Premchand’s poor heroes

I always think of Premchand with nostalgia and the sepia tinted glow of childhood memories. See, when I first started learning Hindi, I wasn’t very good at it, and in a bid to make the language more appealing to me, my mother bought me all the books she could think of. From Tinkle Comics (remember those?) in Hindi, to pulp fiction (only much later) and children’s books.
Amongst them was an old copy of a very nicely illustrated story by Premchand. The story was Eidgah also published as The Festival of Eid and is a story of a little boy who is being raised by his grandmother and who is sent off to the Eid mela with a little money. Instead of spending the money on himself, he buys her a pair of tongs instead, so she won’t burn her fingers. It should be a happy story, but I remember it as heartbreakingly sad, full of poignancy and childhood lost too soon. I read the story again and again — it didn’t improve my Hindi much, but something about the simplicity of the words and the pictures they were able to create resonated within me.
Ever since that first introduction, I greet Premchand like an old friend. I happily read as many of his short stories as I could get my hands on. Although Eidgah remains my favourite, I remember other ones too — the one about the two brothers, where the older brother keeps failing his class and his younger brother doesn’t respect him much anymore, one about an untouchable couple, where the husband is ill and powerfully thirsty and the wife can’t get him any water because the closest is from the Thakur’s well, which they are forbidden to use. All with the same simplicity of language, no matter who the translator, all with the same underlying sadness. Life, Premchand seemed to be telling me, is sad. Deal with it.
Of course, he was prescribed text in school too. Each time I got a Premchand story in one of my readers —Hindi or English — I rejoiced. Every time I read him, no matter if the story was one that I had seen a hundred times before, I found something new to like. Manto, who started cropping up later, didn’t evoke the same kind of response from me. Toba Tek Singh, the story of the lunatic asylum during the Partition, is a story I have read one too many times. Premchand, however, managed to keep it fresh.
And so, when I got my hands on Oxford’s The Illustrated Premchand, I was thrilled. More for my collection. It’s basically a book meant for children, but with minimal editing. The stories remain the same — no dumbing down, no “happy-fying” and certainly, not only the stories he did for kids. I love, love, love the illustrations, they are beautiful and captivating, and capture expressions just right. Of course, I flipped ahead and found The Festival of Eid (score!) translated by Khushwant Singh (double score!) and found it not as sad as I remembered, which is a good thing. There is still a little boy — Hameed going off to the fair with very little money, but he chooses his tongs and then goes on, Tom Sawyer style, to convince his friends that tongs were really the best purchase anyone could have made. The sadness is the poverty of Hameed and his granny, palpable through the story, and maybe it was that I reacted to, all those years ago. Because Premchand’s heroes are poor.
That’s who he wrote about. He was one of the first writers to switch from Sanskritised “proper” Hindi to a dialect more commonly spoken, making him accessible to the people he wrote about. Also, prior to Premchand, Hindi literature was the stuff of fantasies — royalties, beautiful princesses and all that. He brought reality into sharp focus and spoke of all the things that were wrong with society then; and continue to be wrong today.
Would a child react to that throbbing core of injustice that is in all his writing? I know I did, even if I wasn’t too clear what the injustices were. I felt the sadness and the misery of other people in this country, I reacted to the beauty of the stories, too, yes, that’s what kept me reading, but after one of his matter-of-fact tales, I am still left with lingering sorrow. This is the world we live in. Premchand wrote many, many years ago, but I can guarantee you, his characters are still alive today.
Here’s why you should read Premchand, even if you’re not too big on “social issues”.
His writing is beautiful. It is easy, you are quickly caught up in the story and his characters are lively. You know these people, you might have passed them on the street. And give it to the kid you know or the kid in you — Harry Potter is all very well, but sometimes, like Premchand realised, people need a good, old fashioned dose of reality. And reality is all over his writing.

The writer is an author