarawala, Untouchable Fictions, p. 2.
19 Alok Rai, ‘A Kind of Crisis: Godaan and the Last Writings of Munshi
Premchand’, Journal of the School of Languages, 1974, 2(1): 11.
20 Alok Rai, ‘Afterword: Hearing Nirmala’s Silence’, in Premchand, Nirmala,
Alok Rai (trans.), New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 199.
21 Gajarawala, Untouchable Fictions, p. 55.
22 Cited in Sharankumar Limbale, Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Litera-
ture: History, Controversies and Considerations, Alok Mukherjee (trans.),
Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2004, p. 5.
23 Gajarawala, Untouchable Fictions, pp. 3–4.
24 Ibid., p. 34.
25 D. R. Nagaraj, The Flaming Fleet: A Study of the Dalit Movement in
India, Bangalore: South Forum Press, 1993, p. 65.
26 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, London: Verso,
2009, p. 22.
27 Francesco Casetti, Theories of Cinema, 1945–1995, Francesca Chiostri,
Elizabeth Gard Bartolini and Thomas Kelso (trans.), Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1999, p. 155.
28 Francesco Casetti, Inside the Gaze: The Fiction Film and Its Spectator,
Nell Andrew and Charles O’Brien (trans.), Bloomington: Indiana Univer-
sity Press, 1998, p. 19.
29 Ibid., pp. 19–20.
30 Darius Cooper, The Cinema of Satyajit Ray, New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2000, p. 193.
31 Chidananda Dasgupta, The Cinema of Satyajit Ray, 2nd rpt., New Delhi:
National Book Trust, 2005, p. 124–5.
32 Premchand, ‘Sadgati’ [Deliverance], Premchand Rachna Sanchayan
[Selection from the Writings of Premchand], 4th ed., New Delhi: Sahitya
Akademi, p. 181.
33 Mira Reym Binford, ‘State Patronage and India’s New Cinema’, Critical
Arts, 1983, 2(4): 33.
34 Gaurav Majumdar, Migrant Form: Anti-Colonial Aesthetics in Joyce,
Rushdie, and Ray, New York: Peter Lang, 2010, p. 2.

209
 N ishat H aider

35 Meenakshi Mukherjee, ‘His Films, Their Stories’, in M. Asaduddin, Anu-

radha Ghosh, and Francesco Casetti (eds), Theories of Cinema, 1945–
1995, Francesca Chiostri, Elizabeth Gard Bartolini, and Thomas Kelso
(trans.), Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999.

Bibliography
Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproduc-
ibility’, in Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (eds), Selected Writ-
ings Vol. 4 1938–1940, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003,
pp. 251–83.
Binford, Mira Reym, ‘State Patronage and India’s New Cinema’, Critical Arts,
1983, 2(4): 33–46.
Butler, Judith, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, London: Verso, 2009.
Brueck, Laura, ‘Dalit Chetna in Dalit Literary Criticism’, Seminar Web Edition
558 (2006), http://www.india-seminar.com/2006/558/558%20laura%20
r.%20brueck.htm (accessed on 15 December 2013).
Cassetti, Francesco, ‘Adaptation and Mis-Adaptations: Film, Literature, and
Social Discourses’, in Robert Stam and A. Raengo (eds), A Companion to
Literature and Film, Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell, 2004, pp. 81–91.
Casetti, Francesco, Inside the Gaze: The Fiction Film and Its Spectator,
Nell Andrew and Charles O’Brien (trans.), Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1998.
Casetti, Francesco, Theories of Cinema, 1945–1995, Francesca Chiostri,
Elizabeth GardBartolini, and Thomas Kelso (trans.), Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1999.
Cooper, Darius, The Cinema of Satyajit Ray, New York: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2000.
Dasgupta, Chidananda, The Cinema of Satyajit Ray, 2nd rpt., New Delhi:
National Book Trust, 2005.
Eberwein, Robert T., A Viewer’s Guide to Film Theory and Criticism,
Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1979.
Foucault, Michel, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Donald Bouchard (ed.),
Language, Counter Memory, Practice, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1977, pp. 139–64.
Gajarawala, Toral Jatin, Untouchable Fictions: Literary Realism and the
Crisis of Caste, New York: Fordham University Press, 2013.
Ganguly, Debjani, Caste and Dalit Lifeworlds: Postcolonial Perspective, New
Delhi: Orient Black Swan, 2008.
Limbale, Sharankumar, Towards an Aesthetic of Dalit Literature: History,
Controversies and Considerations, Alok Mukherjee (trans.), Hyderabad:
Orient Longman, 2004.
Majumdar, Gaurav, Migrant Form: Anti-Colonial Aesthetics in Joyce,
Rushdie, and Ray, NewYork: Peter Lang, 2010.

210
 I n quest of a comparative poetics

Mukherjee, Meenakshi, ‘His Films, Their Stories’, in M. Asadduddin and

Anuradha Ghosh (eds), Filming Fiction: Tagore, Premchand and Ray, New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012, pp. 3–17.
Nagaraj, D. R., The Flaming Fleet: A Study of the Dalit Movement in India,
Bangalore: South Forum Press, 1993.
Naremore, James, ‘Introduction’, in James Naremore (ed.), Film Adaptation,
New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000, pp. 1–16.
Newman, Charles, The Postmodern Aura, Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 1985.
Palmer, R. Barton, ‘The Sociological Turn of Adaptation Studies: The Exam-
ple of Film Noir’, in Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo (eds), A Com-
panion to Literature and Film, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004, pp. 258–77.
Pandian, M.S.S., ‘One Step Outside Modernity: Caste, Identity Politics and
Public Sphere’, Economic and Political Weekly, 2002, 37(18): 1735–41.
Premchand, ‘Sadgati’ [Deliverance], in Nirmal Verma (ed.), Premchand
Rachna Sanchayan [Selection from the Writings of Premchand], 4th ed.,
New Delhi: SahityaAkademi, pp. 176–82.
Premchand, ‘The Aim of Literature’, in Francesca Orsini (trans.), ‘Appendix’,
in David Rubin, Alok Rai, and Christopher R. King (trans.), The Oxford
India Premchand, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Rai, Alok, ‘Afterword: Hearing Nirmala’s Silence’, in Premchand (ed.),
Nirmala, Alok Rai (trans.), New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999,
pp. 197–211.
Rai, Alok, ‘A Kind of Crisis: Godaan and the Last Writings of Munshi
Premchand’, Journal of the School of Languages, 1974, 2(1): 1–13.
Rai, Alok, ‘Poetic and Social Justice: Some Reflections on the Premchand–
Dalit Controversy’, in Rajeev Bhargava, Michael Dusche, and Heimut
Reifeld (eds), Justice: Political, Social, Juridical, New Delhi: Sage, 2008,
pp. 151–68.
Rai, Amit, Rule of Sympathy: Sentiment, Race and Power (1750–1850), New
York: Palgrave, 2002.
Stam, Robert, Film Theory: An Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.

211
 13
POLITICS OF LANGUAGE,
CULTURAL REPRESENTATION
AND HISTORICITY
‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’ in (self-)translation
and adaptation

Fatima Rizvi

Premchand published his Hindi short story ‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’ (The

Chess Players) in Madhuri, in September–October, 1924. Sometime
before 1928, he brought out an Urdu version of the same story with
a slightly different title, ‘Shatranj ki Bazi’ (A Game of Chess), which
was published in Khwab-o-Khayal ki Kahaniyan (Stories of Dreams
and Visions), published by Lajpatrai and Sons.1 Thereafter, several
cross-cultural translations have been brought out, most of the English
ones bearing the title ‘The Chess Players’, David Rubin’s being one of
them. In 1977, Satyajit Ray adapted Premchand’s story into his first
big-budget Urdu–English film, Shatranj ke Khiladi. Premchand had
inherited about a century-old translational traditions and witnessed at
first-hand the ‘cultural chauvinism’2 which led up to the division of the
related linguistic traditions of Urdu and Hindi. This chapter examines
how these four versions of Premchand’s texts are layered by various
political considerations surrounding language, cultural representation
and historicity. The study begins by contextualising Premchand against
a tradition of translational endeavours and linguistic politicisation,
both of which compelled him to self-translate. A close textual analysis
of the Hindi and Urdu versions of the story focuses on the chief differ-
entiating aspects. This is followed by a study of translational techniques
in Rubin’s cross-cultural translation. Ray’s cinematic historicisation of
Premchand’s text, as a mimetic, creative exercise, depicting the cultural
zenith and nadir of erstwhile Awadh concludes the chapter.

212
 P olitics of language A N D culture

Translational traditions, socio-political

culture and Premchand
Translation from the original/source to the target/receptor language
is a semiotic/inter-semiotic exercise, involving extrinsically a change
of script and intrinsically processes of cultural, semantic and linguis-
tic decoding and recoding, recension, abridgement, reordering, tran-
screation and adaptation. It plays a major role in enabling literatures
reach large and diverse readerships. Translational exercises are not
new, but within subcontinental India the nineteenth century witnessed
a surge which contributed significantly towards the development and
standardisation of both dialectal linguistic forms and literary genres
of Urdu fiction. Institutions such as Fort William College, Calcutta
(estd. 1800), and Delhi College (estd. ca. 1827) were set up as part
of the colonial practice to disseminate knowledge of the Orient, and
translation and publication played significantly enabling roles. These
translations were osmotic in influencing the creation of modern Urdu
literature and cultivating a long-standing interest in Urdu fiction. Fur-
thermore, besides publishing Persian, Sanskrit, Urdu and Hindi texts,
the Naval Kishore Press, Lucknow (estd. 1858), undertook transla-
tions of English novels which were ‘Indianised’ to accord with the
subcontinental milieu. In the aftermath of the 1857 uprising, Urdu
periodicals became platforms for discursive, intellectual, cultural and
literary debates.
The mid-nineteenth century witnessed distinctive efforts empha-
sising the separateness of modern Hindi and Urdu, notwithstanding
their common origins from rural, dialectal and urban linguistic forms.
A movement initiated in Benaras, propagating Hindi in the Nagari
script as the official court language and replacing Urdu in the Nast-
aliq script, percolated many North Indian cities of the Hindi belt.
The argument was in favour of the ‘national’ character of the Nagari
script, used by the populace, as against the ‘foreign’ character of the
Nastaliq script used by the elite. The encouragement hitherto given
to Urdu as the official court language was perceived as detrimental to
the education of the masses; its usage was seen to favour the minor-
ity bourgeoisie community in employment opportunities and sponsor
separatism.
Premchand too experienced the anxiety of the divisive politics and
power play supporting communalisation of language. He believed in
the common origins of the two languages, but stressed the foreignness
of Urdu.3 Premchand specified that he was not concerned with the
politics of naming a national language though one was essential to

213
 F atima R izvi

counter the influence of English. He advocated Hindustani, easily spo-

ken and understood by most, and mourned that the once commonly
used pluralistic Hindustani idiom was fast giving way to two distinct
languages.4
Nawab Rai began his literary career writing Urdu fiction, because
Urdu was the prevailing medium of literary expression and he had
imbibed it during the course of his education. This is a matter of con-
siderable significance, given that chronologically, he wrote at a time
when the semiotic syncretism of the pluralistic Indo–Muslim herit-
age was under seige. By about 1900, Nawab Rai’s social and political
awareness gradually matured into a nationalist consciousness. Though
never an active politician, he believed that politics should be aimed
at supporting progress of the human race and directed his writings
towards serving the nation and the people.5 Among his earliest works
to exhibit nationalist consciousness is Soz-e Watan (Lament of the
Nation; 1908), a collection of five Urdu short stories proscribed by
the British government on grounds that it was seditious. Nawab Rai
was forbidden from publishing without prior colonial consent. It is
then that he adopted the pseudonym ‘Premchand’. The first story to
appear under this pseudonym was ‘Bade Ghar ki Beti’ (1910) in Hindi;
from 1913 to 1915, he steadily gave up Urdu in preference for Hindi.6
Having inherited a tradition of translational activities, Premchand
remained devoted to translation, particularly self-translation. Despite
tensions of developing a nascent language, obligations to reach out to
women of the community and constraints of publication, his bilingual-
ism provided the greatest encouragement to do so.

‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’ and ‘Shatranj ki Bazi’

Premchand was writing and rewriting within a hybrid cultural con-
text. ‘Shatranj ki Bazi’ is constrained by its original text, ‘Shatranj
ke Khiladi’; nevertheless, certain distinctions surrounding the poli-
tics of linguistic and cultural representation are perceivable. ‘Shatranj
ke Khiladi’ belongs to the genre of the serious, inward-looking short
story, which propagates utilitarian ideals and owes its existence to the
political culture of the times. Written during Premchand’s residence in
Lucknow – a phase described as both comfortable and prolific7 – the
story centre-stages Lucknow as the seat of aristocratic indolence and
cultural profligacy, characteristic of the erstwhile kingdom of Awadh.
‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’ was meant to shake the populace out of its com-
placency in a phase of political indolence during India’s freedom strug-
gle.8 Thus, Premchand believes in the circular notion of history; he

214
 P olitics of language A N D culture

uses the historic past to comment on the political present. Premchand’s

story is skeletal. It revolves around the obsessive playing of the game of
chess, against all odds by the jagirdars, Mir Raushan Ali and Mirza Saj-
jad Ali, representing the elitist Muslim cultural centre. Mir and Mirza
are real-life motifs whose actions illustrate a grim political assertion
conveyed by the narrator. As an authorial intrusion, he serves as Prem-
chand’s mouthpiece, deconstructing the protagonists as well as their
socio-cultural set-up, by means of satiric irony. In the narrative com-
ments, Premchand’s Hindi is Sanskritic and his tone, condemnatory.
Premchand rewrites ‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’ in heavily Persianised
Urdu as ‘Shatranj ki Bazi’, so as to make his text accessible to Urdu
readership. Premchand’s self-translation is a renewal, to the extent,
that his text is linguistically and aesthetically re-coded and reinter-
preted, differentiating it from the Sanskritic Hindi one. Rewriting the
Mir–Mirza story in the language employed by Mir and Mirza makes
it as much a medium for illustration of linguistic and cultural pat-
terns, as the Sanskritic Hindi one is a medium for critical realism.
Premchand has his prospective readership in mind. His narrator nar-
rates with reduced tonal acerbity and mellowed sarcasm. His politi-
cal message is veiled; its vigour and ironic intent seem diminished.
Premchand’s Urdu maintains its resplendent, copious, elegiac and lyri-
cal tone in its fictional usage. Perhaps, because of this style, the Urdu
text seems remote, romantic, less ironic and cynical, despite its satiric
intent. Furthermore, the multiple semantic possibilities of the Urdu
vocabulary provide for multiple connotative possibilities and contrib-
ute towards a veiling of intent.
Premchand’s Urdu title ‘Shatranj ki Bazi’ seems inappropriate: first,
because it is viewed in the light of the holistic message conveyed by the
Hindi text; second, because the changed ‘bazi’ shifts the focus from
the ‘khiladi’ (chess-players) to the game of chess or the moves made by
the players, during the course of the game; and third, because the word
‘khiladi’ (player/players) is common to both Urdu and Hindi, carries
similar semantic connotations and can be nuanced with similar ironic
overtones. However, considering that the Urdu narrator’s criticism of
the society and the players is mingled with a lament for both the fate
of the players in meeting their unnatural deaths and the passing away
of a social order (symbolised by the decrepit mosque, built during the
reign of Asaf-ud Daulah), the title seems consistent with the substance
of the narrative. This is unlike the Hindi text which overtly satirises
the players with a condemnation of their bravado.
Tara Chand’s observation that Sanskritic Hindi was created on
the model of Persianised Urdu9 provides for the estimation that

215
 F atima R izvi

morphologically the two languages share common linguistic domains.

This being the case, Premchand’s Hindi and Urdu texts share similar
syntactic structures, but several distinctions pertaining to vocabulary
are discernible. Clearly, there is a paucity of vocabulary and expres-
sion in the Hindi text; the abundant Urdu vocabulary and expres-
sion make the story linguistically and aesthetically more engaging and
the cultural representation richer than that in the Hindi one. This
may best be elucidated by the repeated usage of ‘vilasita’ (pleasure/
pleasure-seeking) in the Hindi text,10 which is exchanged for several
compound/portmanteaux words commonly employed in Urdu and
Persian, carrying analogous connotations – ‘aish-o-ishrat’ (resplend-
ence), ‘rang-ralian’ (debauchery), ‘nafs-parasti’ (self-gratification),
‘nafas-parvari’ (hedonism)11 – and towards the end, in reference to
the two noblemen, ‘aish ke bande’ (men living resplendently),12 as
against ‘vilasi’.13 This points at an issue concerning evolution of mod-
ern Hindi as an emergent language, that ‘in order to find its new feet
Hindi needed to overhaul its very base – syntactically, lexically and
orthographically and set about educating the readership it needed to
legitimate its being.’14
Premchand also employs the dramatic, dialogic style to convey the
sense of the protagonists’ lifestyles. As the narrative develops, Prem-
chand gradually switches to simpler Hindustani, employing an easy
conversational, even a colloquial, idiom. That the specificity of a cul-
ture was co-extensive with the specificity of its language15 is best exhib-
ited in the opening paragraphs of the two texts. Both stories open with
a reference to the age – ‘Wajid Ali Shah ka zamana tha’,16 in Hindi
(It was the era of Wajid Ali Shah17) and ‘Nawab Wajid Ali Shah ka
zamana tha’18 in Urdu (It was the era of Nawab Wajid Ali Shah).19
However, by prefixing the title ‘Nawab’ to Wajid Ali Shah, the Urdu
text immediately attaches notions of stateliness deserving of the king.
Perceptive in the Urdu text’s opening is the ‘Ek tha badshah . . .’ (There
was once a king . . .) opening of the oral, make-believe narratives of the
raconteurs of Lucknow.
The opening paragraph of the Hindi text, with its satiric tone and
abundant usage of the Sanskritic vocabulary, deprecates the cultural
ethos of Awadh. The critical realism of the modern Hindi narrator
contemptuously reduces the era as given over to ‘vilasita’. His par-
enthetical asides, tongue-in-cheek comments and ironic observations
supply the sarcasm.

Shatranj, taash, Ganjifa khelne se buddhi teevra hoti hai,

vichar-shakti ka vikas hota hai, penchida maslon ko suljhane

216
 P olitics of language A N D culture

ki adat padti hai. Yeh daleelen zoron ke sath pesh ki jati thin
(is sampradaye ke logon se duniya ab bhi khali nahin hai).20
By playing chess, cards or ganjifa*** the wits were sharp-
ened, the process of thought was developed, one became
accustomed to solving complex problems – arguments of this
sort were presented with great vehemence (The world is not
free even today of people of this persuasion!).21

The Urdu narrator conveys a similar sense of the times but his obser-
vations are less caustic, primarily because the parenthesis is absent and
the focus is only on the game of chess:

Fikr ko jaulaan akl ko rasa aur zehen ko tez karne ke liye,

shatranj keemiya samjha jata tha. Ab bhi is quaum ke log
kahin-kahin maujood hain jo is daleel ko bade shad-o-madhh
se pesh karte hain.22
Chess was considered instrumental in stimulating imagina-
tion; polishing wit and sharpening intelligence. People belong-
ing to such a society who tender this position with immense
enthusiasm are yet to be found hither and thither.

Also noteworthy is the narrator’s pointing out, later in the story, that
the wealth from the suburbs was frittered away in the city of Luc-
know. The Urdu narrator is more detailed in his delineation of the
frivolities but employs language aesthetically in spite of using it as a
vehicle to convey the sense of waste and misuse. His Persianised dic-
tion treats the reader with splendorous rhetoric while illustrating the
people’s pursuits and cultural ambiance, albeit critically –

[. . .] aur yahan samaan-e-aish ke baham pohchane mein sarf

ho jati thi. Bhand, nakkal, kathak, arbaab-e-nishat ki garm-
bazaari thi. Saaqinon ki dukaanon par asharfiyaan barasti
thin. Rais-zaade ek-ek dam ki ek-ek asharfi phenk dete the.
Masaarif ka yeh haal aur Angrezi campany [. . .].23
[. . .] and it was frittered away over here, in pleasurable activ-
ities. Jesters, clowns, kathak, courtesans abounded. Vendors of
liquors and spirits were showered with gold coins. Wealthy
young men squandered away money without a thought. Such
were the expenditures and the East India Company [. . .].

Premchand’s Hindi narrator employs predominantly Sanskritic vocab-

ulary in his enunciations of the state of affairs in the kingdom. His

217
 F atima R izvi

condemnation is acerbic in both choice of words and brevity. For

instance, the Sanskritic ‘vaishyaon’ (compare with ‘arbaab-e-nishat’)
seems to convey the sense and status the courtesans had come to
acquire post-1857 and their marginalisation during the colonisation
of Awadh. Likewise, Rubin translates it as ‘whores’.24

[. . .] aur wah vaishyaon mein, bhando mein aur vilasta

ke anya ango ki poorti mein ud jati thi. Angrez campany ka
rin [. . .].25
[. . . the wealth was] squandered on whores, jesters and the
satisfaction of every kind of vice. The debt of the East India
Company [. . .].26

In the same strain is his ironic conversion of the chessboard and the
chess-game as a ‘sangram-kshetra’ (battlefield; crusade/battle) in
Hindi27 as against the ‘[. . .] phir meh-we-shatranj bazi’ [(. . .) once
more they absorbed themselves in chess-games] in Urdu.28 Prem-
chand’s Urdu narrator provides the reader with a larger sense of the
gynologics prevelant in the zenana (female) spaces of households. For
instance, the Hindi expression ‘Unhone, unka nam Mir bigadoo rakh
choda tha’29 (She had named him Mir the spoilsport) is reconstructed
in Urdu with more pejoratives as: ‘Woh Mir sahab ko nikhattoo, biga-
doo, tukde-khor waghaira namon se yaad kiya karti thin’30 (She would
think of Mir sahab in terms of soubriquets like good-for-nothing, kill-
joy, freeloader, among others). Mirza’s wife’s invectives are a continu-
ation of similar strains:

Ab mua idhar aye to khade-khade nikaal doon. Ghar nahin

chakla samajh liya hai.31
If the Dead One comes here I will have him thrown out
immediately. He imagines this is a brothel, not a house.

The Urdu narrator seems to collaborate with language to transport

the reader away from the reality of the present into the illusory world
of the nawab. His vocabulary is perceptive of the reader’s sensibil-
ity, and discerning of the cultural milieu of the story. His language
is redolent with the ease and lethargy that characterised the people.
The Hindi narrator’s sarcasm is mellowed by the Urdu narrator’s
prolix syntax. For instance, ‘Huzoor Nawab Sahab bhi aishgah mein
honge’32 (The King’s in his harem, no doubt)33 sounds condemna-
tory by comparison with ‘Huzoor jaan-e-aalam bhi istirahat farmate

218
 P olitics of language A N D culture

honge ya shayad saaghar ka daur chal raha ho’34 (Sir, the ‘beloved of
creation’ must be resting or perhaps enjoying his drink), which speaks
of the nawab conjecturally, especially due to the usage of ‘shayad’
(perhaps).
A comparison of the concluding paragraphs of the Hindi and Urdu
texts reveals that the satiric references in the Hindi text render the
chess-players as caricatures that kill each other without a cause.
Premchand employs a single epithet in lamenting over their unnatu-
ral deaths in the Hindi text. Brevity drives home the point. This sat-
ire is toned down in the Urdu text, best exemplified by the narrator’s
choice of words and his tone with regard to the protagonists. Consider,
for instance, the straightforwardness of the Urdu ‘maqtuleen’ (those
killed)35 by comparing with the sarcasm of the Hindi ‘veeron’ (brave-
hearts).36 Premchand’s Urdu narrator seems generous towards the
protagonists, concluding with a seemingly genuine, dirge-like lament,
embodying poetic pathos and philosophically bemoaning the passage
of time which takes all within its tide – animate and inanimate – the
chess-players and the dilapidated mosque. The Hindi narrator merely
employs a single rhetoric to indicate that the ruins of the decrepit
mosque were baffled at the deaths of the chess-players. In both the
texts, Premchand animates the chess-kings by making them lament the
deaths of the chess players, to amplify the point that decadence was
destructive.
Compare the Urdu:

Andhera ho gaya tha. Bazi bichchi hui thi. Dono badshah

apne-apne takht par raunak-afroz the. Un par hasrat chhaee
hui thi. Goya maqtuleen ki maut ka matam kar rahe hain.
Charo taraf sannate ka aalam tha. Khandhar ki bosida
deewaren aur khasta-haal kangure aur sar-ba-sujood minar
lashon ko dekhte the aur insaani zindagi ki be-sabaati par
afsos karte the jis mein sang-o-khisht ka sabaat bhi nahin.37
It was dark. The chess game was laid out. Both the kings sat
magnificently on their respective thrones. Their countenance
was covered over with agony. As though they were mourning
the deaths of those who had been killed.
Silence spread all around. The weakened walls of the dilapi-
dated mosque, the damaged turrets and the minarets, fallen
to the ground, beheld the corpses and bemoaned the passage
of time which took in its tide, transient humanity as well as
intransient stone.

219
 F atima R izvi

with the Hindi:

Andhera ho chala tha. Bazi bichchi hui thi. Dono badshah

apne-apne singhasanon par baithe hue mano in dono veeron
ki mrityu par ro rahe the!
Charo taraf sannata chchaya hua tha. Khandhar ki tooti
hui mehraben, giri hui deewaren aur dhool-dhoosrit minaren
in lashon ko dekhti aur sir dhunti thin.38
Darkness was coming on. The chess game had been set up.
The two kings each on his throne sat there as though lament-
ing the death of these two heroes.
Silence spread over all. The broken archways of the ruins,
the crumbling walls and dusty minarets looked down upon
the corpses and mourned.39

At times, Premchand’s translation is fairly reductive. Though such

instances are rare, they bring into play the idea that language in his
translations is thorny40 or that he often designated translations of his
stories to his pupils/collaborators, which he later touched up.41

‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’ and ‘The Chess Players’

David Rubin translated the Hindi ‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’ as ‘The Chess
Players’ (1988). By this time, Ray’s cinematic adaptation had gener-
ated interest in Premchand’s tale in the West. Rubin’s cross-cultural
translation is meant for Anglophone readership within and outside
India to whom neither Premchand’s original language nor the cultural
significations within it are otherwise intelligible. Thus, Rubin’s trans-
lation intends to acquaint a linguistically and culturally diverse read-
ership with Premchand’s world and thought. Such a translation from
one language/culture into another is an ‘intersemiotic process’, a case
of diffusion and a special kind of renewal where the code gets acti-
vated and extends beyond its previous boundaries as well as borrow-
ings.42 Rubin makes use of several translational techniques and devices
in order to achieve textual, psychological, cultural and aesthetic equiv-
alence. Although absolute exactness is elusive, his translation achieves
both formal and dynamic equivalence in that it retains Premchand’s
message and aims to produce similar effects so as to convey the sense
of the story in the target language.
Morphologically, the English language is different from Hindi.
This calls for syntactic and grammatical adjustment and replace-
ment by means of abridgement, omission, reordering, addition and

220
 P olitics of language A N D culture

adaptation. In the opening paragraph, Premchand’s narrator observes,

‘Kahin chausar bichi hui hai; pau-barah ka shor macha hua hai.’43
Such stylistic usage is acceptable in Hindi; the readership is familiar
with the game. Rubin’s readership maybe unfamiliar with both the
game and the lexicon associated with it. Thus, he translates this as
‘here the cloth for causar** spread out, there shouts of “What luck,
I’ve made an ace and twelve!”[. . .]’.44 He glosses ‘causar**’ by means
of a footnote in addition to an explanation indicating that the cloth
is spread out for the game. Rubin employs several appropriations to
translate Premchand’s imagery for the cross-cultural reader’s discern-
ment: ‘Hakim’ as ‘doctor’, ‘ababeelen’ as ‘swallows’ and ‘Company’
as ‘East India Company’ cater effectively to Western readership.45
‘Wazir’ (minister) is translated as ‘queen’46 since in the British style
chess-game, the queen and not the wazir is empowered next only to
the king.
Rubin annotates the Hindi vocabulary he retains as cultural signs
(e.g. ‘causar’, ‘madak’ and ‘ganjifa’), by means of footnotes which
foreground the reality of cultural distance between the source and
the target cultures. He also provides footnote explanations for ideas
related to cultural and historical intelligibility. The inappropriateness
of an aristocratic, purdah-observing lady going out to the doctor is
elucidated.47 A succinct comment acquaints the readers with Nawab
Asaf-ud-Daulah’s temperament and his regal pursuits.48 Rubin also
employs ‘selective lexical fidelity’ to illustrate the importance of dis-
course in interpreting cultures,49 by leaving certain ‘culture-specific’
words, such as ‘paan’, ‘yogi’, ‘hookah’ and ‘gazal’ untranslated.50 He
adapts interjections and forms of address like ‘janaab’ and ‘Arrey
yaar’51 as ‘my dear fellow’ and ‘old man’,52 respectively, to convey a
sense of the jousting that transpires between the friends.
Rubin’s bilingual reader is likely to experience cultural losses in the
translation, due to the untranslatibility of Premchand’s gynologics. In
this category are phrases and expressions like the typically regional,
and culturally nuanced ‘nigodi’,53 which connotes resentment, trans-
lated as the rather unadorned ‘wretched’.54 The metaphoric sense
of the adage, ‘rani roothengi, apna suhag lengi’55 is duly explained
‘As they say, “If the queen sulks, she’ll only hurt herself.” ’56 Mirza’s
begum’s desperate invective –

Ab Mir Sahab idhar aye to khade-khade nikalwa doongi. Itni

lau khuda se lagate to wali ho jaate! Aap to shatranj khelen
aur mein yahan chooleh-chakki ki fikr mein sir khapaoon!
Jaate ho hakim sahab ke yahan ki ab bhi taamul hai.57

221
 F atima R izvi

translated as –

If Mir Sahib comes back here I’ll have him kicked out
straightaway. If you devoted such fervour to God you’d be
a saint. You’re to play chess while I slave away looking after
this household? Are you going to the doctor’s or are you still
putting it off?58

conveys the begum’s explosive anger but the femininity of the diatribe
is diminished, partly due to the absence of the feminine verb form, the
usage of the pronoun ‘you’ as against ‘aap’ and the somewhat lacklus-
tre translation of the begum’s rhetoric. The absence of the purdah sys-
tem and the inner, confining (zenana), and outer, liberating (mardana),
spaces of an Indian household in the Western cultures compounds the
loss which Rubin attempts to overcome by means of a footnote.
Premchand’s abundant rhetoric, adages and metaphors, ensconced
in cultural patterns, religion, mythology and social practice, intri-
cately woven into his conversational style are handled variously by
Rubin. Rubin employs a similar English idiom in translating ‘[. . .] aap
itna keejiye ki zara tan jaiye’,59 replacing it with ‘But of course you
ought to show a little backbone yourself’.60 Premchand’s idiomatic
expression – ‘[. . .] ya sab ka safaya kar dala?’61 is translated by means
of another, to elucidate the sense – ‘[. . .] or has he let them go to
the dogs?’.62 In other instances, Rubin simply explains Premchand’s
meaning. Thus, ‘[. . .] miyan ki shatranj to hamare ji ka janjal ho
gayee’63 is explained as ‘The master’s chess games are giving us a lot
of trouble . . .’;64 ‘kamli din-din bhari hoti jati thi’,65 as ‘day by day
the misery was getting harder to bear’66 and ‘[. . .] sar dhunti thi’67 is
simply translated as ‘. . . and mourned’.68 Rubin replaces the dramatic
script format employed by Premchand for the occasional ‘he said’,
‘she asked’ in order to keep the dialogic order clear.

Shatranj ke khiladi, the cinematic adaptation

The relationship between literature and films is both old and intimate.
A cinematic adaptation of a literary text is a transposition involving
imitation, transcoding and appropriations. As the new auteur the
director may texture the available fictional material with his imagina-
tion, his creativity and his perceptions of the collective audience sensi-
bility. Total fidelity to the source remains elusive (or unadvisable); film
adaptations may engage with the source text in several ways in the cre-
ative process. The adapted text and its adaptation Shatranj ke Khiladi

222
 P olitics of language A N D culture

belong to the same semiotic tradition. However, the passage of time

that has lapsed since Premchand’s print version was first published
and Ray’s production of Shatranj . . . , as well as the altered political
situation provide for the possibility that the film may be viewed as a
retrospective, postcolonial, indication that ‘[t]he [e]mpire [re-tells]’69
in order to tilt the balance in favour of alternate, indigenous view-
points, indicating that neither the director nor his audience are sub-
ject to colonial culture. Premchand’s narrow point of view squarely
condemns a decadent sovereign’s governance of a decadent people as
the mainstay for the annexation and its passive acceptance. Ray envi-
sions more possibilities in Premchand’s story by means of its historical
contextualisation and by foregrounding the complex political situa-
tion and cultural patterns criticised in it. The annexation of Awadh
remains a background reality in Premchand, in the shape of minimalist
references to the political culture of the times, foregrounded towards
the conclusion in the reduction of a decadent nawab as persona non
grata. This is the nemesis of a kingdom given over entirely to sensual
and artistic pleasures.
The film opens with the device of a narrator/voice-over, deprecating
in half humorous, half ironic-satiric overtones Mir and Mirza’s obses-
sion with playing chess and providing a brief on the prevailing political
conditions, stressing the deliberate, disruptive, political manoeuvres
(or chess-games) of Lord Dalhousie and the John Company and his
loathing of the titular king and the annexations prior to Awadh. This
absolves Premchand’s hedonistic king of some of the blame, by trans-
ferring it onto avaricious expansionist designs of an imperialist coun-
try’s ‘mercantile bottom’ company.70 He introduces a new historical
plot, which, in fact, assumes greater significance by comparison with
the Mir–Mirza plot, at the larger, public level, because it involves the
nawab and emphasises political power play for control over Awadh.
This plot also introduces inner conflict, practically absent in Prem-
chand, by means of articulation of dilemmas by the two historical
personae. General Outram must go on with the business of the annex-
ation despite his disapproval of it and is uncomfortable about British
imperiousness in brushing aside the earlier 1837 treaty. Wajid Ali Shah
introspects and adjudicates over himself when he receives news of the
requirement to endorse a new treaty.71 Ray condemns ‘two negative
forces, feudalism and colonialism. [. . .]Wajid and Dalhousie’.72
In his condemnation, Ray emphasises the clash of oriental and
occidental cultures, by depicting cultural and linguistic patterns. This
is best brought out in three instances: (a) a serious and detailed dia-
logue between General Outram and his aide-de-camp Colonel Weston,

223
 F atima R izvi

about a gifted but derelict king, which concludes with a word of warn-
ing to Weston, who has learnt the Urdu language, and appreciates the
king’s artistic attributes. Outram fails to understand either the culture
or the seeming contradictions within the king – he is a ‘bad’, ‘frivo-
lous’, ‘effeminate’ and ‘worthless king’, who cannot rule, has no wish
to rule, and so he has ‘no business to rule’73; (b) the exchange between
Outram and Dr Fayrer spells out Outram’s unease in compelling the
king to sign the new treaty. As Outram explains his position, Fayrer
admits that he is the only king who has refused to be treated by an
English doctor in preference for ‘quacks’. Outram feels disgusted by
the fragrance of the damask rose attar daubed by the nawab and finds
his preference for both confounding.74 The occidental standpoints,
interposed with Outram’s perplexity about the individuality of the
Nawab, are in effect, a postcolonial ‘writ[ing] back’ by Ray, empha-
sising the linguistic, artistic and cultural contingencies and collisions
that contributed towards the coloniser–colonised conflict, in addition
to political and economic ones. Western notions of supremacy over
the Orient (symbolised by Outram’s dismissiveness of the nawab) and
the oriental culture (symbolised in the persona of the Nawab and the
depiction of the cultural ambiance of the urban capital) stem from
confidence generated by the increasing expanse of British colonies.
Weston may be seen to exemplify the earlier assimilative tendencies
of the British but Outram personifies the steadily increasing empire-
building designs of the British and the chasms of cultural misunder-
standing. Fayrer appreciates Indian perfumes but is sceptical of the
hakims the nawab consults; and (c) an outwardly humorous case in
point involves a tongue-in-cheek advice given by Mirza to Munshi
Nandlal, to teach Collin sahab Hindustani etiquette, while teaching
him Hindustani language. Latent in this remark is resentment for the
mercenary officers of the Company Bahadur.
In addition to unease arising from political power play, linguistic
incompatibility between the British and the Indians, kept in focus
by the presence of an interpreter, points at the power play between
English and Urdu languages. This is best elicited in the dialogue
between Outram and the Queen Mother Aulea Begum and, later,
between Outram and the nawab. Outram’s discomfiture at the Queen
Mother’s observations, his dismissiveness of her explanation of hospi-
tality and co-operation extended to the British, his patronising attitude
towards Wajid Ali Shah, his failure to understand the nawab’s gesture
in physically handing over the crown and the articulation of his sin-
gular purpose in compelling Wajid Ali Shah to sign the new treaty
also stress unease that borders his discernment of the iniquitousness

224
 P olitics of language A N D culture

of British policies. But he has to obey orders. In addition, within Urdu

itself, the polished urban Urdu, spoken by the royalty and the nobility,
carries notions of class distinction and cultural hierarchy. It is con-
trasted with the dialectal Awadhi spoken by the domestic assistants
in Mir’s and Mirza’s households, and Kallu. In being a rural variant,
Awadhi signified a lack of both. Since dialectal usage was confined to
the outskirts of the urban township and the adjoining districts, per-
haps Ray intends to stress the chess-players’ rural antecedents, or that
Lucknow was a mufassil town. Kallu’s dialectal usage is justifiable
because he inhabits the eastern banks of the Gomti. Baroque buildings
were located on the western banks, the ashraaf mostly inhabited the
western banks. In Premchand, Mir’s and Mirza’s decision to play chess
on the nondescript eastern banks is a conscious one aimed at avoiding
both the urban and the royal glare. Premchand’s brief description of
the eastern banks is supportive of the lack of consequential occupancy.
Wajid Ali Shah was a patron of the arts, under whom Awadh
became the focal point of a cultural renaissance and the capital city,
Lucknow, became an unparalleled centre of cultural elegance and lin-
guistic refinement, symbolising grace and perfection. Ray projects the
king as a complex persona, while also depicting him as a pawn in
the larger chess-games of imperialist expansion. The annexation plot
combats dilemmas of representation of the character of the king, as
multifaceted/incapable, artistically inclined/gross, worthless/laudable
and shrewd/profligate; it highlights situations/events leading up to
the annexation. Wajid Ali Shah is introduced by means of vignettes
depicting some of the politically fragile facets of his kingly persona
though, ironically, it is these facets that define him as an aesthete:
(a) The rahas (opera) which he performs to the thumri celebrates him
as an enthusiastic aficionado of music and dance, and a believer in
ethnic syncretism; (b) his leading the mournful Mohorram processions
can be viewed as a populist act; and (c) his preoccupation with women
points at his sexual proclivities. Later, his devout nature and his crea-
tive and leisurely pursuits such as composing poetry and pigeon-flying
are highlighted.
The apparently dissolute king assumes complex dimensions when
visualised in the light of his ability to ratiocinate. His justification of
the surfeit of self-gratification, though dotted with self-blame, also
highlights his helplessness in the existence of the earlier Subsidiary
Alliances treaty. That the people of Awadh were deeply moved by their
king’s removal from the throne, that they did not accept the annexation
as fait accompli and that Wajid Ali Shah’s disarming his soldiery was
shrewdness under guise of ‘passive resistance’75 have been illustrated

225
 F atima R izvi

in Shatranj ke Khiladi, by means of Wajid Ali Shah’s soliloquies, and

by means of Kallu’s report of chaos in the city. The annexation was the
‘logical end’ of the progressive subordination of Awadh to British eco-
nomic and political control and indolence on the part of the kings was
the outcome of this subordination.76 The outwardly peaceful removal
of the king had serious ramifications in catalysing the uprising and
brought about cataclysmic transformation in India’s colonial history.77
Apart from occasional references to the Company’s economic policies,
Premchand ignores these political-economic stratagems.
The second, Mir–Mirza plot which is a renewal of Premchand’s plot
creates a ‘double vision’78 for viewers familiar with Premchand’s text(s)
but occupies an auxiliary position because it involves the nobility. This
plot does not interfere with the Wajid Ali Shah plot, neither do the
characters interact. Mir and Mirza are proponents of a way of life
against the larger drama of the annexation. Premchand’s story is essen-
tially urban but it is Ray’s adaptation which provides the sense of the
city – not so much in terms of its monumental grandeur but in terms
of depicting a way of life in a bustling city. Premchand’s authorial
interventions are foregrounded in Ray to recreate the city’s ambience
and emphasise the disposition of its nobility. Kite-flying, pigeon-flying,
cockfights, ramfights, town criers, eating paan and drawing on the
hookah are only some of the visible aspects that contribute towards
this depiction. Politics surrounding class distinctions are discernible
in Mirza’s admonition of Mir that ramfights are not meant for the
genteel. Behind the scene, a sense of the bazaars and the flourishing
businesses of the day references to commerce, industry, careers and
market-places, which contributed towards making Lucknow a bour-
geoisie power centre, complete the depiction.
Shatranj ke Khiladi also illustrates the moral depravity and the rot
which has set into human relationships, by trans-creating Premchand’s
mischievous statement as regards Mir’s wife’s proclivities, – that for
some unknown reason [‘kisi agyaat karan se (. . .)’]79 she preferred that
her husband stay away from home, into a tense and effective anecdote
involving a clandestine extra-marital affair with her husband’s nephew,
Aqil. Either Mir is unable to comprehend, or he feigns ignorance. Sim-
ilarly, Mirza’s wife’s headache is contrived as a ploy to veil her sexual
desires, but all her wiles cannot arouse Mirza. The Mir–Mirza plot
exposes the sterility that marked the entire social system and espe-
cially the nobility. It is reminiscent of the mal du temps depicted in
T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland’, a fact further endorsed by Premchand’s
own Urdu title ‘Shatranj ki Bazi’, and Saeed Jaffrey’s translation enti-
tled ‘A Game of Chess’.

226
 P olitics of language A N D culture

Ray employs the game of chess as a metaphor for the larger political
annexation. The chess-games of Mir and Mirza are in fact leisurely
pastimes by comparison with the shrewd political manoeuvres of the
East India Company in the annexation of a vast and wealthy kingdom,
against allegations of misrule. The film opens with a shot focusing
the chessmen placed in readiness for the game to commence; Mir and
Mirza play their chess-games on a multi-coloured, satin, embroidered
bisaat (cloth), according to Indian rules; other chess-games are being
played within the zenanas of their households. The warning of the
annexation (checkmate) issued by Munshi Nandlal is coupled with
a detailed appraisal of the British manoeuvres as against Indian ones
in the game of chess. According to Ray, the crux of the film lies in
the final game played by Mir and Mirza wherein the Indian Wazir
is replaced by the British Queen.80 Annexation of kingdom entails
annexation of culture.
Premchand’s stories conclude on a bloody note. Mir and Mirza
draw swords and wound each other fatally. The kingdom falls in a
bloodless coup, with the king seemingly an accomplice; but minor
issues such as aspersions cast on each other’s lineage and frustrations
due to deceitful chess moves lead the chess-players to confront and kill
one other. The irony is unmistakable. Such a deus-ex-machina denoue-
ment seems implausible, keeping in mind the indolence that character-
ises Premchand’s protagonists. Premchand’s justification of the sudden
rush of blood is realistically unconvincing for a people given over to
leisurely lifestyles. For the same reason, Ray’s conclusion is the more
convincing. The single shot fired by Mir (the other pistol having been
surreptitiously removed by him) after much reciprocal condemnation,
which misses Mirza’s arm, following soon after the (behind-the-scene)
annexation of Awadh is a technical juxtaposition. There are no reac-
tions. Mirza’s invite to play yet another game of chess indicates that
for these people, life goes on – nothing changes and nothing interferes
in the pursuit of leisure. The critique Mir and Mirza offer of them-
selves in this final scene that they who cannot manage their wives can-
not be expected to watch over a kingdom; that they need the dark to
conceal themselves on their return journey is more scathing and more
effective than Premchand’s bloody conclusion.

Conclusion
‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’ is a scathing satire on the profligacy characteris-
ing the nobility of Awadh. It deprecates the jagirdars and their life-
styles, but almost ignores the prevailing political conditions. ‘Shatranj

227
 F atima R izvi

ki Bazi’ regales the reader in the language best suited to the delinea-
tion of the Mir–Mirza story and concludes on a philosophical note
genuinely bemoaning their fate. Premchand’s narratives have been lay-
ered with multiple interpretations and possibilities by Satyajit Ray’s
filmic adaptation by means of its historical contextualisation against
the annexation of Awadh. The English language short story does not
operate singularly on the device of ironic sarcasm to convey serious,
utilitarian messages. Premchand’s sarcasm as an indigenous, cultural-
linguistic tendency is the mainstay of his narrative, promulgating his
political message. Rubin’s translation is less nuanced and his rhetoric
less picturesque, but retains the sense and the flavour of the source-
language text to the extent that a cross-cultural translation permits.

Notes
1 As regards the Hindi and Urdu versions of Premchand’s self-translated
texts, it is often difficult to determine which version preceded the other, as
publication was superseded by considerations other than the creative exer-
cise. However, in the case of ‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’ and ‘Shatranj ki Bazi’,
Madan Gopal and Amrit Rai, two of Premchand’s biographers, have given
indication of the sequence of publication.
2 This is Satya Mohanty’s phrase, cited in Sanjay Kumar, ‘Faultlines of
Hindi and Urdu’, Frontline, 28 July–10 August 2012.
3 Shamsur Rehman Faruqi, Early Urdu Literary Culture and History, New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 21–2, 62.
4 Premchand, Sahitya ka Uddeshya (The Purpose of Literature), Allahabad:
Hans Prakashan, Caxton Press, 1967, pp. 100–38.
5 Amrit Rai, Premchand: His Life and Times, Harish Trivedi (trans.), New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 81.
6 Ibid., p. 388.
7 Ibid., p. 205.
8 Ibid., p. 209–10.
9 See Shamsur Rehman Faruqi, Early Urdu Literary Culture and History,
New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 55.
10 Premchand, ‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’ (The Chess Players), in Amar Sahitya-
kar, Premchand ki Sampoorn Kahaniyan; Shatranj ke Khiladi Tatha Anya
Kahaniyan (The Complete Short Stories of Premchand; The Chess Players
and Other Stories), vol. 12, Delhi: Saakshi Prakashan, 2011, pp. 104–5.
11 Premchand, ‘Shatranj ki Bazi’ (A Game of Chess), in Qamar Rais (ed.),
Premchand ke Numaindah Afsane (Representative Short-Stories of Prem-
chand), Aligarh: Educational Book House, 2010, pp. 82–3.
12 Premchand, ‘Shatranj ki Bazi’, p. 95.
13 Premchand, ‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’, p. 114.
14 Vasudha Dalmia, ‘Introduction: Hindi, Nation and Community’, in
Shobna Nijhawan (ed.), Nationalism in the Vernacular: Hindi, Urdu and
the Literature of Indian Freedom, Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2010,
p. 33.

228
 P olitics of language A N D culture

15 See Harish Trivedi, ‘Translating Culture vs. Cultural Translation’, in Paul

St. Pierre and Prafulla C. Kar (eds), In Translation: Reflections, Refrac-
tions, Transformations, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Com-
pany, 2007, p. 279.
16 Premchand, ‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’, p. 104.
17 Premchand, Premchand: Deliverance and Other Stories, David Rubin
(trans.), New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1988, p. 182.
18 Premchand, ‘Shatranj ki Bazi’, p. 83.
19 The translations of Premchand’s Urdu text are my own.
20 Premchand, ‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’, p. 104.
21 Premchand, Premchand: Deliverance and Other Stories, p. 182.
22 Premchand, ‘Shatranj ki Bazi’, p. 83.
23 Ibid., p. 88.
24 Premchand, Premchand: Deliverance and Other Stories, p. 187.
25 Premchand, ‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’, pp. 108–9.
26 Premchand, Premchand: Deliverance and Other Stories, p. 187.
27 Premchand, ‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’, p. 110.
28 Premchand, ‘Shatranj ki Bazi’, p. 90.
29 Premchand, ‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’, p. 105.
30 Premchand, ‘Shatranj ki Bazi’, p. 84.
31 Ibid., p. 86.
32 Premchand, ‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’, p. 111.
33 Premchand, Premchand: Deliverance and Other Stories, p. 189.
34 Premchand, ‘Shatranj ki Bazi’, p. 91.
35 Ibid., p. 95.
36 Premchand, ‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’, p. 114.
37 Premchand, ‘Shatranj ki Bazi’, p. 95.
38 Premchand, ‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’, p. 114.
39 Premchand, Premchand: Deliverance and Other Stories, p. 192.
40 Ibid., p. 216.
41 Madan Gopal, Munshi Premchand: A Literary Biography, London: Asia
Publishing House, 1964, p. 113.
42 Kapil Kapoor, ‘Philosophy of Translation: Subordination or Subordi-
nating: Translating Technical Texts from Sanskrit – Now and Then’, in
Shantha Ramakrishna (ed.), Translation and Multilingualism: Post Colo-
nial Concepts, New Delhi: Pencraft International, 2007, p. 148.
43 Premchand, ‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’, p. 104.
44 Premchand, Premchand: Deliverance and Other Stories, p. 182.
45 Ibid., pp. 183, 190, 188.
46 Ibid., p. 192.
47 Ibid., p. 183.
48 Ibid., p. 188.
49 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back:
Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, London: Routledge,
2002, p. 63.
50 Premchand, Premchand: Deliverance and Other Stories, pp. 188–90.
51 Premchand, ‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’, p. 106.
52 Premchand, Premchand: Deliverance and Other Stories, p. 184.
53 Premchand, ‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’, p. 106.
54 Premchand, Premchand: Deliverance and Other Stories, p. 184.

229
 F atima R izvi

55 Premchand, ‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’, p. 106.

56 Premchand, Premchand: Deliverance and Other Stories, p. 184.
57 Premchand, ‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’, p. 107.
58 Premchand, Premchand: Deliverance and Other Stories, p. 185.
59 Premchand, ‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’, p. 107.
60 Premchand, Premchand: Deliverance and Other Stories, p. 186.
61 Premchand, ‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’, p. 106.
62 Premchand, Premchand: Deliverance and Other Stories, p. 184.
63 Premchand, ‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’, p. 108.
64 Premchand, Premchand: Deliverance and Other Stories, p. 186.
65 Premchand, ‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’, p. 109.
66 Premchand, Premchand: Deliverance and Other Stories, p. 187.
67 Premchand, ‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’, p. 114.
68 Premchand, Premchand: Deliverance and Other Stories, p. 192.
69 See Ashcroft et al., The Empire Writes Back.
70 This is J. Kaye’s phrase, cited in Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Awadh in Revolt
1857–1858: A Study of Popular Resistance, Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1984, p. 43.
71 Satyajit Ray (dir.), Shatranj ke Khiladi (The Chess Players), Big Home and
Music Entertainment 2012, 1977.
72 Andrew Robinson, ‘Satyajit Ray’s The Chess Players’, History Today, July
2007, p. 25.
73 Ray (dir.), Shatranj ke Khiladi.
74 Ibid.
75 Amaresh Misra, Lucknow: Fire of Grace, The Story of Its Renaissance,
Revolution and the Aftermath, New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 2006. p. 110.
76 Mukherjee, Awadh in Revolt, pp. 32–3.
77 Misra, Lucknow, pp. 109–14.
78 Joy Gould Boyum, Double Exposure: Fiction to Film, Calcutta: SeaGull
Books, 1989, p. 53.
79 Premchand, ‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’, p. 108.
80 Satyajit Ray, ‘My Wajid Ali Shah Is Not Effete and Effeminate’, The Illus-
trated Weekly of India, 31 December 1978–6 January 1979, XCIX, p. 51.

Bibliography
Ashcroft, Bill, Griffiths, Gareth, and Tiffin, Helen, The Empire Writes Back:
Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, London: Routledge,
2002.
Boyum, Joy Gould, Double Exposure: Fiction to Film, Calcutta: SeaGull
Books, 1989.
Dalmia, Vasudha, ‘Introduction: Hindi, Nation and Community’, in Shobna
Nijhawan (ed.), Nationalism in the Vernacular: Hindi, Urdu and the Lit-
erature of Indian Freedom, Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2010, pp. 33–63.
Faruqi, Shamsur Rehman, Early Urdu Literary Culture and History, New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Gopal, Madan, Munshi Premchand: A Literary Biography, London: Asia Pub-
lishing House, 1964.

230
 P olitics of language A N D culture

Kapoor, Kapil, ‘Philosophy of Translation: Subordination or Subordinating:

Translating Technical Texts from Sanskrit – Now and Then’, in Shantha
Ramakrishna (ed.), Translation and Multilingualism: Post Colonial Con-
cepts, New Delhi: Pencraft International, 2007, pp. 146–56.
Kumar, Sanjay, ‘Faultlines of Hindi and Urdu’, Frontline, 28 July–10 August
2012, Frontline, 29(15), www.frontlineonnet.com/fl2915/fl291500.htm
Misra, Amaresh, Lucknow: Fire of Grace, The Story of Its Renaissance, Revo-
lution and the Aftermath, New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 2006.
Mukherjee, Rudrangshu, Awadh in Revolt 1857–1858: A Study of Popular
Resistance, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984.
Premchand, Premchand: Deliverance and Other Stories, David Rubin (trans.),
New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1988.
Premchand, Sahitya ka Uddeshya (The Purpose of Literature), Allahabad:
Hans Prakashan, Caxton Press, 1967.
Premchand, ‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’ (The Chess Players), in Amar Sahityakar,
Premchand ki Sampoorn Kahaniyan; Shatranj ke Khiladi Tatha Anya
Kahaniyan (The Complete Short Stories of Premchand; The Chess Players
and Other Stories), vol. 12, Delhi: Saakshi Prakashan, 2011, pp. 104–14.
Premchand, ‘Shatranj ki Bazi’ (A Game of Chess), in Qamar Rais (ed.), Prem-
chand ke Numaindah Afsane (Representative Short-Stories of Premchand),
Aligarh: Educational Book House, 2010, pp. 82–95.
Rai, Amrit, Premchand: His Life and Times, Harish Trivedi (trans.), New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Ray, Satyajit (dir.), Shatranj ke Khiladi (The Chess Players), Big Home and
Music Entertainment 2012, 1977.
Ray, Satyajit, ‘My Wajid Ali Shah Is Not Effete and Effeminate’, The Illustrated
Weekly of India, 31 December 1978–6 January 1979, XCIX, pp. 49–51.
Robinson, Andrew, ‘Satyajit Ray’s The Chess Players’, History Today, July
2007, pp. 20–6.
Trivedi, Harish, ‘Translating Culture vs. Cultural Translation’, in Paul
St. Pierre and Prafulla C. Kar (eds), In Translation: Reflections, Refractions,
Transformations, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2007,
pp. 277–84.

231
This page intentionally left blank
 Part IV

PREMCHAND’S THEMATICS
This page intentionally left blank
 14
KASHI AS GANDHI’S CITY
Personal and public lives in
Premchand’s Karmabhumi

Vasudha Dalmia

Though Banaras and its streets may have once looked the same to the
older pilgrim and tourist, by the early 1930s much had changed in
the city. Despite the inherent conservatism signalled by the many tem-
ples, religious organisations, and the rituals performed at the ghats,
the inner life of the city was undergoing rapid transformation. In fact,
the radical social and political protests of the day not only involved the
new intelligentsia but had also reached the streets. There were several
clubs and venues where the many communities of the city could meet;
there were even four theatre-cum-cinema halls.1
By now, Banaras had a dense network of colleges, which brought
together the youth of the province. Its prestigious Queen’s College,
regarded as the citadel of Western education and founded as early as
1791, could now boast of history that went back more than a cen-
tury. The Nagari Pracharini Sabha, Society of the Propagation of
Nagari, that is Hindi, had grown from a small cell founded in 1893
by three enthusiastic students to an august institution with a library,
assembly hall and a scholarly journal with its own publication series.
Modern Hindi, the prime medium of new thought, had also found
other venues of perpetuation and propagation in this city of its birth –
newspapers, journals and literary gatherings at the houses of patrons
and poets. The circle of poets and connoisseurs around Jai Shankar
Prasad (1889–1937), for instance, intersected with that of Rai Krishna-
das (1892–1985), scion of a wealthy merchant house, and founder
of the art and sculpture collection to be housed later at Bharat Kala
Bhavan.2 And even new visitors from Europe in search of Indian art,
music and philosophy, such as Alice Boner (1889–1981), and Alain

235
 V asudha D almia

Danielou (1907–94), settled on the banks of the river, bringing their

own kind of cultural impetus to the city.3
Theosophy with its hankering for ancient roots, but shot through
with progressive impulses, continued to flourish on its beautiful new
campus at Kamaccha, which was equipped with a library, theatre and
assembly hall. Annie Besant had founded the Central Hindu College,
as an institution in 1898 which could rival Queen’s College, and the
Central Hindu Girls School in 1905. The Benares Hindu University,
founded in 1915, had now been in existence for a decade and a half.
Explicitly and self-consciously ‘Indian-Hindu’ in its architecture and
its residence halls,4 which, radical for the time, observed neither sta-
tus nor intra-caste difference, and in the ‘idyllic-rural’ lifestyles fos-
tered in the residence halls and the generous space devoted to mango
orchards, fields and forests, it drew students from all parts of India,
but particularly from the surrounding region. Gandhi’s call for civil
disobedience in March 1930 elicited an enthusiastic response from
the students, male and female. Though the women’s college could be
distinguished from the rest of campus by its high walls, they were not
proving to be high enough to hold back the girls from participating
in picketing.5
The national movement energised and brought into the public
sphere new sections of the population – ‘untouchables’ and artisans,
students and professors from increasingly politicised campuses, and
for the first time in public life, women of all ages.6 Perhaps the most
significant feature of the civil disobedience movement of 1930 was the
massive participation by women at all levels of public action, many
of them below the age of 17. Not only women fought alongside their
men, but also they often propelled them into action. The agitation for
national freedom came thus to be inevitably and closely coupled with
personal freedom for women. As a police report astutely observed:

The Indian woman is struggling for domestic and national lib-

erty at the same time and like a woman, she is utterly unreason-
able and illogical in her demands and in her methods, but like
a woman, she has enormous influence over the stronger sex.7

Karmabhumi, or the Field of Action (1932), Premchand’s penulitmate

novel, charted the personal and public lives of men and women and
of groups in and around Banaras, as implicated in protest actions led
initially by the educated, but with people of humbler origin in the
second line of command, who were ready to take charge once their

236
 K ashi as G andhi ’ s city

leaders were thrust into prison.8 For, in 1932, after a life of wander-
ing, as teacher, school inspector, author and public intellectual, who
had gained renown as the lively and innovative editor of the prestig-
ious Lucknow Hindi journal Madhuri (1927–31),9 Premchand had
come back to live in the city, around which he had constantly circled
in his fictional work. He had moved to a house in Benia Bagh from
his rural home in nearby Lamhi.10 He brought with him not only an
India-wide reputation as a short-story writer and novelist, but also
as an independent publisher in Banaras; he was the founder-editor of
Hans (1930) and Jagaran (1932), literary-political journals, which he
continued to bring out to the end of his days, though dogged by heavy
debts and plagued by draconian government censorship. Between
1930 and 1934, around 348 newspapers and journals had been forced
to shut down; this included Aaj in Banaras, and the distribution of
the works of Gorky, Marx, Engels and Lenin had been banned. Prem-
chand’s own Hans and Jagaran had punitive bail clamped down upon
them.11 Though he takes the precaution of never mentioning Gandhi
explicitly in Karmabhumi, not even as a Mahatma, as a Gandhian
of radical progressive hue, in his editorials and articles, Premchand
continued to take a clear stand on the social and political issues that
suffused his fiction and propelled his characters, participating inten-
sively in the burning issues of the day – on the widespread peasant
unrest in the United Provinces and Bihar, on its violent suppression,
on the polarisation of Hindus and Muslims, channeled by right-wing
organisations and on the artificially created Hindi–Urdu divide. He
also followed local politics, commenting in minute detail on the mis-
conduct of the city municipal council, sparing neither the city notables
who constituted it, nor the colonial state which not only kept the
municipality miserably underfunded but also actively fostered com-
munal divisions.
Though he kept his distance from organised religion, Premchand
recognised the importance of ritual and temple worship in the life of
the people around him and he sided resolutely with Gandhi on the
issue of Dalit temple entry. The Mahatma had just then embarked on
yet another fast unto death. Begun on 20 September 1932, the fast was
directed against Ramsay MacDonald’s recent communal award pro-
viding for separate electorates for Muslims and Dalits. It also targeted
Ambedkar, who backed the award.12 In an October 1932 editorial in
Jagaran, Premchand came out in strong support of Gandhi’s stand,
chastising caste Hindus for paying only lip service to the idea of caste
equality. Though in this charged climate even the pious in Banaras,

237
 V asudha D almia

this holiest of Hindu cities, were ready to agree that untouchables

were also Hindus:

[they] do not want to give them any social rights, wishing to

see them remain downtrodden and Dalit. So, only one way
remains – that those Hindus who regard Mahatma Gandhi as
the true protector of Hindus, take an oath that they will not
go to the temples that do not allow entry to untouchables,
as dear to the Mahatma as his life, that they will not give
dān or ritual offerings to any panda or priest who regards
the Mahatma as a foe of religion and a non-Hindu . . . If the
Vishwanath Temple does not open up to untouchables, crores
of Hindus will join their untouchable brothers in construct-
ing another temple right here in Kashi and ritually install
Vishwanath there, because Vishwanath is not the god of spe-
cific castes, he is the father and lord of all mankind, and all
have equal right to claim and own him. There is need for such
agitation and it is bound to happen soon.13

In the fictional space of his novel, Premchand could bring about this
miracle; a central scene depicts the dramatic opening of temple doors
to all.
Linked to Gandhi were also his beliefs regarding the changes needed
to better the lot of women. Mahatma had been strident enough in his
views.14 And we have to remember, in speaking of them as strident, a
fact easily forgotten in looking back from our post-feminist vantage
point, that before the early 1920s most upper-caste/class Hindu and
Muslim women in North India observed purdah, which barred them
not only from participation in higher education but also from enter-
ing the public space in any meaningful way. In the service they could
perform for the nation and society at large, and here Gandhi was
clearly addressing these very upper castes and classes, women were to
be regarded as honoured comrades in common service. And in some
public acts, such as picketing against liquor and foreign cloth shops,
they were even to play the leading role. Though he allowed the fam-
ily hierarchies to remain unchallenged and regarded the male head of
the household, if not as the sole then surely as the primary breadwin-
ner, Gandhi also spoke out, as early as 1928, for women’s right to
have the final say in the choice of marriage partner. And he pleaded
for equal property rights for women. Political rights for women had
already been secured, at least on paper, from the early 1920s onwards.
Between 1921 and 1930, Indian provincial legislatures had extended

238
 K ashi as G andhi ’ s city

franchise to women, conferring equal citizenship with men on women

who possessed equal qualifications – literacy, property, age, payment
of taxes and length of residence. In 1931, the Congress Party was to
pass a resolution at its Karachi annual session committing itself to the
political equality of women, regardless of their status.15
For the most part, Premchand could be regarded as echoing the
Mahatma’s known views on the role of women in the household as well
as in the freedom struggle. His wife Shivrani Devi has given us a lively
record of her own short prison term.16 But Premchand pleaded for yet
greater autonomy than Gandhi asked for, when for instance, he spoke
of women’s right to divorce. The narrator of his novel provided space
for Sukhada to voice radical views on the rights of women within mar-
riage, views which no one else in the novel shares, and on which the nar-
rator also withholds comment, thus, in a sense, allowing them to stand
unchallenged. That Premchand shared them, and went further than
even Sukahada could go, becomes apparent in his journal columns.
Populated by a vast cast of characters, Karmabhumi is held together
by an omniscient narrator, who limits his role to providing the bare sto-
ryline, quick character sketches and minimal auctorial comment, using
the earthy idiom Premchand’s readers had become familiar with. The
novel is symmetrically arranged, moving as it does between city and
country in its five sections. But the balance tips in favour of the city sec-
tions. Not only are the first, third and final sections Banaras-centred,
but also they are longer than the other sections. The shorter second and
fourth sections are set in a small mountain village near Haridwar and
in its surrounding countryside. The village is primarily populated by
Dalits; they are chamars or raidasis with small landholdings. Much of
the area belongs to an opulent Hindu monastic establishment with its
young, deceptively friendly, saffron-clad monastic head.
While the major political and social movements of the day under-
gird the narrative, it is conceived of as the field of action of its two
prime protagonists, Amarkant and Sukhada, husband and wife, in
quest as much of themselves, within and without the marriage, as of
their express social and political goals. The personal and the political
thus become inextricably intertwined. The private constantly expands
into the public, only to shrink back into the private in moments of
reverie. There is a new sense, then, not only of interiors but also of a
new self-reflexive interiority. There are four major public agitations.
The first, to save from capital punishment a raped woman who kills
in retribution those whom she sees as representing her rapist, takes
place in Banaras. The second, to gain temple entry for Dalits, also
takes place in the city. The third, to organise collective resistance by

239
 V asudha D almia

an overtaxed peasantry to comply with the revenue demands of the

imperial state, moves to the country. The fourth, to obtain housing for
the urban poor, retrieving city-owned land from avaricious municipal
councilors, returns once more to Banaras.
There is wonderful symmetry even here. For, Amarkant and
Sukhada, soon estranged from each other, respectively lead two of
these agitations, spurring each other into ever more radical action.
Their rivalry with each other, their struggles with customary structures
of feeling, as much as with the power holders and their sense of moral
as well public victory or defeat provide the central narrative tension of
the novel. It is largely focalised through them and moves with them to
their scene of action.

Custom, education and the nationalist call

At first haltingly, but then with increasing self-awareness, Amar and
Sukhada reflect on what they seek in their relationship – support, con-
firmation, encouragement, a new yearning for self-realisation and ful-
fillment, a major secularisation of the kind of spiritual self-realisation
sought through the ages by saint and sinner. We have only to recall
Kabir and other Nirguni Sant poets. There is in Karmabhumi but a
newer kind of reflexivity, of self-awareness and deliberated action that
point to a major shift not only in the author’s practice, but also in a
more general structure of feeling. Marriage for the educated young
no longer means timid acquiescence to what fate has ordained. At the
very least, for the male partner, it means a level of communication that
allows for growth.
Amarkant had been a coddled and indulged child, but his mother
died when he was young; his stepmother also passed away soon, leaving
behind a daughter, Naina, who resembled Amar and deeply loved him.
But the stepmother had driven a wedge between father and son, who
were not able to bond again. Much of Amarkant’s subsequent life was
shaped by his resistance to his father. After squandering years in school,
Amar’s interest in education suddenly perked up. He insisted that he
continue to study against his father’s express wish; perhaps it was this
that gave him new drive. His one support was his college friend Salim.
His wife Sukhada, independent and imperious in her ways, came
into the family as the only child of a wealthy and progressive Lucknow
family. The narrator characterises her and Amar as follows:

Consequently, this young woman with masculine qualities

was wedded to a young man with feminine traits and lack of

240
 K ashi as G andhi ’ s city

manly enterprise (purushartha). If the two were to exchange

clothes, they could well take the place of the other. Femininity
is nothing but repressed manly enterprise.17

The statement that Amar was not manly enough and Sukhada not
womanly enough would seem to suggest that seeing them both restored
to their conventionally assigned roles was the moral thrust and hid-
den agenda of the narrative, whereas what we see unfold before us is
the process by which both outgrow their initial reserve and resort to
action, irrespective of gender, leading them to becoming bitter rivals.
And if one were to push this thesis further, then the bigger social causes
that they and others espouse and the nationalism that undergirds these
causes – Dr Shantikumar would also belong here – would become
mere by-products of their rivalry and thirst for public recognition.
Yet, there seems little doubt that Sukhada poses a threat to many in
the city. As Salim’s succinct description of Sukhada suggests, the differ-
ence between men and women seemed to be narrowing, a change not
entirely welcome in early 1930s’ Banaras:

And then, your wife is a new woman, educated, of free thought,

who likes to go out, watch films, read newspapers and nov-
els. May god protect us from such women! We have to thank
Europe for this. Today, we can be thankful for whatever it is
that our ladies forget to do. It used to be boys who tried to
outstrip each other in this way. Men indulged in teasing the
other sex, but the times have changed. Now, women also take
the initiative and approach men.18

However at this early stage, both Sukhada and Amar are preoccupied
with their immediate domestic surroundings, with making social state-
ments, which mark their difference from the rest of the family.
Lala Samarkant, a self-made man, began life with a small-time
agency for turmeric, to which he added molasses and rice. He was
soon able to lend money on interest and, in a relatively short time,
amassed a handsome fortune. He had regular habits, took regular
physical exercise, led a ritually correct life and maintained a pious
front. His was then a customary life, a cause for no surprise to any-
one. We have only to think of the two types of merchants – the frugal
merchant and the great sahu (banker) – to easily locate the appropri-
ate category for Lala Samarkant. The frugal merchant led an austere
and modest life, avoiding excessive show of any kind. He observed
the religious festivities of the community to which he belonged and

241
 V asudha D almia

performed acts of charity. Education, beyond that which was abso-

lutely necessary to negotiate periodic social change, could have no
place in this world. Banarasi’s fellow merchants in seventeenth-
century Jaunpur had admonished him to give up his foolish pursuit
of learning; it was ‘only for brahmans and bards. A merchant’s son
should tend shop. Do not forget that a man who is too studious has to
beg for food.’19 As in Banarasi’s case, so too here, the tension was not
only between a frugal lifestyle – for Amar’s was the life of an austere
Gandhian – and an excessively opulent one; it was also between the
customary and the educated.
Amar’s education, and that too in the era of high nationalism,
coupled with the Gandhian call to social and political action could
only serve to alienate him increasingly from the merchant existence
of his father. College and university campuses had become precisely
what Lord Curzon had tried to prevent earlier in the century – hot
beds of sedition. Even the most august educational institutions could
not remain immune to the waves of nationalism sweeping through
the country. The novels of the1930s, peopled with students and pro-
fessors, had begun to reflect this politicisation. In Karmabhumi, it is
Queen’s College Professor Shantikumar, a middle-class professional,
who serves as Gandhi’s mouthpiece, forming the pole at the other end
of the universe anchored in the customary lifestyle of Amar’s father.
Anglicised in his lifestyle and thought, it is Shantikumar who brings
social activism to the life of his students:

Shantikumar was about thirty-five years old, very fair and

handsome. His clothes and manners were English and at first
glance, he appeared to be English, with his blue eyes and light
coloured hair. He had a doctorate from Oxford. He was a
fanatic opponent of marriage, an enthusiastic nationalist, and
devoted to social service. Of happy disposition, and warm
hearted, he never missed an opportunity to joke. He was
friendly with students. He took part in political movements,
but covertly. He didn’t come out in the open with this. But yes,
he could be found thundering in the field of social action.20

Here then, in ‘the field of social action’, we have the Karmabhumi of

the novel’s title. Professor Shantikumar’s role as mentor will be key
to Amar’s later decision to abandon merchanthood altogether and
embark on social reform and political action. Initially, it is just lifestyle
choices and Gandhian self-help measures and austerity that herald the
split with his father. Mahatma had placed high value on the process of

242
 K ashi as G andhi ’ s city

producing handspun cloth, on the act of spinning and on the spinning

wheel as symbol of freedom. Khadi had moral value for him and wear-
ing it was a matter of ‘dharma’:

Khadi and spinning were to become not only the unifying

national cause in the peaceful struggle for freedom but also
the basis of a new non-industrial, craft-based economic struc-
ture in independent India. As Gandhi himself admitted, khadi
to him was something of an obsession: ‘Of all my foibles, of
all my weaknesses and fanaticisms or whatever you like to call
them, khadi is my pet one . . . This is sacred cloth.’21

Khadi and the spinning wheel were not only seen as symbols of politi-
cal, social and economic protest, but as a weapon in family warfare,
provoking violent reaction from Lala Samarkant. For maddeningly
enough, Amar justifies the time spent at the spinning wheel as an act
of self-purification: ‘You regard a dip in the Ganga, puja, and reciting
scripture as your prime dharma; I understand dharma as truthfulness,
service and helping others.’22 When Lala Samarkant threatens to disin-
herit him, Amar’s reaction is contrary; severance from home will only
open up new vistas for him:

The day you undertake this virtuous act, the sun of my good
fortune will rise. I’ll be freed of this emotional bond and
become independent. As long as I remain shackled to this, my
self (atma) will remain undeveloped.23

When Amar speaks of the need to create space for his atma or self,
so that it can evolve to its fullest potential, he is surely adding new,
almost Freudian dimensions/connotations to the classic philosophical
term, using it to mean the self of a modern individual. He sees this
quest for the self as a lonely one, not necessarily coupled with the
extension, or even reconfirmation of the self, in the partner. His wife
Sukhada belongs to the other side, so to speak. She sides with his
father, reproaching Amar for his inaction in business. Only Salim, col-
lege friend, would-be poet and son of another newly rich father, can be
looked to for sympathy and understanding.

Merchant son as political agitator

When Shantikumar leads a group of college students, including Amar
and Salim, to a nearby village, it is the Gandhian programme of village

243
 V asudha D almia

uplift which drives the action. On the way back to the city, discussing
the shocking poverty they have witnessed in the village, they come
upon a sudden commotion: a group of villagers stand muttering under
a tree, and two white soldiers guard an Arhar field, from within which
comes the cry of a woman. The students rush towards the field, bam-
boo poles in hand, but they come too late to save the woman. She
limps out of the field, trying to cover herself with the clothes torn off
her body: ‘Who could give back to her the precious thing of which she
had been robbed?’24 As we will learn later, she is Munni, a poor Rajput
woman from the village. Her rapists are British soldiers.
The matter is hushed up and the soldiers quickly transferred. But the
incident has a lasting impact on Amar. These two-penny white soldiers
from the lowest social stratum in England could dare to do this because
India was dependent. The rape of a Rajput woman stands for the rape
of the nation. Amar glows with the prospect of becoming part of a
larger cause, of the nationwide movement to free India. Munni becomes
the cause, the object around which protest can consolidate. She not only
opens the field of action for him, offering him a legitimate avenue of
escape from a profession he cannot subscribe to, but also she provides
him with a sure way of gaining the moral upper hand vis-à-vis Sukhada,
whom he continues to find overbearing and impossibly self-willed.
But annoyingly enough, while others are busy organising protest, it is
Sukhada who looks after the raped woman, offering to find shelter for
her with her widowed mother Renuka Devi who has moved to Banaras.

Why don’t you go one of these days and find out how she is
doing, or do you think you’ve done your duty by delivering
speeches? . . . She’s done nothing wrong, why should she be
punished?25

The contest between husband and wife has begun in earnest. Sukhada
makes Amar feel inferior. Amar does not go to see the victim of the
rape, but six months later, Munni herself appears unexpectedly outside
Lala Samarkant’s shop, first attacking and killing the one white man
who has just visited the shop and then the other with a knife. She’s not
afraid of the noose, she tells the police superintendent who appears on
the scene; she even prays for death. Munni becomes a heroine for the
populace. Two thousand people accompany her on her way to prison.
But her triumph cannot be other than short-lived, as she knows best.
She can never be integrated back into Hindu society, and as the narra-
tor shows with pitiless clarity, in the agitation that follows, she finds
herself being used by all those who set out to help her.

244
 K ashi as G andhi ’ s city

For three months, there is immense excitement in town. Renuka,

Sukhada’s rich, widowed mother, looking for a cause to throw herself
into, has organised and funded the defense. She has become the queen
of the city; Shantikumar and Amarkant are her right and left hands.
On the final day of Munni’s trial in the Sessions Court, presided over
by an Indian judge, with some years in the Indian National Congress
to his credit, there is voyeuristic thrill in the courtroom. Munni recedes
even as she is being celebrated. The narrator is almost cynical in his
report of what goes through our protagonists’ heads:

Amarkant was thinking, the whites dared to do such a thing

because they considered themselves kings of this country.
Shantikumar had already composed a speech in his head, the
subject of which was men’s tyranny of women. Sukhada was
thinking, if she were to be released, she would keep her in her
home and serve her. Renuka was taken with the thought of
setting up a dispensary in her name.26

The judge is a Maharashtrian; a fallen Congresswalla, who nonethe-

less cannot but be sensitive to the strong wave of public sympathy.
A procession all the way to the banks of the Ganga with Munni
at its head is planned. A radiant Munni allows some of the fanfare
to take place, but refuses to be further used by participating in the
procession.
In the course that Amar’s life now takes and the decisions he finds
himself taking, the political and the personal become inextricably
entwined. For one, Amar begins to claim Munni’s release as his vic-
tory; he it was who had roped in his wealthy mother-in-law for the
cause. He shoots into prominence in the city, he is elected municipal
commissioner, he makes speeches and he writes articles for the local
newspapers. He participates in Shantikumar’s voluntary organisation,
Sevashram, which he runs alongside his activities as college professor.
He is a winner in many ways but the avenues for further growth are
hazy, as also the means to earn a living away from his father. Though
he has begun to bask in the wealth and well-being around him and
to fuss endlessly over his newly born son, the clashes with his father
continue. When he declares he is ready to leave his father’s house, to
his immense annoyance, Sukhada also declares herself equally ready
to leave with him. Not only her readiness to sacrifice the comfort of
home made her a burden for Amar, who would have to organise a
whole household, but also she relativised his moral victory and some-
how made hers the greater victory. This moral triumph Amar chalks

245
 V asudha D almia

up against her. ‘His ideals and his dharma had been put to the test
today and he had become aware of his weak position. The camel had
arrived at the foot of the mountain and taken stock of its heights.’27
Henceforth, they will view their encounters with each other in terms
of victory or defeat, jay-parajay.
A climactic scene of an altercation with Lala Samarkant leads to
Amar moving out of the house with wife, baby son, and Naina, to a
much more modest dwelling in Nichi Bagh. He sells hand-spun cloth,
khadi, earning little. But Sukhada outdoes him even here;, as a school
teacher, she earns much more than he does. His struggle to define him-
self, to allow his atma to unfold, is increasingly also defining itself as
a struggle with her. A lost and frustrated Amar has in the meantime
met Sakina, a young Muslim woman, who lives with her widowed
mother, wife of a deceased employee of his father. Their extreme pov-
erty and their small, dilapidated house in Govardhan Sarai offer a
novel insight into life in another part of the city. He is attracted to
Sakina and at a particularly desperate moment in his life, he decides
to fall in love with her. He contrasts her warmth and tenderness with
Sukhada’s marble-like beauty and her domineering manner. He speaks
of his newfound romance as love (muhabbat), invoking once more the
need for the development of his self (atmakavikas), with little care for
what Sukhada or indeed Sakina might need or value. It is a significant
moment nonetheless, a first articulation of the value attached to self-
development as it is brought into direct connection with love. It needs
to be noted, however, that muhabbat, romantic love, is still located
outside marriage. At no stage in the narrative is there any mention of
romantic love within it. Married bliss at its optimal means sharing,
veneration and respect.
Sakina’s presence in the narrative and Amar’s programmatic proc-
lamations seem contrived, a way to highlight the possibility of intra-
communal harmony and Hindu–Muslim amity. Amar goes so far as to
declare that he is Hindu through sheer accident of birth and that he
is ready to convert to Islam and cast his defiant lot with her, though
neither her mother nor an overwhelmed Sakina can take on the social
burden this heroic act would impose on them. When a helpless Lala
Samarkant turns up in Sakina’s humble dwelling to dissuade his son
from such folly, Amar uses the occasion to make further weighty state-
ments. He is going to begin a new life, where women, instead of drag-
ging a man down, bring happiness and light into life. Amar leaves
Banaras without social mooring, not as a victor, which he had been for
a brief spell, but as a loser.

246
 K ashi as G andhi ’ s city

Street action and a woman at the forefront

Placed at the heart of the novel, in the third of its five sections, we
have the story of Sukhada’s meteoric rise to fame in the city, of her
transmutation from a spoilt rich girl to fearless leader, championing
the cause of the poor. Shantikumar is once more the catalyst for the
agitations that follow, as once more, he and Lala Samarkant form
the two poles, representing extreme divergence of opinion regarding
the immediate cause at hand, which now shifts to the issue of Dalit
access to an important city temple. Initially siding with her father-in-
law, once her passion for social justice has been roused, Sukhada will
gravitate towards Shantikumar.
The unspecified Vaishnava temple, the Thakurdwara,28 which
becomes the centre of the agitation, enters the narrative as the loca-
tion of Lala Samarkant’s attempt, with his son gone, to regain public
face as a pious Hindu. He doles out large sums of money for vari-
ous religious occasions, and the congregation grows ever larger. The
Naujawan Sabha, a youth organisation, and Shantikumar’s Sevashram
boys perform there regularly. But a number of Dalits have taken to
carefully edging their way into the assembly and it is not long before
violence erupts in the temple.
The narrator notes wryly that Dalits lived without this privilege for
so long; it seems futile to them to sacrifice their lives for it. They march
in protest, but they are afraid. Amar’s sister Naina, who weaves her
way in and out of the narrative, follows the marchers. Lathi-armed
priests are stationed at the temple doorway, along with Lala Samar-
kant. There is violence and the Dalits run. This is when, Sukhada,
standing in the doorway of the family house, tells Naina, herself on the
run, that Lala Samarkant has instigated the violence:

I don’t consider it right that untouchables enter the temple,

but my blood begins to boil, when I see bullets being fired.
You can regard dharma as lost, when it begins to need bul-
lets to protect it. Look, look, that man has received a bullet
wound. There is blood flowing from his chest.29

There is barely a moment to take note of this sudden turn in Sukhada’s

life, as she jumps headlong into the fray. Courage is as contagious as
cowardice, the narrator tells us. Within seconds, a human wall has
formed with Sukhada at its centre. A bullet whizzes past her. Three or
four men fall. There is more firing, and more people fall. Every man

247
 V asudha D almia

and woman there had begun to understand that they were fighting for
their dharma and their rights.
The narrator and Sukhada seem to have melted into one. Suddenly
and unaccountably, there takes place the first of the change-of-heart
scenes that will eventually resolve all social and political conflict in
the novel. Lala Samarkant comes up and positions himself next to
Sukhada as he shouts: ‘The temple doors have been opened. Whoever
wants to can receive darshan. There are no restrictions for anyone.’
The wounded begin to be carried away on stretchers by the Sevashram
students. The city merchants contribute whatever is needed for the
death rituals. Custom and education come together.
The whole city is eager to celebrate the victors and Sukhada has
become the goddess of victory, as the pyres of the dead are lighted
on the banks of the Ganga. She comes to be regarded as the very per-
sonification of service and compassion (seva aur daya ki murti bani
hui hai).30 No surprise is expressed when Sukhada takes to the street
and leads street action; no mention is made of the fact that she is an
abandoned woman. Social and political service awards such women a
legitimate public role. And with that, the poor and the destitute enter
Sukhada’s world for the first time. Rich and poor honour her. She has
begun to speak at public meetings. She may not be a particularly elo-
quent speaker, but her sincerity seeps through.
Sukhada’s actions are accompanied by attempts at self-justification
that bear closer analysis. She clearly finds it necessary to defend her
defiant position vis-à-vis her absconding husband to two persons in
particular, to the gentle and submissive Sakina, who could be regarded
as portraying the ideal wife, and to Shantikumar, the modern middle-
class professional, who could be expected to understand her fiercely
feminist stance. Visiting an ill Sakina, and faced with her gentle
reproach regarding her lack of tenderness, Sukhada is driven to a pas-
sionate assertion of her rights. A man can betray and ask for under-
standing; couldn’t a woman do the same?
Shantikumar notes dryly that Sukhada has displaced Amar in the
city, as he would find out, were he to come back. He himself could
not have even dreamt of all that has happened in the past year. But
he responds conventionally enough when Sukhada begins to argue
with him about who is to blame, man or woman, for the unhappy
marriages that Shantikumar says have kept him from entering matri-
mony. Man is not woman enough, he feels, not gentle, kind, nurturing
enough; there is some bestiality in his nature. If woman becomes a
beast along with man, both end up being unhappy. Echoes of Gandhi
even here, for Gandhi regarded women as ‘the best exemplars of moral

248
 K ashi as G andhi ’ s city

force in society’.31 Sukhada challenges him. So, a man wins either way,
the fault always lies with the woman, for being not woman enough to
bear with suffering.
Shantikumar is won over; along with him is the reader also being
persuaded to share her point of view? Despite Sukhada’s protest, a
deeply impressed Shantikumar writes to Amar, though he gets not a
gratified but a troubled response. Amar’s letter gives Shantikumar all
credit for this awakening, but typically, he sees Sukhada’s gain as his
loss; that is, he sees the whole matter once again in terms of victory and
defeat. In this short time, a revolution has come about and Sukhada
has become a figure of veneration for him; he feels ashamed that he did
not appreciate her true worth. A defeated Amar is not yet ready, any
more than Sukhada in her victory, to think in terms of reconciliation.

Poverty, taxation and a man of the people

As in all Premchand novels, the city and the country are presented
as deeply interconnected. The second and fourth sections transition
effortlessly into the countryside, ruled and administered as it is by
powers either based in the city or with strong links to it. Despite the
myriad, rapidly sketched characters, who people the small Dalit vil-
lage in the eastern Hills, where Amar lands after his wanderings, the
two village sections are held short, with seven and eight brief chapters,
respectively. Section two lays out the ground for action, as Amar is
absorbed into his new village community, while section four is con-
stituted by the action. Amar’s action is both exemplary and problem-
ridden as far as his own motives unfold, to himself only to some extent,
much more explicitly to the reader. This bifurcated narrative perspec-
tive, which seems to postulate the action itself as unquestionably noble
but the complex motivation propelling it as less than noble, is char-
acteristic for the narrative as a whole. The village narrative follows
a clear social reform agenda, as will become apparent in the reading
that follows here, the psychological insights, the narrator’s and Amar’s
own, seem less programmed, a part of the dynamic of the characters
taking on a life of their own, one that the social reform agenda of the
novel cannot entirely direct.
The village setting in the eastern U.P. hills has almost a textbook
character, where social reform can find fertile soil. The chamars or
leather workers as the dominant caste in the village are not subject
to the usual humiliations of the conventional caste hierarchies; they
have a measure of autonomy in social matters. They call themselves
Raidasis – after the Nirguni Sant Ravidas, a Banarasi of the same caste,

249
 V asudha D almia

revered by many North Indian devotional communities – signposting

that they have begun to claim more respectable status. There is no
zamindar in this village; Gudar functions as the village head (mukhia),
and his foreyard is the meeting place for the village council. Three
years ago, Gudar’s eldest son had fished out of the river and brought
home as his bride-to-be the trouble-torn Munni, who had first taken
refuge in Haridwar, only then to succumb to an accident himself. After
his untimely death, Munni stays on as part of the family, becoming its
female head, in the absence of a mother-in-law. Gudar immediately
recognises the value of Amar’s presence in the village; with his knowl-
edge of English he can help with the upward mobility already apace.
Saloni, the old woman who gives Amar shelter, provides temporary
space for the little school that Amar soon sets up. Thus it comes about
that a Dalit village provides refuge for two who seek shelter from the
moral codes that they have transgressed. Munni as a raped woman has
no place in a society that regards her as tainted, and Amar has sought
marriage with a poor Muslim woman.
It is in this setting that Munni comes into her own, to form the third
of a triangle that will persist past the utopian closure of the novel. The
Dalit social order with its flexible social mores has thus provided ref-
uge to Munni, as also to the financially destitute Amar, and they repay
their debt with village uplift work. Amar and Munni persuade Gudar
and others in the village to give up alcohol, and then to give up eating
carrion, their hereditary right and custom. Amar’s school prospers.
He has been joined in his work by the radical Swami Atmanand, non-
Gandhian, who has left Shantikumar and the city, disillusioned by the
compromises necessary to function in any organisation there.
There are points in the narrative where character prevails over the
narrative agenda of social reform. Sukhada, though still apart from
him, has joined Amar on his activist path; he worships her. Thus he
speaks of worship, an almost distancing emotion, rather than roman-
tic love, as Sukhada had. But this does not lead to a power equation
of any kind. There can be no reconciliation. Sukhada poses a threat –
to his sense of self, to his mode of action. She rushes into impulsive
action, where he hesitates. There never seems to be any question of
subservience; it is he who must bend before her.
A brooding Amar withdraws from Munni as much as from Sakina,
avoiding the usual banter, focusing only on his struggle with Sukhada.
He gives a fiery speech and asks the peasants to entirely withhold tax.
He will realise later that his impulsive decision, prompted by the need
to outdo Sukhada and provoking inevitable counter-violence, would
ill-serve the peasants. For violence gave the state opportunity to act.

250
 K ashi as G andhi ’ s city

Some will be killed; many will land in prison. District Magistrate Gaz-
navi understands the plight of the peasants, he understands Amar’s
need to play the leader, and he sees swaraj coming but more overpow-
ering is the necessity to quell the fire immediately. It is not so difficult
to put a stop to open rebellion, as it is to stop this kind of wind blow-
ing (Khule fasad ko rokna itna mushkil nahin, jitna is hava ko).32
Amar in his excitement has violated the terms of the agreement with
the authorities. His battle is righteous, the ends had been righteous,
but not the means. Amar will realise the extent of his folly in ignor-
ing the means, in the self-introspection that will follow once he is in
prison. Meanwhile, it is too late to stop the brutal police action which
will strip the village of all it possesses; Amar’s school will be gutted,
cattle auctioned and butchered, with Salim personally whipping defi-
ant old Saloni in an unsuccessful bid to reduce her to submission.
Official violence is taking a new path, following a policy, which has
been described as ‘civil martial law’: ‘empowering civil officials with
sweeping, near-military powers, instead of directly calling the army as
at Amritsar in 1919’.33

Bonding in bondage
The fifth and last section shifts from city to countryside and back
again, bringing Sukhada and Amar together, with the insights they
have gained in their time apart, but with their heads still held high. As
we have seen, Amar’s two authority figures, father and mentor, have
almost come together. Lala Samarkant no longer offers opposition –
he has been to the village and he speaks of dharma yuddha, much
like Shantikumar – though he still harbours hard thoughts about his
son, voiced now to his imprisoned daughter-in-law. Sukhada it is who
defends him; whatever Amar did, good or bad, there was always resist-
ance at home. And Amar’s two women also come together. Sukhada
meets Munni in prison, classed in an inferior prison category, but as
spirited as ever, resisting the prison matron’s directions to assign her
to a role as Sukhada’s personal attendant. A proud Sukhada decides to
join Munni in her prison class.
In prison, Amar is undergoing similar transformation. The death
of inmates, visions of the violence visited on old Saloni, darkness and
despair make him turn inwards, first to god and then away from him.
Brooding over cause and effect, it hits him one day, like a flash of
light. This new self-reflexivity, this inward turn of narrative, as novel
in Premchand’s oeuvre as in Amar’s own development, brings him to
a sudden realisation of his own motives. Amarkant sees that he has

251
 V asudha D almia

had no goal, no ideal, no steadfast resolution (vrata), till now. He has

to face the fact that he has been swimming in a wave of opportunism
(upayogavadita).
He is filled with self-reproach. Why had he reacted so hastily?
New for Premchand is this kind of extended analysis of past actions
by the protagonist himself, in which he makes sense of his life, creat-
ing his own personal, historical narration and an analysis that will
inflect his future action.34 For all this new sense and articulation of
interiority, however, it is worth noting that romantic love (muhabbat,
prem, anurag) is still reserved for the relationship outside marriage.
Within marriage, it is in terms of reverence and admiration that he
will learn to regard his wife. Sukhada had gone through a similar
process, and now the same thing was happening to Amar. There had
been loss of life, women widowed, children orphaned. As the lead-
ers were being cast into prison, the next lot of capable people was
taking over and similarly being transported into prison. The state
was reacting with extreme brutality in the village, now in a state of
near ruin.
As readers we witness unbelievable violence, for which there is no
effort to mitigate or make bearable. It is in this dark hour, when all
seems set to wipe out every trace of resistance, that the narrative takes
a deliberate turn. Premchand was intensely aware of what he was
doing when he twisted the narrative thus, in order to become inspi-
rational rather than plunge into yet deeper depths. As early as Janu-
ary 1925, in an article for the journal Samalochak, he had reflected
on the difference between the realist and the idealist novelist; he used
the English terms, placing himself squarely in the latter category. This
is why, he tells, those novels rank high in our esteem where realism
and idealism blend with each other.35 This novelist idealism dovetails
neatly with Gandhian notions of allowing for change of heart in politi-
cal opponents: ‘The appeal of reason is more to the head, but the
penetration of the heart comes from suffering. It opens up the inner
understanding in man.’36
Thus it comes about that, one after another, the prime villains
succumb to change of heart, providing resolutions to one menacing
political conflict after another. Lala Samarkant is able to bring around
Salim, who now embarks on a real investigation of the situation of the
peasants and he cannot believe what he sees. Salim’s detailed report
evinces both pity and impatience from Mr. Gaznavi. No new truths
are revealed in this report, he tells him, and to withhold it. But Salim
sends it up, ignoring Gaznavi’s words of caution, with the result that
he is removed from service within the week. A new civilian, a Bengali

252
 K ashi as G andhi ’ s city

by the name of Ghosh, has been sent in his stead and he has no com-
punctions in furthering the brutality. Salim becomes a peasant leader
and joins Atmanand.
Meanwhile, in spite of Sukhada’s absence, the action in Banaras is
being set forth. There are Gandhian speeches on the maidan, by Lala
Samarkant and others, one more eloquent than the other. Shantiku-
mar, not to be held back any longer, makes the most eloquent Gan-
dhian address. It is not clear whether the people will win or lose, but
strike they must, bearing ill will (bair) towards none:

Humanity cannot always be trampled upon. Equality is a truth

of life. It’s the only situation that makes for the stability of
society . . . This is the age of enlightenment (jagrti). Enlighten-
ment cannot tolerate injustice.37

Shantikumar’s imprisonment propels Naina into action. She has held

back thus far, out of consideration for her in-laws and due to her own
shyness. She steps forward and speaks, on that hillock of bricks in the
golden light of the full moon. She confesses that it is her father-in-law
who had bought the disputed land. She predicts that the time is not far
when the poor will grab power. She asks them to accompany her to
the municipality and thousands follow her, in disciplined formations.
She sings, and they sing with her as she marches. Women from good
houses have entered the public sphere; they court arrest, and they face
violence.
The scene shifts to the municipality board meeting. If in Sevasadan,
this still new institution had played a central role in deciding the fate of
Suman and her fellow prostitutes, here it becomes the scene of climac-
tic confrontation between regressive and progressive societal forces.
Not as the battle ground for newly communalising Hindu and Mus-
lim formations, but the newly rich, both Hindu and Muslim, whose
rapaciousness, in collusion with the colonial state, knows no bounds,
with only a few professional men to speak in the voice of reason and
even justice. The board members can only be glad that Shantikumar
has been taken prisoner. But Mr. Shafiq, university professor, who
knows Shantikumar, steps up and warns of the terrible violence that
will now ensue. Just then, the district superintendant of police (DSP)
calls; he wants orders to fire on the procession being lead by Naina
Devi. The vote in the municipality board is twelve to ten in favour
of firing. Seth Dhaniram, Naina’s father-in-law, remains neutral. The
phone rings again with the news that Manilal, Naina’s husband, has
shot his wife dead; he will be lynched by the crowd, and it is her corpse

253
 V asudha D almia

which is being carried at the head of the procession now. Naina’s death
provides the resolution to the crisis in the city. Dhaniram is the first
to turn around, then Hafiz Halim, Salim’s father. They step out to
address the people and Hafiz Halim’s is the last speech to the crowd.
He speaks of the beginning of a new phase, naya daur. Naina’s corpse
is carried to the Ganga: ‘The battle which had been initiated by a devi
six months ago had been brought to a close by another devi by sacrific-
ing her life.’38 Not Amar, but his women win. And the narrator dwells
lovingly on each moment of this idealised reality.
The congregation in prison undergoes similar reconciliations. It is
Sukhada whom Amar has most wronged and he asks for forgiveness
before everyone. But Sukhada does not let him off so easily. When
alone, she accuses him of being a person filled with anger (upar se
niche tak krodh krodh). If he had made any overtures, written to her,
he could have moved her. The fault had lain not with her person-
ally, but her upbringing. But they could let that rest now; he was to
tell her who had won, whereupon they both proceed to claim victory.
Sukhada tries to clinch the argument by saying: ‘You instigated rebel-
lion and I quenched it by disciplined action.’ They will continue to
squabble, for the time being; however, it is he who has the last word:
‘You fulfilled what I had set out to do.’39

Conclusion
The narrative has thus negotiated its way through the new social
parameters that the educated couple at its heart are setting themselves,
as they explore their potential in this period of political growth, which
makes possible emancipation from both family norms and societal
expectations. But it has also exposed the limits of its growth, as Amar
and Sukhada came up against the boundaries of the possible, both by
way of self-fulfillment and fulfillment in their relationship. The ‘deeper
inwardness’ and the‘radical autonomy’40 coupled with it thwart the
very togetherness that they have simultaneously sought and at the end
partially achieve. Premchand is too much of a ‘realist’ after all, for
fairytale harmony to be established at the end; the personal power
struggle between the two cannot and does not allow for that. For
such are the challenges and contradictions of the two-fold thrust of
their endeavour, their quest for expansion of self and for fulfillment in
partnership. The ambitions undergirding their seva, service, and their
thirst for public recognition make for precarious balance. Thus it is
that, till the very end, Amar and Sukhada, though realising, in their
way, the Gandhian ideal of marriage welded together by service to the

254
 K ashi as G andhi ’ s city

nation, remained locked in their power struggle and in a relationship

defined in terms of victory and defeat, jay/parajay. And so it comes
that the personal, political and social at all times remain deeply impli-
cated in each other.

Notes
1 Balmukund Varma, Kashi ya Banaras, Banaras: Self-published, 1935. I am
grateful to Shri Shashank Singh of Banaras, for drawing my attention to
this work and providing me with a photocopy.
2 I look forward to the long-promised publication of Prasad ki Yad, 400-
page manuscript in possession of Professor Kalyan Krishna.
3 An only partially told story of the 1930s’ cosmopolitanism of Kashi.
4 Leah Renold notes the architectonic features that distinguished the BHU
campus from the exclusive Indo-Saracenic style followed in colonial build-
ings and campuses (e.g. Allahabad and Mayo College in Ajmer) upto that
period. Frank Lishman, the architect of central campus buildings, added
to the Indo-Saracenic style conspicuously Hindu features and ornamen-
tation, such as the horizontal layering of temples, shikhara, mandapa,
and the bell-gracing temple entrances. Leah Renold, ‘A Hindu Temple of
Learning: The Hybridization of Religion and Architecture’, in Michael
S. Dodson (ed.), Banaras: Urban Forms and Cultural Histories, London:
Routledge, 2012, pp. 180–9.
5 See Leah Renold, A Hindu Education: Early Years of the Banaras Hindu
University, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005, for a graphic account
of the early life of the campus. For the details above, see in particular
pp. 183, 153 and 206.
6 See Francesca Orsini, ‘Women and the Hindi Public Sphere’, in Francesca
Orsini (ed.), The Hindi Public Sphere, 1920–1940: Language and Liter-
ature in the Age of Nationalism, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002,
pp. 243–89.
7 Note from U. P. Police Inspector Dodd, 3 September 1930. Cited in Sumit
Sarkar, Modern India, 1885–1947, Madras; Bombay; Delhi: Macmillan,
1983, p. 290.
8 Karmabhumi was written first in Devanagari, and published in Novem-
ber 1932 by Saraswati Press in Banaras. Its Urdu version was published in
Delhi in 1934. According to Amrit Rai in Qalam ka Sipahi, it was written
from April 1931 to 5 September 1932. There is some difference of opinion
regarding the time of its composition. See Premchand, Premchand Racha-
navali, Dr Jabir Hussein, Sushil Trivedi, Indra Sagar, Madhukar Singh,
Balram, Ram Anand, Kanti Prasad Sharma and Rima Parashar (eds), 2nd
edition, 20 vols, Delhi: Janvani Prakashan Pvt Ltd., 2006, vol. I, pp. 63–4,
for details.
9 See Amrit Rai’s poignant biography of his father, Amrit Rai, Qalam ka
Sipahi, Allahabad: Hans Prakashan, 1962, p. 472.
10 Rai, Qalam ka Sipahi, p. 499.
11 Rekha Awasthi, ‘Samgathanki Rashtriya Anivaryata’, Naya Path, January–
June 2012, Special Issue on the 75 years of the Progressive Cultural
Movement in India, pp. 24–37.

255
 V asudha D almia

12 See Gail Minault, Ambedkar: Towards an Enlightened India, Delhi: Penguin-

Viking, 2004, pp. 47–55, for Ambedkar’s stand on the vexed issue of the
British policy of providing separate electorates. Mahatma broke his fast
four days later; the country had watched with bated breath, with a much
pressured Ambedkar reluctantly agreeing to a compromise: the famous-
infamous Poona Pact.
13 Premchand, Premchand Rachanavali, vol. 8, p. 141. Editorial in Jagaran,
5 October 1932, with the heading, ‘Kashi’s Blemish/Disgrace’ (kalank).
14 As Madhu Kishwar showed in her pioneering 1985 two-part article pub-
lished in EPW, Madhu Kishwar, ‘Gandhi on Women: Part I’, Economic
and Political Weekly, 1985, 20(40): 1692. Also see chapters 4 and 5 of
Geraldine Forbes, Women in Modern India; The New Cambridge History
of India, 4/2, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, that I draw
information in the following account.
15 Gandhi, Young India, 31 April 1930. Cited in Kishwar, ‘Gandhi on
Women: Part I, pp. 1693, 1696.
16 Shivrani Devi Premchand, Premchand: Ghar Mein, Delhi: Atmaram and
Sons, 1991 (first published 1956), pp. 126–30.
17 Premchand, Premchand Rachanavali, vol. 5, p. 239.
18 Ibid., pp. 325–6.
19 Banarasi Das, Ardhakathanak, Half a Tale, Jaipur: Rajasthan Prakrit
Bharati Sansthan, 1981, p. 33.
20 Premchand, Premchand Rachanavali, vol. 5, p. 250.
21 Cited in Emma Tarlo, Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India,
London: Hurst and Company, 1996, p. 87.
22 Premchand, Premchand Rachanavali, vol. 5, p. 262.
23 Ibid., p. 264.
24 Ibid., p. 251.
25 Ibid., p. 255.
26 Ibid., p. 276.
27 Ibid., p. 268.
28 Possibly a reference to the city’s Gopal Mandir.
29 Premchand, Premchand Rachanavali, vol. 5, p. 375.
30 Ibid., p. 377.
31 Kishwar, ‘Gandhi on Women: Part I, p. 1692.
32 Premchand, Premchand Rachanavali, vol. 5, p. 443.
33 Sarkar, Modern India, p. 318. The phrase ‘civil martial law’ stems from
chapter 5 of D. A. Low’s study, D. A. Low, Congress and the Raj: Facets
of the Indian Struggle, 1917–1947, London: Heinemann, 1977.
34 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989, p. 251.
35 Premchand, Premchand Rachanavali, vol. 7, pp. 292–3.
36 M. K. Gandhi, ‘Speech at Birmingham Meeting’, in The Collected Works
of Mahatma Gandhi (Electronic Book), Vol. 54. New Delhi: Govern-
ment of India, 1999, pp. 43–8. Cited in Karuna Mantena, ‘Another Real-
ism: The Politics of Gandhian Nonviolence’, American Political Science
Review, 2012, 106/2: 463.
37 Premchand, Premchand Rachanavali, vol. 5, p. 488.
38 Ibid., p. 494.
39 Ibid., p. 500.
40 Taylor, Sources of the Self, p. 363.

256
 K ashi as G andhi ’ s city

Bibliography
Awasthi, Rekha, ‘Samgathanki Rashtriya Anivaryata’, Naya Path, January–
June 2012, Special Issue on the 75 years of the Progressive Cultural Move-
ment in India, pp. 24–37.
Das, Banarasi, Ardhakathanak, Jaipur: Prakrit Bharati Sansthan, 1981.
Forbes, Geraldine, Women in Modern India; The New Cambridge History of
India, 4/2, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Gandhi, M. K., ‘Speech at Birmingham Meeting’, in The Collected Works of
Mahatma Gandhi (Electronic Book), vol. 54, New Delhi: Government of
India, 1999, pp. 43–8.
Kishwar, Madhu, ‘Gandhi on Women: Part I’, Economic and Political Weekly,
1985, 20(40): 1753–8.
Low, D. A. (ed.), Congress and the Raj: Facets of the Indian Struggle, 1917–
19, London: Heinemann, 1977.
Mantena, Karuna, ‘Another Realism: The Politics of Gandhian Nonviolence’,
American Political Science Review, 2012, 106(2): 455–70.
Minault, Gail, Ambedkar: Towards an Enlightened India, Delhi: Penguin-
Viking, 2004.
Orsini, Francesca, The Hindi Public Sphere, 1920–1940: Language and Lit-
erature in the Age of Nationalism, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Premchand, Shivrani Devi, Premchand: Ghar Mein, Delhi: Atmaram and
Sons, 1991 (first published 1956).
Premchand, Premchand Rachanavali, Jabir Hussein, Sushil Trivedi, Indra
Sagar, Madhukar Singh, Balram, Ram Anand, Kanti Prasad Sharma and
Rima Parashar (eds), 2nd edition, 20 vols, Delhi: Janvani Prakashan Pvt
Ltd., 2006.
Rai, Amrit, Qalam ka Sipahi, Allahabad: Hans Prakashan, 1962.
Renold, Leah, A Hindu Education: Early Years of the Banaras Hindu Univer-
sity, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Renold, Leah, ‘A Hindu Temple of Learning: The Hybridization of Religion
and Architecture’, in Michael S. Dodson (ed.), Banaras: Urban Forms and
Cultural Histories, London: Routledge, 2012, pp. 170–91.
Sarkar, Sumit, Modern India, 1885–1947, Madras; Bombay; Delhi: Macmil-
lan, 1983.
Tarlo, Emma, Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India, London: Hurst
and Company, 1996.
Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Varma, Balmukund, Kashi ya Banaras, Banaras: Self-published, 1935.

257
 15
DEMYSTIFYING THE
SANCTITY OF THE VILLAGE
COUNCIL
‘Ghareeb ki Haye’ as a counter-narrative
to ‘Panch Parmeshwar’1

Shailendra Kumar Singh

Any position supposes its intrinsic op-position. All sto-

ries comprise within themselves the ghosts of the alter-
native stories they are trying to exclude.2

In his pioneering efforts to shape as well as outline the contours of

Urdu and Hindi literature, Premchand (1880–1936) had to grapple
with a wide range of issues that understandably had some bearing on
his early works. The hitherto existing Urdu tradition was characterised
by an astounding variety because of the significant contributions made
by writers such as Pandit Ratan Nath Sarshar, Deputy Nazir Ahmad,
Abdul Halim Sharar and Mirza Muhammad Hadi Rusva. But while
this variety offered multiple cornerstones to Premchand, an obvious
advantage for any creative writer, it still was not enough to facilitate
his project of writing literature having purpose and topicality. With
no desirable legacy to be inherited, the setting up of yardsticks for
charting out a different trajectory altogether thus turned out to be
a particularly knotty issue for him.3
As opposed to the richness and heterogeneity that Premchand
encountered through the Urdu language, there were only a few liter-
ary precursors in the Hindi tradition such as Devkinandan Khatri. His
Chandrakanta (1888) had been a phenomenal success owing to the
elements of escapade, courtship, mystery and magic (tilism) that were
abundantly present in it. In his essay titled ‘Upanyas’ (Novel; 1925),

258
 S anctity of the village council

Premchand himself acknowledges that prior to Khatri: ‘the field was

empty in Hindi’.4 This alarming dearth of novelists worthy of emula-
tion was somewhat compensated for by the fact that the Hindi liter-
ary tradition could at least boast of works like Bhuneshwar Mishra’s
Gharau Ghatna (Household Incident; 1893) and Balwant Bhumihaar
(1901) and Mannan Dwivedi Gajpuri’s Ramlaal (1917) – works that
were rooted in village life and hence offered an alternative for socially
committed writings.5 In Premchand’s case, such an outlook was also
inflected by a nationalist orientation due to the Swadeshi movement
that took place in Bengal. However, it would have been some consola-
tion if the Bengali literature had been able to provide an alternative for
him. But that was not to be since Premchand considered it too femi-
nine for his purposes.6 Add to this his familiarity with and translations
of the works of Tolstoy, Dickens, George Eliot, Wilde, Galsworthy and
Maeterlinck among others, and what we have is an extraordinary jour-
ney of perpetual self-fashioning and an eclecticism that precipitated
Premchand’s own idiosyncrasy. His early writings constitute a neces-
sary and yet important step in that journey towards the development
of such an idiosyncrasy. In this chapter, I seek to examine the tentative-
ness of Premchand’s formative years as a writer which gets manifested
for instance through his diametrically opposite portrayals of the village
council in ‘Ghareeb ki Haye’ (The Power of a Curse; 1911) and ‘Panch
Parmeshwar’ (The Holy Panchayat; 1916).7 I argue that much before
the palpable venality of the village council that one encounters in
Godaan (1936), ‘Ghareeb ki Haye’ itself serves as a counter-narrative
to ‘Panch Parmeshwar’, thereby demystifying the sanctity of the indig-
enous institution of justice. It also raises pertinent questions vis-à-vis
representation in general and realism in particular even as it demon-
strates the paradoxes that Premchand enters into, albeit inadvertently,
while trying to determine the organising principles of his fiction.

Village council as an alternative

institutional paradigm
In part, Tolstoy’s short story ‘Where Love Is, God Is’ (1885) may have
been the motivating impulse for ‘Panch Parmeshwar’. This conjecture
finds significant credence from the fact that, in 1914, Premchand had
been reading Tolstoy’s short stories which he later translated and pub-
lished in a volume under the title Prem Prabhakar.8 In this volume,
Premchand’s translations tantamount to an exercise in adaptation
so that not only ‘Where Love Is, God Is’ is translated as ‘Prem Mein

259
 SHAILENDRA KUMAR SINGH

Parmeshwar’ but also Martin and Stepanitch become Moorat and

Laloo, respectively, while The Bible is substituted by The Ramayana.
Furthermore, the plight of the anonymous old woman in Tolstoy’s story
and Martin’s near-epiphanic realisation that love literally becomes the
dwelling place of God are themes that are picked up by Premchand for
his own work and subjected to a perceptive reconfiguration in order
to drive home the belief that divinity manifests itself through a panch.
Premchand’s reservations vis-à-vis the institutions of colonial
modernity such as courts, factories and the police and the irreversible
corrosion of values that they engender are quite evident in his writings.
In ‘Namak Ka Daroga’ (The Salt Inspector; 1913),9 a short story writ-
ten three years before ‘Panch Parmeshwar’, the court is represented as
a breeding ground for acts of unscrupulousness and subornation. The
efficacy of Pandit Alopideen’s unusually proficient bribing skills is all
too apparent as the officials, clerks, peons, lawyers and the watchmen
are literally slaves (ghulam) to his tempting and lucrative overtures.10
Viewed in this context, it can be plausibly argued that the village coun-
cil in ‘Panch Parmeshwar’ is represented as an alternative institutional
paradigm of justice, though not strictly in the Gandhian sense of pro-
viding a blueprint for a constructive programme in the nationalist
struggle for swaraj (self-rule). This can be corroborated by the fact
that in the story ‘Khala Jan’, Jumman’s aunt, who is ill-treated by her
nephew and his wife, admits: ‘I am a poor helpless widow, unable to
fight in a court or durbar.’11
Here the village council serves as a final refuge for redressing the
grievances of the downtrodden, marginalised and the underprivileged
individuals of the countryside who are at a complete disadvantage to
access either the legal systems of colonial modernity or the more tradi-
tional forms of jurisprudence that were available through monarchy at
any king’s court (durbar). The sense of autonomy and self-sufficiency
that the story foregrounds through the romanticised depiction of the
village council virtually anticipates the boycott of law courts, among
many other things that took place during the non-cooperation move-
ment (1920–22).12 Premchand’s ideal, though not envisioned as a part
of his patriotic commitments, can nevertheless be construed as some-
thing of a Gandhian effort in order to find out a practical alternative to
the legal systems that were instituted by the Britishers; the only differ-
ence being that the former’s vision is that of a social reformer while the
latter’s is that of a nationalist leader. This is because Gandhi’s views
regarding the function of the village council are not far removed from
the one that Premchand advocates: ‘An ideal Indian village . . . will
have Panchayats for settling disputes.’13

260
 S anctity of the village council

Premchand’s close familiarity with the peasant culture of the United

Provinces is faithfully reproduced in his fictional as well as journalistic
writings. However, he does not always provide a one-sided account
of their oppression, exploitation and victimisation, but delineates at
times the subtle ways in which such a society offered its own form of
resistance. The traditional practice of nai dhobi band, a unique form
of social boycott, can be found in at least two of his short stories
namely ‘Ghareeb ki Haye’ and ‘Dand’ (Punishment; 1925).14 The vil-
lage councils played a pivotal role in such boycotts,15 which also gives
the reader a tenable clue about the source for Premchand’s delineation
of the same as an alternative institutional paradigm. In other words,
‘Panch Parmeshwar’ not only serves as an inadvertent prelude to the
non-cooperation movement but also prefigures, though only inciden-
tally, the increasing relevance of the village councils in the course of
the peasant protests that took place in Awadh (1918–22).16
The organising principle of the story unequivocally suggests that
justice is paramount even if it means compromising one’s friendship
as in Algu’s case or giving up one’s overwhelming thirst for revenge
as it happens with Jumman. It bears a striking similarity to Rawls’s
idea that: ‘interests requiring the violation of justice have no value’.17
Ostensibly, it appears that ‘Panch Parmeshwar’ is a direct reversal of
Sister Nivedita’s story ‘The Judgement Seat of Vikramaditya’ (1907).
This is because the sanctity of the seat of justice in the former does
not presuppose a pure-hearted judge as it does in the case of the latter
but rather remains unsullied even when a reluctant Algu or a spiteful
Jumman are called upon to dispense justice. However, Premchand’s
virtuosity as a writer lies in the way in which he dramatises the inner
conflicts of Algu and enumerates the lessons that Jumman learns as a
panch, both of which constitute a Rawlsian sense of ‘reflective equilib-
rium’.18 Besides, Khala Jan’s right to justice that the story underlines,
notwithstanding her old age and widowhood, implies a certain invio-
lability that merits comparison with Rawls’s observation regarding the
uniqueness of every individual in a society: ‘Each person possesses an
inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a
whole cannot override.’19 Thus, the sacralisation of the village council
reflects the work of a quintessential progressive who visualises a rural
society based on egalitarian principles.

Chronicler’s aspiration versus the reformist impulse

By his own admission, Premchand considered himself as a chroni-
cler of the ‘peasant society’.20 However, he also believed that only an

261
 SHAILENDRA KUMAR SINGH

integration of realism and idealism could produce novels of the highest

quality.21 These two principles thus make competing claims on his fic-
tion since his chronicler’s aspiration is essentially at loggerheads with
his reformist impulse. In his early writings, the questions of fidelity
and verisimilitude that the chronicler in him insists on are not only
counteracted by his reformist impulse, but in turn also able to sub-
stantially undermine the latter. In ‘Panch Parmeshwar’, the ideal of the
village council unmistakably coexists with the more realistic and hence
credible aspects of the plot that can be identified at the level of char-
acter, event and setting. But more importantly, it provides a critical
perspective on the implicit factors that determine the literary texture
of Premchand’s fiction.
At the level of character, Algu and Jumman are represented as two
close friends who share a spirit of camaraderie between themselves
because of their like-mindedness. Yet, both of them are sufficiently
individualised so that while Jumman is an inconsiderate nephew but a
discreet husband who ‘felt it would be unwise to interfere in the func-
tioning of the “officer on duty” – the mistress of the house’,22 Algu is a
conscientious panch who nevertheless also knows how to quieten his
wife with a stick. Both these protagonists are perpetrators in their own
different ways and it is this distinct quotient of human fallibility that
renders a realistic quality to their virtuous deeds that they are able to
carry out in their individual capacities as a panch. Moreover, the ill-
treatment that is meted out to Khala Jan and Samjhu’s ox is delineated
by Premchand as a sequence of realistic events that culminate, either
directly or otherwise, in a need for the village council. The rural setting
of the story too is dexterously woven within the fabric of the narrative
so as to give it a lifelike quality instead of simply representing it as an
idyllic space. The country folks who ridicule Khala Jan’s bent back,
sunken cheeks and white hair, together with the many opponents and
enemies that both Algu and Jumman have, sufficiently corroborate
this since their presence strongly suggests a sense of acrimony that
seems to pervade the entire cultural ethos of the village.
Premchand’s sympathetic inclination towards people belonging to
the countryside engenders a chronicler’s aspiration which then gets
externalised through a large body of fiction-writing that cuts across
multiple genres such as novels, plays and short stories. It virtually pro-
vides him a perspective from within. However, this perspective also
gets substantially inflected by his middle-class assumptions which
unmistakably carry explicit overtones of a patronising attitude. In his
book on Premchand, Jainendra Kumar gives a candid account of an
incident that reveals this outlook; almost catching the reader off guard,

262
 S anctity of the village council

who is otherwise usually accustomed to idealising the former to some

extent or the other. On their way to Lamhi once, Premchand, Shivrani
and Jainendra were unable to find labourers who could carry their lug-
gage. Consequently, Premchand asked the local farmers for assistance,
who in turn refused because working as labourers was simply beneath
their dignity. Enraged at this, he told his friend: ‘Look Jainendra, they
would’ve earned at least half a rupee. The village won’t be more than a
mile or so from here. But who can reason with these jaahils [ignorant,
illiterate and foolish as well as uncivilised and boorish] who lack a
basic sense of judgement?’23 Even in his journalistic writings, which are
relatively more measured, Premchand states that the victimisation of
peasants is at times a logical outcome of their own stupidity.24 So if his
sympathetic inclination gives rise to a chronicler’s aspiration, his pat-
ronising attitude engenders a reformist impulse which then recognises
the need to ‘awaken and embrace the villagers’.25 As Shashi Bhushan
Upadhyay puts it: ‘Thus, although Premchand strongly favours the
inclusion of the “dis”-privileged in the national mainstream, they, in
a way, remain outsiders.’26 Premchand’s idealistic realism can thus be
construed as a yoking together (though not violently in the Johnsonian
sense) of two different tendencies which in turn are determined by a
reformist impulse and a chronicler’s aspiration, respectively. However,
as has already been indicated, this reformist impulse is itself a direct
consequence of a patronising attitude in the same way that the chroni-
cler’s aspiration is an invaluable product of a sympathetic inclination.
The elements of causality can be understood as follows:

A Patronising attitude  Reformist impulse  Idealistic

B Sympathetic inclination  Chronicler’s aspiration  Realism

Premchand’s fiction which is initially caught at the crossroads of con-

descension and sympathy has to then navigate its way through the
other two sets of parallel stages which in turn gives us a nuanced
understanding of the multi-layered nature of negotiation that under-
lies his works.

Demystifying the sanctity of the village council

What is incident but the illustration of character?27

Idealistic realism, the defining characteristic of Premchand’s early

works, is also an effective strategy of narration that can be understood

263
 SHAILENDRA KUMAR SINGH

in terms of plot structure. This involves two registers, namely that of

delineation and denouement. ‘Panch Parmeshwar’ seems to easily fit
in to these two registers so that while the delineation of Khala Jan’s
and Algu’s grievances is anchored within the realm of realism, the
denouement of the story unavoidably hinges upon an idealistic asser-
tion. However, during this phase, Premchand also wrote stories like
‘Ghareeb ki Haye’ that flout such convenient categorisations. Here,
the concluding sections of the plot are neither idealistic nor realistic
but rather serve to illustrate the veracity of an aphorism or simply a
cultural belief based on abstract reasoning.
The inadequacy of idealistic realism as a definitional category in the
case of ‘Ghareeb ki Haye’ can be somewhat compensated for, by tak-
ing recourse to a more sophisticated, inclusive and encompassing set of
terms from Scholes and Kellogg, namely the representational and the
illustrative.28 The plight of Munga, the principal character, who is bla-
tantly hoodwinked by Munshi Ramsevak is explicitly representational
and constitutes the looming crisis of the story. As opposed to this, its
conclusion gradually drifts in to the domain of the illustrative, thereby
corroborating the efficacy of a destitute widow’s imprecations. How-
ever, in order to illustrate the principle of divine retribution, Prem-
chand has to ineluctably depend upon a more representational aspect
of the village council which in turn underlines the incapacity of the
indigenous institution of justice. The village councillors in this story
have been irrevocably corrupted, which ultimately clouds their sense
of judgement: ‘They had had a taste of his [Ramsevak’s] money and
that was that. The council acquitted him and adjourned.’29 Like Khala
Jan in ‘Panch Parmeshwar’, Munga too is at a strategic disadvantage
in relation to the courts and hence relies solely on the village council
for justice: ‘She didn’t have any influence in the courts, she couldn’t
read or write or keep accounts. To be sure, there was some hope in
the panchayat, the village council.’30 The representational aspect of
the village council in ‘Ghareeb ki Haye’, with its emphasis on venal-
ity, thus serves as a counter-narrative to the illustrative aspect of the
indigenous institution of justice in ‘Panch Parmeshwar’. The sanctity
of the village council, a cultural belief within the rural communities, is
already demystified in the former, much before being presented as an
ideal in the latter.
Within such a framework, Nagin’s death, Ramsevak’s conversion
into an ascetic and Ramgulam’s imprisonment are incidents that illus-
trate the character of Munga as a necessary presence. Her dishevelled
appearance, hysterical laughter and intimidating bouts of madness
immediately call to the reader’s mind the character of Bertha Mason

264
 S anctity of the village council

in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847). However, unlike Bertha, who

is the madwoman in the attic, Munga is a madwoman outside the attic
who uses her spatial mobility to her advantage as her dreadful night-
wanderings come to haunt and eventually kill Nagin. In addition to
this, Premchand also underscores the hypocrisy and the double stand-
ards of the rural community by foregrounding the inefficacy of the
village council on the one hand and the strength of nai dhobi band as
a form of social boycott on the other. This is because the very villagers
who are otherwise indifferent to Munga’s predicament and can only
delight in Ramsevak’s embarrassment and loss of face feel obligated
to intervene and consequently impose a social boycott as soon as the
Brahman widow dies. As David Rubin points out:

It is worth noting that in this tale Munshi Ramsevak is ostra-

cized not because he is a wicked man – which everyone has
accepted throughout his career – but because he is technically
the cause of a Brahman’s death. Premchand’s attitude toward
the villagers is no less critical than it is toward Munshiji.31

In the same year that ‘Panch Parmeshwar’ was published, Premchand

wrote another story titled ‘Ishwariya Nyaya’ (Divine Justice; 1916).32
This story too underlines the inadequacy of law courts to dispense jus-
tice in a disinterested manner. Here Bhanu Kunwari, another widow,
gets her land back from Munshi Satya Narayan by simply appealing
to the latter’s conscience and sense of morality. Divine justice is again
shot through human agency and yet the author makes a subtle dis-
tinction since there are no alternative institutional procedures that are
available in this case. On the contrary, it is only the individual’s ethi-
cal propriety that gets emphasised. Moreover, in ‘Panch Parmeshwar’
itself, Premchand writes: ‘Algu Chowdhari used to visit the courts
frequently. So he knew a great deal about law. He began to cross-
examine Jumman. Each question hit Jumman like a blow to the heart.
Ramdhan was amazed at the skilful questioning.’33 This demonstrates
how the sanctity of the village council, at least in Khala Jan’s case, is
inevitably predicated upon an outside source of knowledge which by
the same token renders suspect the very idea of self-sufficiency. At a
deeper level, it also reflects Premchand’s manoeuvring skills as a writer
since he only mentions Algu’s modus operandi and does not provide
the reader with any clues whatsoever regarding the content of the
latter’s questions.
In ‘Mritak-Bhoj’ (The Funeral Feast; 1932), the representation of
the village council comes full circle. The village councillors in this story

265
 SHAILENDRA KUMAR SINGH

use Seth Ramnath’s death as a convenient pretext to swindle his wife

Sushila of her jewellery. They also literally force her to sell her house
in the name of arranging for a respectable funeral feast. But the vil-
lage council almost assumes sinister proportions when Seth Kuberdas
and the other panchayat members collectively decide to marry Revati,
the fourteen-year-old daughter of Sushila, to Seth Jhabarmal, a man
of fifty. Unable to comply with this decision, Revati commits suicide
which serves as a scathing indictment of the local form of adminis-
tration and self-government. Like ‘Ghareeb ki Haye’, this story too
is a counter-narrative to ‘Panch Parmeshwar’ since it discredits any
romanticised conceptions of the village council.
The points of intersection that one can easily identify in these three
stories include the presence of a widow, her predicament and the village
council. Premchand’s various permutations and combinations with
these three narrative ingredients connote a sense of improvisation that
was characteristic of the qissa, dastan and the fasana tradition. Thus,
his efforts to accommodate social realism within the genre of short sto-
ries also reveal a perceptible continuity with these traditions that relied
greatly on the telling and the retelling of tales over and over again.
But, more importantly, it would be instructive to examine ‘Ghareeb
ki Haye’, ‘Panch Parmeshwar’ and ‘Mritak-Bhoj’ as stories that radi-
cally contest and blur the boundaries and the neat divisions that exist
between Stoff or the subject matter and Rohstoff or the raw material
from which the subject matter is constituted. This is because the sub-
ject matter of ‘Ghareeb ki Haye’ serves as the raw material for ‘Panch
Parmeshwar’. However, at a yet another register, the subject matter
of the latter itself acts as the raw material for ‘Mritak-Bhoj’. As Sibaji
Bandyopadhyay states: ‘the Rohstoff that plays the role of mediating
agent in the fabrication of one particular Stoff . . . [is] also mediated
by many a Stoff.’34 Through these three stories and the common pres-
ence of a widow, her predicament and the village council in each one
of them, one can clearly establish the way in which the distinctions
between the Stoff and the Rohstoff are rendered untenable.

No village council for the Dalits?

If in ‘Ghareeb ki Haye’, a story that revolves around the plight of
a Brahman widow, Munga’s desperate appeal for justice is blithely
turned down by the members of the village council, then it follows by
corollary that Premchand is under no illusions whatsoever regarding
the relationship that exists between the Dalits on the one hand and
the village council on the other. This is because Dalits in Premchand’s

266
 S anctity of the village council

fiction are categorically outside the purview and jurisdiction of the

indigenous institution of justice. In Premchand’s schema, this has sev-
eral implications: (a) it allows him to underscore the altruistic outlook
that characterises the honourable and dignified lives that the Dalits
lead, notwithstanding the caste discrimination that they are subjected
to and the economically precarious situation that they have to struggle
against; a contrapuntal presence to the upper-class characters who,
more often than not, are found to be opportunistic, unscrupulous and
reprehensible; (b) to give voice to the deep sense of distrust that the
Dalits harbour in relation to the village council, as well as the other
grand and constructive programmes that were espoused by the middle-
class nationalist leaders; and (c) to reveal with extraordinary psycho-
logical acumen how the exclusion of the Dalits from the village council
itself creates possible avenues for subversion and self-indulgence.
The first point can be corroborated through the story ‘Mritak-Bhoj’.
Here, Sushila, who is rendered homeless because of the funeral feast
that she has to arrange for, is provided shelter by an anonymous Dalit
woman belonging to the Khatik caste.35 Through Sushila’s realisation,
Premchand draws the reader’s attention to the altruistic nature of Dal-
its as opposed to the acquisitive and self-seeking predilections of the
rich and the powerful: ‘She saw that true nobility was to be found
among the very poor and low [implying the lower castes], while com-
passion in the rich was only another form of arrogance.’36 However,
there are occasions when Premchand also fleshes out the Dalit chetna
or consciousness in relation to the village council and the other grand
and constructive programmes that were espoused during the national-
ist movement. This is nowhere more evident than in the short story
‘Lag-Dat’ (Bad-Blood; 1921).37 Written during the heyday of the non-
cooperation movement, this story delineates a long-standing quarrel
between two families of a village, which eventually gets resolved in a
quintessentially Gandhian fashion. Nonetheless, Jokhu Bhagat’s scep-
ticism regarding the efficacy of the village council clearly reveals his
Dalit chetna:38

People tell you to boycott courts and to take up your claims

and disputes with the village council. But where on earth are
there such village councillors as can dispense true justice,
separate the innocent from the guilty? Here you’ll only have
friendly conversations which is at best feigned and calculated.
Those who have enough muscle, they win; those who don’t,
well, those poor ones are ruined forever. In the courts, all the
proceedings take place in accordance with a given law. Every

267
 SHAILENDRA KUMAR SINGH

person, no matter how big or small, is equal in its eyes. Both

the victim and the perpetrator are treated likewise.39

Premchand’s representation of Jokhu’s scepticism is not without its

historical equivalents. This is because Swami Shraddhanand reveals
a similar incident:

The Secretary of the Delhi Congress Committee called the

Chowdharies of the Chamars and requested them to give
to the Congress as many four anna paying members as they
could. The reply of the elders was that unless their griev-
ance as regards the taking of water from the public wells was
removed [a theme poignantly captured in ‘Thakur Ka Kuan’
(The Thakur’s Well; 1932),40] they could not induce their
brethren to join the Congress. The Secretary was a choleric
man of hasty temper and said they wanted Swarajya at once
but the grievance of the Chamars could wait and would be
removed by and by. One of the young men got up and said –
‘Our trouble from which we are suffering for centuries must
wait solution but the “laddu” of Swaraj must go into your
mouth at once. We shall see how you obtain Swaraj at once.’41

In addition to this, Premchand strongly suggests that if the Dalits are

categorically outside the purview and jurisdiction of the village coun-
cil, then it is precisely this same social arrangement that the latter take
liberties with, in order to subvert existing stereotypes and restructure
their daily lives according to their own needs, aspirations and priori-
ties. For instance in Godaan (The Gift of a Cow; 1936), a group of
Dalits belonging to the community of tanners, forcefully push a bone
down the throat of the Brahman Datadin’s son, Matadin, as punish-
ment for desecrating the honour of Siliya, a Dalit maiden.42 However,
this profoundly subversive gesture of theirs goes completely unpun-
ished which demonstrates that the village councillors are utterly ill-
equipped to get to grips with them. What lends further credence to
this interpretation is the contrasting way in which the village council
ensures that peasants like Hori perpetually remain within its clutches.
Finally we have the most bizarre and unsettling work of Premchand’s
entire literary corpus, namely ‘Kafan’ (The Shroud; 1936).43 In this
story, Ghisu and Madhav, the principal Dalit protagonists, are repre-
sented as two layabouts who embody an irreversible debasement of
values. In some ways, they are quite similar to the two tramps, namely
Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo) in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for

268
 S anctity of the village council

Godot (1954).44 Their existence is motivated by a counter-intuitive

rationality due to which they are able to hoodwink the wealthy and
the powerful on precisely the same grounds of social and cultural pro-
priety which compel the latter to be provisionally generous despite
their essentially acquisitive predilections. In order to circumvent the
oppression and exploitation of the upper classes, it appears as though
it is the turn of these two Dalits now to take recourse to opportunis-
tic, unscrupulous and reprehensible ways of dealing with society. This
implies that they have had a vipareet hridaya parivartan, a counter-
reversal of outlook that only allows them to focus on survival and
efficacy. They are at best indifferent, lackadaisical and unapologetic,
which only proves how they are not hemmed in by the social and
moral imperatives. At a symbolic register, their actions constitute an
antidote to Murdafaroshi (literally the practice of selling corpses since
the holdings of lease-holders were auctioned off immediately after
their death),45 a dominant form of oppression that the zamindars used
against the peasants of the United Provinces in the early decades of
the twentieth century. By the virtue of literally selling Budhiya’s corpse
through manipulation, dexterity and subterfuge, Ghisu and Madhav
are finally able to get an upper hand over the zamindar of their village.
All of this is only facilitated and made possible by the fact that they
are Dalits and therefore beyond the purview and jurisdiction of the
village council.
The alternative and radical possibilities that these Dalit characters
explore imply that they make a virtue of their exclusion from the vil-
lage council. It allows them to exercise agency and savour consid-
erable social latitude. However, Dalit critics like V. B. Rawat claim
otherwise: ‘Premchand made all Chamars look like they were kam-
chors [idlers].’46 The irony is both profound and unmistakable. This is
because Premchand’s contemporaries like Shri Nath Singh had dubbed
him as ‘Ghrina Ke Pracharak Premchand’, that is, ‘Premchand the
Hate-Monger’, on account of the writer’s satirical representations of
the Brahmans in his works.47 It seems veritably unfair that Premchand
should have the worst of both the worlds so that while his contempo-
raries considered him anti-Brahman and subversive, Dalit critics of the
succeeding generations have found his works to be anti-Dalit and a
reiteration of the stereotype. Some of them like Dharmavir have even
called him: ‘Saamant Ka Munshi’,48 that is, an agent of feudalism.
This is not very far removed from Chinua Achebe’s declaration that
Joseph Conrad was ‘a bloody racist’.49 For Premchand then, the repre-
sentation of the Dalits entails a Conradian curse, the ultimate price of
intellectual iconoclasm that one must pay so that the topical relevance

269
 SHAILENDRA KUMAR SINGH

of the writer and his works are implausibly negated by the succeeding
generations in order to affirm the validity and radicalism of the task at
hand; Cedric Watts says in Conrad’s defence (it can be used to defend
Premchand as well) as: ‘the reductive falsification of the past in an
attempt to vindicate the political gestures of the present’.50
The radicalism of the two Dalit characters in ‘Kafan’ can only be
objectively appreciated if one delves deeper within the psychology of
the writer in order to find out the reasons that precipitated such a
work of art. In March 1935, Premchand wrote an article titled ‘Hindu
Samaj ke Vibhatsa Drishya-I: Laash ki Durgati’ (Hideous Scenes of
the Hindu Society-I: Cruel Treatment of the Corpse).51 In this arti-
cle, Premchand denounces the funeral ceremony in its totality and
enquires: ‘Why can’t anyone think of cremating a corpse in a way
that death does not appear before us in such an ominous form? That
instead of witnessing its demonic frenzy, we can simply watch its
quiet grandeur?’52 This demonstrates his unqualified disillusionment
with what he considers to be the hideous aspects of his contempo-
rary Hindu society, funeral ceremony being one of them, in addition
to superstition and the rampant corruption prevalent within temples.
So by choosing Dalit characters for turning the world of Brahmani-
cal Hinduism upside down, Premchand, like the Dalits of Godaan, is
unmistakably making a profoundly subversive gesture. He could not
have chosen Hori for the purposes of ‘Kafan’ because the stranglehold
of the village council on the latter is too overwhelming to allow any
kind of dissident or nonconformist behaviour. However, Premchand’s
ingenuity lies in the way in which he even uses Hori’s relationship with
the village council to launch an alternative and equally powerful cri-
tique of nationalism; something which is certainly a step ahead from
the kind of representation of the indigenous institution of justice that
one finds in ‘Ghareeb ki Haye’.

Dissonance in the microcosm

The village council is the voice of god.53

Hori’s words in Godaan come across as the final nail in the coffin in
so far as the representation of the village council is concerned. Though
uttered with the utmost sincerity and almost reiterating the same idea
that Jumman articulates in ‘Panch Parmeshwar’, they are infused with
dramatic irony and hence evoke a deep sense of pathos. In this novel,
the village councillors are shown to be opportunistic and unprincipled

270
 S anctity of the village council

so that their decisions are at best a sheer travesty of justice. They

impose a heavy fine of one hundred rupees on Hori in addition to the
confiscation of his food grains which clearly reflects a punitive as well
as an interventionist outlook. This is because Hori and Dhaniya are
punished for a private family matter, that is for providing shelter to
Jhuniya who is not only impregnated but also subsequently abandoned
by Gobar. However, the proceeds of the fine are outrageously masked
under the pretext of protecting the community which is otherwise in
danger of becoming depraved by a woman of supposedly loose morals.
Premchand’s usage of ‘parodic stylization’54 for representing the
village councillors indicates an absolute degradation of human values
within the rural community of Belari. Instead of maintaining law and
order in the village, these guardians of justice disconcertingly remain
on a constant lookout for opportunities to disrupt communal har-
mony. The Brahman Datadin is described as ‘the village troublemaker,
sticking his nose into everyone’s business’.55 Similarly, Lala Pateshwari
is characterised in equally unforgiving terms:

It was his sacred responsibility to look after the welfare of

everyone in the village. He had no faith in compromise or
mutual conciliation. They only indicated a lack of spirit. He
was a worshipper of conflict, which reflected vitality. As a
result, he was always trying to inspire a life of conflict, setting
off fireworks of one kind or another.56

Here Premchand harbours no hopes whatsoever regarding the ability

of a village headman to meaningfully understand his responsibilities
and consequently act with integrity. As Darren Zook succinctly puts
it: ‘Lives are continually ruined by “village justice”, which Premchand
interprets as a kind of totalitarian rule based on fear: “society would
see to it that those who violate its traditions [maryada] cannot be left
to sleep in peace.” ’57
The venality of the village council in Godaan thus unmistakably
suggests an irredeemable dissonance in the microcosm which also
acts, albeit obliquely, as a trenchant critique of the much larger issues
at stake such as that of nationalism, its comprehensive failure at the
grass-roots level and the empty rhetoric of the ineffectual middle-class
leadership involved in the mass movement for swaraj. This can be cor-
roborated not through Roadarmel’s translation in which some parts of
the text have been carefully omitted (itself a comment on the politics
of translation) but by taking recourse to the original version in Hindi.
At one point in the narrative, Dhaniya, unlike Hori, vociferously

271
 SHAILENDRA KUMAR SINGH

condemns the village councillors: ‘Murderers and blood-suckers, that’s

what you village headmen are. Interest rates of twenty-five and fifty
per cent, tips and donations, bribes and graft – rob the poor any way
you can.’58 In the English version, the narrative immediately proceeds
from here to describe the reactions of the village elders. However, in
the original version, Dhaniya’s fulminations are relatively longer:

Yeh hatyaarey gaaon ke mukhiya hain, gariboan ka khoon

choosneywaaley! Soodh-byaaj dedhi-sawaai, nazar-nazraana,
ghoos-ghaas jaise bhi ho, gariboan ko lootoan. Uss par suraaj
chahiye. Jail jaane se suraaj na milega. Suraaj milega dharma
se, nyaya se.59
Murderers and blood-suckers, that’s what you village head-
men are. Interest rates of twenty-five and fifty per cent, tips
and donations, bribes and graft – rob the poor any way you
can. And on top of that you want Suraaj (Self-Rule). Well,
going to jail won’t guarantee that. Suraaj can only be achieved
through justice and righteousness.

Through these words, Premchand unequivocally links the local with

the national, the remote with the immediate and the obscure with the
apparent. The dissonance in the microcosm provides an impeccable
estimate of the shortcomings, weaknesses and the imperfections that
the macrocosm is replete with. The desiccated lives that both Hori and
Dhaniya lead on a day-to-day basis constitute a sardonic commentary
on how the rhetorical gymnastics, enticing promises and the reassur-
ing ideologies of nationalism have only flattered to deceive since there
is not even the slightest hint of any trickle-down effect that can amelio-
rate their living conditions. Zook rightly observes that: ‘Premchand’s
Godaan is actually something of an anti-nationalist dirge – one, more-
over, that held that the problems confronting colonial India were to
a large degree internal, “indigenous” and self-inflicted.’60
Thus from the incipient, tentative and the experimental representa-
tions of the village council in his early years, Premchand moves on to a
more definitive and convincing portrayal of the indigenous institution
of justice in Godaan. The novel bespeaks his maturation of art and
the crystallisation of his ideologies, which undoubtedly make it his
chef-d’oeuvre. However, the sense of completeness, finality and cer-
tainty that one finds in it also owes its origins to his early works like
‘Ghareeb ki Haye’ that act as counter-narratives to his more idealistic
assertions in ‘Panch Parmeshwar’. These classics not only stand the
test of time but also anticipate similar representations or variations

272
 S anctity of the village council

upon them in the post-independence period. One such work is Ran-

gey Raghav’s ‘Panch Parmeshwar’ (The Holy Panchayat; 1956), which
ironically bears the same title as Premchand’s story even as it com-
prehensively undermines the sanctity of the village council. Similarly,
in Raag Darbari (1968), Shrilal Shukla employs scintillating and yet
mordant wit to emphasise the irreversible debasement of values that
the village council precipitates in Shivpalganj. By adopting an inimita-
ble style that is at once flippant as well as disconcerting, Shukla steadily
punctures the complacencies and the assumptions of both Ranganath
and the reader (and perhaps implicates himself too) as ineffectual and
self-deluded intellectuals. Premchand’s act of demystifying the sanctity
of the village council in ‘Ghareeb ki Haye’, ‘Mritak-Bhoj’ and Godaan,
among others, is thus a dedicated attempt to point out the kind of
stagnation that had come to characterise the everyday existence of the
countryside in the United Provinces. However, it also moves beyond
topicality to prognosticate the bleak future that lay ahead for the vil-
lage communities in the post-independence period where oppression,
exploitation and victimisation are nothing but completely home-made
realities and hence more difficult to eradicate.

Notes
1 I am grateful to my supervisor, M. Asaduddin, for his comments on earlier
versions of this chapter. I am also thankful to Santosh Kumar Singh for
engaging with successive versions.
2 Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissi-
dent Reading, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992, p. 47.
3 It is almost paradoxical that while Premchand’s novels filled in the void
that was left after Rusva’s Umrao Jan Ada (1899), they still marked a pal-
pable departure from the Urdu tradition that preceded it. As M. Asadud-
din puts it: ‘It is a pity that Rusva’s Umrao Jan Ada remained a singular
achievement with no worthy successor until the emergence of Premchand,
who moved on a different terrain’; M. Asaduddin, ‘First Urdu Novel: Con-
testing Claims and Disclaimers’, Annual of Urdu Studies, 2001, 16: 96.
4 Premchand, Vividh Prasang [Journalistic Writings of Premchand], Amrit
Rai (ed.), 3 vols, Allahabad: Hans Prakashan, 1962. Hereafter ‘VP’. VP
III, p. 36. Rashme Sehgal’s translation of ‘Panch Parmeshwar’ in Modern
Indian Literature: Poems and Short Stories, David Rubin’s translation of
‘Ghareeb ki Haye’, ‘Mritak-Bhoj’ and ‘Kafan’ in The Oxford India Prem-
chand, Christopher R. King’s translation of Ghaban (2000 edn) and Gor-
don Roadarmel’s translation of Godaan (2007 edn) have been used in this
chapter. The rest of the translation of Premchand’s Hindi texts is mine.
There is also a discrepancy between how Christopher R. King spells Gaban
(I have taken recourse to this for reference purposes only) and the way
I have used it in this article as Ghaban, which is a more accurate English
equivalent. For more on this, see M. Asaduddin’s chapter in this volume.

273
 SHAILENDRA KUMAR SINGH

5 Parasnath Singh, Premchand Kaleen Upanyason Mein Grameen Jeevan

[Rural Life in the Novels of Premchand Era], Delhi: Capital Publishing
House, 1985, pp. 5–7.
6 Amrit Rai, Premchand: His Life and Times [translation of Qalam ka
Sipahi; 1962], Harish Trivedi (trans.), Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1991, pp. 252–3.
7 Premchand’s tentativeness was nothing short of a conundrum for him in
his early years. In one of his letters to Dayanarayan Nigam, he acknowl-
edges this catch-22 situation of his: ‘I’m still not confident about the kind
of writing style that I should adopt for myself. On some occasions, I imi-
tate Bankim, while on others I follow in the footsteps of Azad [a contem-
porary journal like Zamana]. These days I’ve been reading Count Tolstoy’s
stories and feel somewhat of an affinity for his flair. It’s nothing but a
weakness on my part’; Premchand, Chiththi Patri [Letters], Amrit Rai and
Madan Gopal (eds), vol. I, Allahabad: Hans Prakashan, 1962, p. 29.
8 Rai, Premchand: His Life and Times, pp. 80, 113.
9 Premchand, Mansarovar [Selected Stories of Premchand], 8 vols, MS 1
to 8, New Delhi: Prakashan Sansthan, 2004. [Hereafter MS]. MS 8,
pp. 198–204.
10 Premchand’s scepticism regarding any uncritical acceptance of colonial
modernity precedes Gandhi’s emergence within the political sphere and
hence was fashioned independently of it, probably by his literary alle-
giance to the Swadeshi movement and his association with the Arya Samaj
in his early years. However, this opposition certainly received a new impe-
tus under the influence of Gandhi and his non-cooperation movement;
something which gets manifested through his powerful critique of fac-
tories in Rangabhumi (1925); see Shashi Bhushan Upadhyay, ‘Resisting
Colonial Modernity: Premchand’s Rangabhoomi’, in Bernard Bell, et al.
(eds), Communications Processes, vol. 3, Communication, Culture and
Confrontation, New Delhi: Sage, 2010, pp. 257–72. In addition to this,
the corruption and the ineptitude of the police are starkly brought in to
focus in ‘Darogaji’ (The Police Inspector; 1928); see MS 4, pp. 62–7. Simi-
larly, Gajpuri’s Ramlal too is an incisive account of the exploitation and
injustice that is meted out to the rural folk by a host of perpetrators such
as the police, courts, the moneylender and the patwari among others.
11 Premchand, ‘The Holy Panchayat’ [translation of ‘Panch Parmeshwar’], in
Department of English, University of Delhi (ed.), Modern Indian Litera-
ture: Poems and Short Stories, Rashme Sehgal (trans.), New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2012, p. 58.
12 This point can be substantiated by Pemchand’s own admission to his wife:
‘The fact of the matter is that whatever he [Gandhi] wants done, I already
do it beforehand. This implies that I’m a ready-made and a natural disciple
of his’; see Shivrani Devi Premchand, Premchand: Ghar Mein [Premchand:
In the House; 1956], New Delhi: Atma Ram and Sons, 2000, pp. 116–17.
13 M. K. Gandhi, Village Swaraj, H. M. Vyas (comp.), Ahmedabad: Navjivan
Publishing House, 1962, p. 45.
14 In ‘Ghareeb ki Haye’ and ‘Dand’, the services of the barber and the wash-
erman are denied to both Munshi Ramsevak and Mr. Sinha, respectively;
see Premchand, The Oxford India Premchand [hereafter OIP], New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 39; and MS 3, p. 102. Nai dhobi band

274
 S anctity of the village council

literally meant that the barbers and the washermen would withdraw their
services indefinitely in order to effectively display their sense of discon-
tent. For more on this kind of protest, see Majid Hayat Siddiqi, Agrarian
Unrest in North India: The United Provinces, 1918–1922, New Delhi:
Vikas Publishing House, 1978, p. 111. The politics of representation that
informs the peasant narratives of Premchand constitutes a part of a larger
ongoing study for my doctoral dissertation.
15 Siddiqi, Agrarian Unrest in North India, p. 111.
16 Ibid.
17 John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1999 (first published 1971), p. 28.
18 Ibid., p. 18. In the story, both Algu and Jumman heuristically arrive at a
higher level of consciousness. Thus in Algu’s case, Khala Jan’s question:
‘Will you turn your back to justice for fear of ruining your friendship?’
becomes the source of moral knowledge for him only after much reflec-
tive consideration. Similarly, the sense of responsibility that Jumman feels
on becoming a panch acts as a springboard for contemplation and helps
him to acquire a better understanding of justice which is divorced from
one’s prejudices and hence is guided more by impartiality, Premchand;
‘The Holy Panchayat’, pp. 58, 63–4.
19 Rawls, A Theory of Justice, p. 3.
20 Premchand, Chiththi Patri [Letters], Amrit Rai and Madan Gopal (eds),
vol. II, Allahabad: Hans Prakashan, 1962, p. 76.
21 Premchand, VP I, p. 35.
22 Premchand, ‘The Holy Panchayat’, p. 56.
23 Jainendra Kumar, Premchand: Ek Kriti Vyaktitva [Premchand: A Creative
Personality], Delhi: Purvodaya Prakashan, 1973, p. 27. A similar incident
takes place in Kayakalp (1926) in which Chakradhar, the otherwise mor-
ally upright protagonist, immediately flies off the handle when a peasant
refuses to help him at an inopportune hour; Premchand, Kayakalp [The
Metamorphosis; 1926], New Delhi: Vani Prakashan, 2002, p. 217.
24 Premchand, VP I, pp. 19–20.
25 Premchand, VP II, p. 21.
26 Shashi Bhushan Upadhyay, ‘Premchand and the Moral Economy of Peas-
antry in Colonial North India’, Modern Asian Studies, 2011, 45(5): 1230.
27 Henry James, ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1884). Cited in Robert Scholes and
Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative, London: Oxford University
Press, 1966, p. 160.
28 Scholes and Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative, p. 84. Meenakshi Mukher-
jee borrows these terms to demonstrate how ‘the fable-like anterior mode
which he [Premchand] thought he had discarded comes back to punctuate
the realistic narrative [of Godaan]’; Meenakshi Mukherjee, Realism and
Reality: The Novel and Society in India, New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1985, p. 165. Reversing this premise, I propose to examine how the
fable-like anterior mode of Premchand’s early works is itself punctuated
by the realistic narrative mode thereby leading to contradictory represen-
tations of the village council.
29 Premchand, OIP, p. 35.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid., p. 259.

275
 SHAILENDRA KUMAR SINGH

32 See Premchand, MS 5, pp. 182–96.

33 Premchand, ‘The Holy Panchayat’, p. 60.
34 Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, ‘Introduction’, in Sibaji Bandyopadhyay (ed.),
Thematology: Literary Studies in India, Kolkata: Jadavpur University,
2004, p. 29.
35 Khatiks and Kunjras are vegetable vendors; see Shashi Bhushan Upad-
hyay, ‘Representing the Underdogs: Dalits in the Literature of Premchand’,
Studies in History, 2002, 18(1): 55. In the Hindi version, the old widow’s
caste is specifically mentioned while David Rubin simply refers to her as
a ‘low-caste greengrocer’; Premchand, OIP, p. 359. Also see, Premchand,
MS 4, p. 123.
36 Premchand, OIP, p. 359.
37 Premchand, MS 6, pp. 145–9.
38 There are sufficient grounds for concluding that Jokhu is a Dalit even
though this is not stated explicitly in the story. For instance he is a Bha-
gat, one of the many untouchables who lived in UP in the early twentieth
century. According to Nandini Gooptu: ‘From the turn of the century,
many untouchables . . . began to call themselves bhagats, a term which
denoted lay practitioners of bhakti cults, who were not ascetics of insu-
lar religious sects’; Nandini Gooptu, The Politics of the Urban Poor in
Early Twentieth-Century India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001, p. 149. Moreover, there is a considerable measure of intertextuality
within Premchand’s literary corpus so that his characters do not always
come across as individualised and unique but also, at times, formulaic and
repetitive, thereby existing as types. The brilliantly satirical representa-
tion of the gluttonous and intemperate Brahman, Pandit Moteram Shash-
tri, is common to stories such as ‘Satyagraha’ (A Moral Victory; 1923),
‘Manushya Ka Param Dharma’ (Man’s Highest Duty; 1920) and ‘Moter-
amji Shashtri’ (Mr. Moteram Shashtri; 1928); the urban, educated and
Westernised woman Malti is present in both ‘Aakhiri Tohfa’ (The Final
Gift) and Godaan while the Dalit character Bhagatram (another Dalit hav-
ing bhagat either for his name or his surname) features in both ‘Saubhagya
ke Kodey’ (Blessed Whiplashes; 1924) and ‘Aaga-Peechha’ (Vacillations;
1928). If this richness in terms of intertextuality is any indication, then
Jokhu Bhagat of ‘Lag-Dat’ surely seems to be a Dalit, not very differ-
ent from the Jokhu of ‘Thakur Ka Kuan’ (The Thakur’s Well; 1932). For
these stories see Premchand, OIP, pp. 124–37, 138–42, 83–6; Premchand,
Gupt Dhan [Hidden Treasure, another collection of Premchand’s short
stories], Lal Singh Chaudhary (ed.), 2 vols, New Delhi: Bharati Bhasha
Prakashan,1996, vol. II, pp. 231–9, 305–9; and Premchand, Bharatiya
Dalit Jeevan ki Kahaniyan [Stories of the Lives of Indian Dalits], New
Delhi: Kalyani Shiksha Parishad, 2009, pp. 128–45, 154–65.
39 Premchand, MS 6, p. 147.
40 Premchand, OIP, pp. 83–6.
41 Swami Shraddhanand, Inside Congress, Bombay: Phoenix Publications,
1946, pp. 133–4. Devidin, another Dalit character, voices similar concerns
in Ghaban: ‘Sahab, tell me the truth, when you mention self-rule [Swaraj],
what sort of picture comes before your eyes? Like the English, you’ll draw
a big salary too, live in bungalows too, enjoy the mountain air, and travel
around wearing English styles. How will the country get better from this

276
 S anctity of the village council

kind of self-rule? You and your friends and relations will pass your lives
in great ease and comfort, but there will be no benefit to the country . . .
When you’re so crazy about living it up now without even being in power
yet, when you do get into power, you’ll grind up the poor and swallow
them down’; Premchand, Gaban: The Stolen Jewels [translation of Gha-
ban; 1931], Christopher R. King (trans.), New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2000, p. 159.
42 Premchand, Godaan: The Gift of a Cow [translation of Godaan, 1936],
Gordon C. Roadarmel (trans.), New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007,
pp. 305–6.
43 Premchand, OIP, pp. 233–40.
44 The theme of waiting indefinitely is common to both the works. So if Didi
and Gogo wait for Godot who never arrives, Ghisu and Madhav apatheti-
cally bide their time before a burnt-out fire at the door of their hut and
wait for Budhiya, Madhav’s wife, to die alone and unattended: ‘This same
woman was dying today in child-birth and it was as though they were only
waiting for her to die so they could go to sleep in peace and quiet’; Prem-
chand, OIP, p. 234. Their inability to move from their respective positions
also bears a striking analogy with the tramps’ unsuccessful attempts to
leave the scene. That this inability is a part of Madhav’s reluctance to go
inside and attend to his wife lest his father may do away with most of the
potatoes that they are roasting together further renders the situation pre-
posterous. Since they are idlers, even Budhiya’s death cannot put an end to
their act of waiting. As soon as she passes away, Ghisu and Madhav wait
for the hypocritical zamindar, shopkeepers and moneylenders to provide
them with money for the shroud and the funeral. But more importantly,
they wait for each other’s implicit consent so as to rationalise the futility
of purchasing a shroud and instead spend the money on a sumptuous meal
and liquor – a unique example of reductio ad absurdum. Finally, their
behavioural tendencies strongly suggest that they will continue to twiddle
their thumbs till they find a similar opportunity in the future.
45 Kapil Kumar, Peasants Betrayed: Essays in India’s Colonial History, New
Delhi: Manohar, 2011, p. 87. In ‘Balidaan’ (Sacrifice; 1918), one of Prem-
chand’s peasant narratives, there is an explicit evidence of Murdafaroshi.
When Harkhu dies, his lands are auctioned off in return for an enhanced
rent and a nazrana (extra premium on rent demanded as gift payment) of
one hundred rupees. Unable to meet such huge requirements, Girdhaari,
Harkhu’s son, commits suicide and the story ends on a note of absolute
despair; see Premchand, MS 8, pp. 48–54.
46 V. B. Rawat, ‘Premchand and His Dalit Writings’. Cited in Ruth Vanita,
‘Introduction’, in Premchand (ed.), The Co-Wife and Other Stories, Ruth
Vanita (trans.), New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2008, p. xiii. Ruth Vanita
provides a cogent rebuttal to this: ‘It does not occur to Rawat that the
woman, described by Premchand as extremely hardworking and efficient,
is also a Chamar’; Ibid., p. xiii.
47 Rai, Premchand: His Life and Times, p. 289. Other contemporaries like Jyoti
Prasad Mishra ‘Nirmal’ had also criticised Premchand on similar grounds.
48 Dharmavir, Premchand: Saamant Ka Munshi [Premchand: Agent of Feu-
dalism], New Delhi: Vani Prakashan, 2005, p. 15. See Harish Trivedi’s
chapter in this volume.

277
 SHAILENDRA KUMAR SINGH

49 Chinua Achebe, ‘An image of Africa: racism in Conrad’s “Heart of Dark-

ness” ’, Massachusetts Review, 1977, 17(4): 788.
50 Cedric Watts, ‘Heart of Darkness’, in J. H. Stape (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996, p. 57.
51 Premchand, VP III, pp. 154–7.
52 Ibid., p. 156.
53 Premchand, Godaan, p. 158.
54 Vasudha Dalmia, ‘Introduction’, in Premchand, Godaan: The Gift of a
Cow, Gordon C. Roadarmel (trans.), New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002,
p. vii. Dalmia borrows this term from Bakhtin to examine the village
councillors.
55 Premchand, Godaan, p. 157.
56 Ibid., p. 330.
57 Darren C. Zook, ‘The Outrage of Everyday Life: Disillusionment, Despair,
and the Endless Search for Justice in Premchand’s Godaan’, South Asia:
Journal of South Asian Studies, 2005, 28(3): 425.
58 Premchand, Godaan, p. 141.
59 Premchand, Godaan [The Gift of a Cow; 1936], New Delhi: Vani
Prakashan, 2004, p. 118.
60 Zook, ‘The Outrage of Everyday Life’, p. 416.

Bibliography
Achebe, Chinua, ‘An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s “Heart of Dark-
ness” ’, Massachusetts Review, 1977, 17(4): 782–94.
Asaduddin, M., ‘First Urdu Novel: Contesting Claims and Disclaimers’,
Annual of Urdu Studies, 2001, 16: 76–97.
Bandyopadhyay, Sibaji, ‘Introduction’, in Sibaji Bandyopadhyay (ed.),
Thematology: Literary Studies in India, Kolkata: Jadavpur University,
2004, pp. 7–29.
Dalmia, Vasudha, ‘Introduction’, in Premchand (ed.), Godaan: The Gift of a
Cow, Gordon C. Roadarmel (trans.), New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2002,
pp. v–xvii.
Dharmavir, Premchand: Saamant Ka Munshi [Premchand: Agent of Feudal-
ism], New Delhi: Vani Prakashan, 2005.
Gandhi, M. K., Village Swaraj, H. M. Vyas (comp.), Ahmedabad: Navjivan
Publishing House, 1962.
Gooptu, Nandini, The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Twentieth-Century
India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Kumar, Jainendra, Premchand: Ek Kriti Vyaktitva [Premchand: A Creative
Personality], Delhi: Purvodaya Prakashan, 1973.
Kumar, Kapil, Peasants Betrayed: Essays in India’s Colonial History, New
Delhi: Manohar, 2011.
Mukherjee, Meenakshi, Realism and Reality: The Novel and Society in India,
New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985.

278
 S anctity of the village council

Premchand, Bharatiya Dalit Jeevan ki Kahaniyan [Stories of the Lives of

Indian Dalits], New Delhi: Kalyani Shiksha Parishad, 2009.
Premchand, Chiththi Patri [Letters], Amrit Rai and Madan Gopal (eds),
2 vols, Allahabad: Hans Prakashan, 1962.
Premchand, Gaban: The Stolen Jewels [translation of Ghaban; 1931],
Christopher R. King (trans.), New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Premchand, Godaan [The Gift of a Cow; 1936], New Delhi: Vani Prakashan,
2004.
Premchand, Godaan: The Gift of a Cow [translation of Godaan; 1936],
Gordon C. Roadarmel (trans.), New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2007.
Premchand, Gupt Dhan [Hidden Treasure, a Collection of Premchand’s Short
Stories], Lal Singh Chaudhary (ed.), 2 vols, New Delhi: Bharati Bhasha
Prakashan,1996.
Premchand, Kayakalp [The Metamorphosis; 1926], New Delhi: Vani Prakashan,
2002.
Premchand, Mansarovar [Selected Stories of Premchand], 8 vols, MS 1 to 8,
New Delhi: Prakashan Sansthan, 2004.
Premchand, ‘The Holy Panchayat’ [translation of ‘Panch Parmeshwar’], in
Department of English, University of Delhi (ed.), Modern Indian Litera-
ture: Poems and Short Stories, Rashme Sehgal (trans.), New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2012, pp. 53–69.
Premchand, The Oxford India Premchand, New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2004.
Premchand, Vividh Prasang (Journalistic Writings of Premchand), Amrit Rai
(ed.), 3 vols, Allahabad: Hans Prakashan, 1962.
Premchand, Shivrani Devi, Premchand: Ghar Mein [Premchand: In the House;
1956], New Delhi: Atma Ram and Sons, 2000.
Rai, Amrit, Premchand: His Life and Times [translation of Qalam ka Sipahi;
1962], Harish Trivedi (trans.), Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991.
Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1999 (first published 1971).
Scholes, Robert and Kellogg, Robert, The Nature of Narrative, London:
Oxford University Press, 1966.
Shraddhanand, Swami, Inside Congress, Bombay: Phoenix Publications, 1946.
Siddiqui, Majid Hayat, Agrarian Unrest in North India: The United Prov-
inces, 1918–1922, New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1978.
Sinfield, Alan, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident
Reading, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.
Singh, Parasnath, Premchand Kaleen Upanyason Mein Grameen Jeevan
[Rural Life in the Novels of Premchand Era], Delhi: Capital Publishing
House, 1985.
Vanitha, Ruth, ‘Introduction’, in Premchand (ed.), The Co-Wife and Other
Stories, Ruth Vanita (trans.), New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2008, pp. xi–xxvii.
Upadhyay, Shashi Bhushan, ‘Premchand and the Moral Economy of Peasantry
in Colonial North India’, Modern Asian Studies, 2011, 45(5): 1227–59.

279
 SHAILENDRA KUMAR SINGH

Upadhyay, Shashi Bhushan, ‘Representing the Underdogs: Dalits in the Litera-

ture of Premchand’, Studies in History, 2002, 18(1): 51–79.
Upadhyay, Shashi Bhushan, ‘Resisting Colonial Modernity: Premchand’s
Rangabhoomi’, in Bernard Bell et al. (eds), Communications Processes,
vol. 3, Communication, Culture and Confrontation, New Delhi: Sage,
2010, pp. 257–72.
Watts, Cedric, ‘Heart of Darkness’, in J. H. Stape (ed.), The Cambridge Com-
panion to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996,
pp. 45–62.
Zook, Darren C., ‘The Outrage of Everyday Life: Disillusionment, Despair,
and the Endless Search for Justice in Premchand’s Godaan’, South Asia:
Journal of South Asian Studies, 2005, 28(3): 413–35.

280
 INDEX

addressivity 15 Derrida, Jacques 153, 197

‘Agyeya’, S. H. Vatsyayan 17, 87 Desai, Anita 104
Ahmad, Aijaz 97, 104 – 6 Dickens, Charles 58, 71, 75, 114,
Anand, Mulk Raj 96, 104, 201 157, 162, 259
Ananthamurthy, U. R. 16, 18, 37, 38 distancing effect 44
Anderson, Benedict 95, 103, 106 Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee 104
domestication 78, 169
Bakhtin, Mikhail 48, 53 – 5, 278 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 52
Barthes, Roland 197 Dryden, John 178
Bassnett, Susan 72, 74, 118, 172 – 3 Dutt, Gauri 16
Beckett, Samuel 1, 35, 268
Bellow, Saul 16 Eliot, T. S. 46, 53, 226
Benjamin, Walter 46, 202, 208 Enright, D. J. 51
Borges, Jorge Luis 94, 103, 105 – 6 Everarert, Christine 31
Brueck, Laura 102, 105 – 6, 200,
209 – 10 Flaubert, Gustave 113
Foucault, Michel 196 – 7, 208, 210
Camus, Albert 52 France, Anatole 113 – 14, 132, 163
Chandra, Vikram 104
Chattopadhyay, Bankimchandra 7, Gandhi 10, 19, 25, 27, 40, 58,
16, 274 77, 112 – 13, 121, 145, 166,
Chattopadhyay, Saratchandra 132 182, 235 – 9, 242 – 3, 248, 250,
Chaturvedi, Banarasi Das 112 252 – 4, 260, 267, 274
Chinese T’ang poetry 62 Gandhian nationalism 19
civil disobedience movement 236 Garnett, Constance 52
Columbus, Christopher 95 Gennete, Gerard 9, 94, 103, 107
Ghosh, Amitabh 104
Dalits 19, 99 – 102, 195, 198 – 9, 202, Gide, Andre 114
204, 237, 239, 247, 266 – 70, Gilbert, Stuart 52
276, 279 – 80 Gorky, Maxim 87, 162, 237
Das, Srinivas 16 Goyanka, Kamal Kishore 21, 29 – 30,
dastan 48, 145 – 6, 266 37 – 9
de Balzac, Honore 113 Grass, Gunter 115
Defoe, Daniel 135 Greenblatt, Stephen 96, 103, 107
de Maupassant, Guy 113 Gupt, Maithilisharan 140

281
 INDEX

Hindustani Academy 27, 36 Pevear, Richard 52

Homer 15, 178 ‘Phillauri’, Shraddharam 16
Hugo, Victor 113, 139 polyglossia 48
Pope, Alexander 178
Imagist blank verse 62 postcolonialism 105, 107
Prabha 31
Jimenez, Juan Ramon 104 Prakash, Uday 70
Jones, William 135 Prasad, Jai Shankar 87, 235
Pratap 22
Kalidasa 135 – 7, 154 Pratt, Mary Louise 94, 103
Karnad, Girish 96 – 7, 107 Premchand
Khatri, Devkinandan 16, 258 – 9 adarshonmukh yatharthavad
Khayyam, Omar 140 16, 199
Koteliansky, S. S. 17 Asrar-e Ma’bid 24
Kumar, Jainendra 87, 91, 110 ‘Atmaram’ 60, 104
Kundera, Milan 1, 6, 17, 35 ‘Bade Ghar ki Beti’ 24, 59,
120, 214
Lahiri, Jhumpa 104 ‘Balak’ 60, 69
Lawrence, D. H. 17 Bazaar-e Husn 4 – 5, 7, 18, 31, 45,
Lefevere, Andre 62, 72, 74, 118, 124 130, 146, 148, 155 – 6, 159 – 60
Lodge, David 105 ‘Boodhi Kaki’ 111, 119
critique of Fitzgerald 140 – 1
Maeterlinck, Maurice 8, 113, 116, ‘Dikri ke Rupaye’ 59
130, 161 – 3, 165 – 8, 171, 259 ‘Do Bailon ki Katha’ 58, 60, 81,
Manto, Saadat Hasan 96 – 7 104, 120
Márquez, Gabriel García 6, 17, ‘Do Behne’ 109
104, 107 ‘Duniya ka Sabse Anmol
Maryada 30 Ratan’ 84
Mehta, Gita 104 ‘Falsafi ki Muhabbat’ 179,
meta-narrative 63 183, 190
Mistry, Rohinton 104 ‘Fatiha’ 120
Moncrief, Scott 51 Ghaban 18, 42, 44, 46, 54, 80,
Murakami 6, 17 86 – 7, 93, 273, 276 – 7, 279
‘Ghareeb ki Haye’ 10, 258 – 9,
Nabokov, Vladimir 1, 35 261, 264, 266, 270, 272 – 4
nai dhobi band 261, 265, 274 ‘Gilli-Danda’ 81
Narayan, R. K. 104 Godaan 10, 18 – 20, 41 – 3, 48, 52,
Naremore, James 196 – 7, 208, 211 54, 58, 60, 62 – 3, 66, 68 – 70,
Neruda, Pablo 104 79 – 80, 85 – 6, 91, 113 – 14, 259,
Nigam, Dayanarayan 30, 162, 274 268, 270 – 3, 275 – 80
non-cooperation movement 25, 40, in Hindi 20–1, 37, 39, 147, 159
78, 182, 260 – 1, 274 ‘Idgah’ 59, 83, 120, 123
‘Ishwariya Nyaya’ 59, 265
Orientalism 15, 94 – 5, 102 ‘Jadoo’ 60
‘Jamai Babu’ 51
Pamuk, Orhan 6, 17 ‘Juloos’ 60, 120
Panchatantra 96 ‘Kafan’ 18, 23, 30, 59 – 60, 84, 88,
paratext 9, 42 – 3, 46, 61 – 2, 69, 94, 99, 101 – 2, 104 – 5, 111, 115,
98 – 101, 103 119, 268, 270; and Waiting for
paratranslation 100 Godot 277

282
 INDEX

Karmabhumi 10, 18, 42, 47, ‘Shatranj ke Khiladi’ 9 – 10,

53, 58 59 – 60, 104, 109, 119, 212,
Kayakalp 57, 275 214 – 15, 217, 220, 222, 226 – 31
‘Kazaki’ 59, 120 ‘Shatranj ki Bazi’ 60, 212,
‘Khoon-e Hurmat’ 179 – 80, 214 – 15, 226
183, 190 ‘Shudra’ 100, 105, 198
‘Kshama’ 59 ‘Suhag ki Sari’ 30 – 1
‘Kusum’ 120 – 1 ‘Sujaan Bhagat’ 59
‘Lag-Dat’ 120, 267, 276 ‘Thakur ka Kuan’ 59 – 60, 105,
‘Malkin’ 179, 187, 189 – 91 111, 119, 268, 276
‘Manovritti’ 60 translational praxis 166 – 71
‘Mooth’ 30 translation as new aesthetic 7,
‘Moteramji Shashtri’ 60, 276 161, 165, 171
‘Motor ke Chhinte’ 60 – 1, 68 ‘Triya Charitra’ 33
‘Mritak-Bhoj’ 265 – 7, 273 in Urdu 20–1, 147
‘Muktidhan’ 120 Vardan 80, 88, 130
‘Nairashya’ 119 – 20 ‘Vichitra Holi’ 25, 27, 34, 36
‘Namak ka Daroga’ 59, 111, 119, views on cultural nationalism 7,
124, 260 144, 147 – 9, 153, 155
‘Nasha’ 60 views on Swaraj 112
Nirmala 11, 18, 23, 42, 44, ‘Yah Bhi Nasha, Vah Bhi
52, 60, 63 – 4, 68, 71 – 4, 78, Nasha’ 60
80, 83 – 5, 91, 179, 183, 190, Premchand Yug 36
209, 211 Pritchett, Frances 31, 38
on translation 130 – 41 Progressive Writers’ Movement 40
‘Panch Parmeshwar’ 10, 59, 64, Proust, Marcel 51, 113
120, 258 – 66, 270, 272 – 6, 279
‘Pariksha’ 22, 120 Qissa 266
‘Poos ki Raat’ 3, 23, 59 – 60, 111,
119, 124 Rafael, Vicente L. 96
Pratigya 130 Rakesh, Mohan 70, 110
Prema 88 Rao, Raja 96, 104
Premashram 57 – 8, 77, 79, 113, Ramanujan, A. K. 16, 172 – 3
130, 132 Rawls, John 261, 275, 279
‘Prem ki Holi’ 111 Ray, Satyajit 9 – 10, 195, 201 – 3, 207,
Rangabhumi 18, 30 – 1, 42, 209 – 10, 212, 228
45, 57 – 8, 80, 86 – 7, 110, reflective equilibrium 261
130 – 2, 274 Renu, Phaneshwar Nath 178
representation of Dalits 19, 99, Roy, Arundhati 104
266 – 70 Rushdie, Salman 18, 104
‘Sadgati’ 9 – 10, 23, 105, 195 – 6, Russell, Ralph 45
198 – 9, 201 – 9, 211 ‘Russian fever’ 17
‘Sajjanata ka Dand’ 79 Rusva, Mirza Muhammad Hadi 4,
‘Samar Yatra’ 59, 120 144 – 5, 158 – 9, 258, 273
Sangram 79, 92
‘Saut’ 77, 82, 93, 111, 119 Sahay, Shiv Pujan 29 – 30
‘Sava Ser Gehun’ 59 – 60, 111, 119 Sarshar, Ratan Nath 16, 132, 258
Sevasadan 4, 5, 7, 10, 18, 31, 42, Schulz, Siegfried A. 58, 71, 75, 114,
45, 47, 57 – 8, 87, 91, 130, 146, 116 – 17
148 – 50, 155 – 60, 253 ‘Sehar’, Iqbal Verma 29, 31

283
 INDEX

Seth, Vikram 104 Verma, Nirmal 17 – 18, 70,

Sharar, Abdul Halim 16, 136 – 7, 258 110, 211
Singh, Khushwant 101, 159 – 60 Vermeer, Hans J. 73, 75
Soviet bloc 61 Vidyarthi, Ganesh Shankar
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravarty 153 113, 139
Suri, Manil 104 Volokhonsky, Larissa 52
swadeshi 150, 155, 259, 274 Vyas 15, 135
Syal, Meera 104
Ward, Mathew 52
Tagore, Rabindranath 7–8, 16–17, 40, Woolf, Virginia 17
50, 76, 97, 104, 114, 145, 211
Tharoor, Shashi 104 Yashpal 70
Tolstoy, Leo 77 – 8, 87 Yeats, William Butler 114

Valmiki, Omprakash 15, 105 – 6, Zamana 24, 30, 33, 116, 130,
108, 135 134 – 5, 137, 142, 162, 274
Vasconcelos, Jose 97 Zola, Emile 113, 201

284