CYCLING CITIES
The mark of a great writer is when his words resonate across centuries and generations. Not only is the writer and his work termed to be way ahead of his time, but also a reflection of the contemporary society. Upanyas Samrat Munshi Premchand was one such prolific writer. His oeuvre included more than a dozen novels (his first was the 1903 novel called ‘Devasthan Rahasya’, and his last one, ‘Mangalsootra’, remained unfinished), around 250 short stories, many essays and even Hindi translations of a number of foreign literary works. Through these stories, Premchand took his readers through the social upheavals of 20th century India. A hark back.
Munshi Premchand (31 July, 1880-8 October 1936), also Dhanpat Rai, also Nawab Rai, lived most of his life in abject poverty, alienation and anonymity. His invisibility proved that the mark of genius in terms of Urdu and Hindi literature which has made him a legend was also marked by a life of protracted struggle, personal loss and unhappiness, and relentless penury.
A school teacher always in small obscure schools stretched across the arid landscape of Eastern Uttar Pradesh, he started studying in a madarsa and graduated to become a teacher with a starting salary of Rs 5. He worked across the most remote terrains in difficult, dusty locations, cut-off and solitary: born in Lamahi in Varanasi, he moved from this job to another with low salaries, from Pratapgarh to Bhairach in eastern UP, travelling the landscape of ordinary life in its most stark inequalities, hunger and despair. Perhaps this was the reason that he was meticulous in documenting the bitter realism of the Hindi heartland with such minutest of details, with sardonic humour and satire, laced with the idea of hope and beauty, as much as deep tragedy, loss and loneliness.
Like Somerset Maugham’s classical epic, The Human Bondage, he too explored the human condition in its kaleidoscopic meaninglessness, looking for meaning in life, as much as entering deep into the social psychology of his time, like the characters of Fyodor Dostoevsky, roaming the mean, hungry, maddening and lonely bylanes of Tsarist Russia’s St Petersburg, almost always condemned and exiled, fighting the demons of insanity in his mind. But Munshi Premchand did not go insane; nor did he become a gambler like Dostoevsky, or an exiled outsider in eternal metamorphosis like Franz Kafka of Prague. Instead, he chose to become anti-war, antiBritish, progressive, radical, almost a prophet unknown against the feudal and colonial monstrosities of his time.
A failed marriage, a re-marriage, banning of his books by the British, perpetual joblessness, and the story of utter poverty did not prevent him from joining the freedom struggle and the progressive writers, storytellers, lyricists and musicians, who shaped the high culture of pre and post independence India – a high culture which entered the smallest bylanes of our homes in little towns and villages via the radio, lifting our spirits and telling us that all is not lost. Not even love, in the time of eternal despair. No wonder, even when he had no money, he quit his government job after Gandhi gave a call to quit all government jobs as a mark of civil disobedience.
Shrilal Shukla, another great writer from the same region, wrote the bestseller classic, ‘Raag Darbaari’. He wrote, pithily and with bitter satire that the Indian education system is like a bitch lying on the streets which everyone can kick as and when they want to. So what would Premchand have written if he had been in contemporary India, about the streets of India where blood seems to be flowing almost always on the streets?
The India of mob-lynchers going berserk in the name of cow or beef, the stabbing of a teenager, Junaid, in a train who had gone shopping for Eid, the murder of dairy farmer Pehlu Khan in Rajasthan with legitimate papers for a cow he bought for milk, or Mohammad Akhlaq of Dadri, on false accusations of storing beef in his fridge, the lynching of Dalits in Una who skin cow carcasses for a living, the public murder and humiliation of women in Jharkhand branded as witches – what would Premchand have thought about it all?
Or the killing of farmers in Madhya Pradesh, the death of 70 children because the oxygen cylinders had failed in Gorakhpur – his own backyard, the killing of 30 people who chose to die defending a godman-rapist? Or Gujarat genocide 2002 and the sexy ad campaign of ‘Acche Din’. What would he have written in the postnarrative of Godaan or Rangbhoomi? Would he have called his novel, Raktbhoomi, or Matrabhoomi, or just Nafratbhoomi? Or would he write a long essay titled: Mere naam pe nahin… Not in my name?
The blind beggar in Rangbhoomi knows the truth. The grandmother in Idgah, which still makes us cry, knows the truth of love and poverty on the day of Eid, and the chimta the little one gets for her from the village fair, because her hand gets burnt on the tawa in an angethi with raw fire. The characters in Godaan will tell us the truth about Premchand’s India, the cowbelt, and unravel the mysteries of the human mind in a casteist and patriarchal feudal order ruled by the British.
His second wife who went to jail on the call of Gandhi would tell us how the first feminists were made in India, fighting for freedom, like Kalpana Dutt and Aruna Asaf Ali. Every character is etched with subtlety and precision, with both tragedy and satire moving upstream, against the stream, and turning the tide of a mundane life, into an epical testimony of complexity and patriotism layered with shadows and twilight zones. In that manner, Premchand did not craft any magic realism like Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Salman Rushdie. He only tried to document in his own complex and understated, satirical, deep manner how India of that time was designed, and how it is refusing to change. Has India changed in contemporary times under the umbrella of manufactured media consent, the mediocrity of literature, cinema and aesthetics, and the advent of a self-styled superman at the helm of affairs? How republical is the Republic?
If only Premchand can be reinterpreted, he would show us our own cracked mirror, especially in the Hindi heartland. No wonder, another great, Satyajit Ray from Bengal, made two epical films based on the literature of Premchand: Sadgati and Shatranj ke Khilari. The first on the oppression of a bonded Dalit labourer, played by great actor late Om Puri, and the second, on the dying regime of singer, dancer and lover, Wajid Ali Shah, who brought alive Krishna’s Raas Lila in his courts and love chambers in Awadh, in authentic Ganga-Jamuni sanskriti, even as the British advanced and captured Lucknow. With the late Saeed Jaffrey and Sanjeev Kumar, both great actors by any world cinema standards, Ray documented and sketched the refined embroidery of this town next to a flowing Gomti, even as the chess game became a metaphor of death, dying and defeat.
However, Premchand will never become a metaphor; he will never die, or face death, or be defeated; this is because he is as great as any great writer ever born on planet earth. His tragedy was that he was never translated. And, yet, in the last moments of his life, he was elected as the first president of the Progressive Writers’ Association in India in 1936, which was a unique assembly of the finest in the land. He deserved the honour, in his humility and his invisibility. Truly, Munshi Premchand, the legend and the humanist, will never ever die in the annals of literature. His legacy will live on.
Like his classical political and literary journal, ‘Hans’ which collapsed along with his printing factory, and which was revived by another great writer, Rajendra Yadav in the 1980s. Since Rajendra Yadav's death, his daughter continues to bring out this classical masterpiece, where writers from remote areas still write beautiful and deeply moving stories and critical essays. A postmaster, a station master, a school teacher — these are the writers who are the living legacy of Munshi Premchand. No celebrities surely, but they are the flesh and blood of a certain greatness which continues to defy the metro-centric celebrities of mediocrity and opportunism. That is a tribute to Premchand, like a graffiti written on the wall: Not in my name.