Premchand: where to start

Premchand is the easiest door into Hindi literature. His stories are short, his language is the Hindi of the street and the village, and his subjects (debt, caste, dowry, a child at a fair) need no background. He wrote around three hundred stories and a dozen novels, so the real question for a new reader is which ones to read first.

Our short answer: read five stories in an evening or two, then one short novel, then Godaan.

Who he was

Premchand was born Dhanpat Rai Srivastava on July 31, 1880, in Lamhi, a village near Varanasi. He worked as a schoolteacher and deputy inspector of schools, and began writing in Urdu under the name Nawab Rai. His first story collection, Soz-e-Watan, was seized by the colonial government for sedition, and he took the pen name Premchand afterward.

From the mid-1910s he wrote more and more in Hindi. In 1921 he quit government service in response to Gandhi's non-cooperation movement. He ran a printing press, edited the literary magazine Hans from 1930, and spent a short, unhappy spell writing for films in Bombay. In April 1936 he gave the presidential address at the first meeting of the Progressive Writers' Association in Lucknow. He died in Varanasi on October 8, 1936.

Five stories for a first evening

These are short, and each shows a different side of him.

1. Idgah (1933). Hamid, a small boy who lives with his grandmother, goes to the Eid fair with three paise and comes home with a pair of iron tongs for her. It takes twenty minutes and is the story most Hindi speakers remember from school.
2. Do Bailon ki Katha (1931). Two bullocks, Hira and Moti, are sent to a cruel new owner and keep escaping. It is funny and also, quietly, about freedom.
3. Shatranj ke Khiladi (1924). Two noblemen of Lucknow play chess while the British take over Awadh. Satyajit Ray made it into a film in 1977.
4. Panch Parmeshwar (1916). Two friends each have to judge the other at the village panchayat. A clear early example of Premchand's moral seriousness.
5. Kafan (1936). A father and son, both idlers, collect money for a shroud for the son's wife and spend it on drink. One of his last stories and his darkest.

Read them in this order. The first two are gentle, the third is satire, and the last is hard to forget.

Three novels

Nirmala (1927) is short enough for a week. A teenage girl is married to a widower much older than her because her family cannot pay a dowry, and suspicion slowly wrecks the household. It is a good first novel because the cast is small and the plot moves.

Gaban (1931) follows Ramanath, a young man who embezzles money to buy jewelry for his wife and then has to run from the consequences. It moves from a small-town house to Calcutta and has more plot than any other Premchand novel.

Godaan (1936) is his masterpiece and his last finished novel. Hori, a poor farmer, wants one thing, a cow of his own, and the novel follows him through debt, caste rules and village politics while a parallel story follows the urban rich. It is long and slow in places. Read it after you have read a few stories and know his voice.

If you get through these and want more, Sevasadan (1919), Rangbhoomi (1925) and Karmabhoomi (1932) are the other major novels.

Hindi, Urdu or English?

If you read Hindi even slowly, read Premchand in Hindi. His prose is plain and his best effects are in the dialogue, which loses its rhythm in translation. Keep a dictionary nearby for Persian and Arabic words such as gaban (embezzlement) and kafan (shroud).

If you read Urdu, many stories exist in Urdu versions too, some revised by Premchand himself.

If you need English, there are several modern translations of the stories and novels. Gordon C. Roadarmel's The Gift of a Cow (1968) is the long-standing English Godaan. These translations are in copyright, so buy or borrow them. Look for an edition that names its translator and gives the original title of each story, because translated collections sometimes rename them.

Is Premchand free to read?

In India, yes. Under the Copyright Act, 1957, a literary work stays protected for 60 years from the start of the year after the author's death. Premchand died in 1936, so that period ended decades ago, and his original Hindi and Urdu texts are public domain in India.

Two things are not free just because Premchand is. A modern translation is a new work by its translator. A modern edition's introduction, notes and illustrations are new work too. Our public domain guide explains this in more detail, and our guide to free sources lists places where volunteers and institutions have put his Hindi texts online, including Hindi Wikisource and Hindi Samay, which has a dedicated Premchand collection.

Films and adaptations

Satyajit Ray filmed two Premchand stories: Shatranj ke Khiladi (1977) and Sadgati (1981), a short film about caste. Godaan and Gaban were both filmed in Hindi in the 1960s. Watching an adaptation after reading the story is a good way to check how much you understood.