Munshi Premchand

He was married to a girl selected by his grandfather in 1895. He was just 15 years old at that time and was still studying in school. He did not get along with his wife who he found to be quarrelsome. The marriage was very unhappy and his wife left him and went back to her father. Premchand made no attempts to bring her back.

He married a child widow, Shivarani Devi, in 1906. This step was considered revolutionary at time, and Premchand had to face a lot of opposition. This marriage proved to be a loving one and produced three children.

He suffered from ill health during his last days and died on 8 October 1936.

Premchand was born as Dhanpat Rai Srivastav on 31 July 1880 in Lamhi, a village near Varanasi, in British India. His parents were Ajaib Rai, a post office clerk, and Anandi Devi, a homemaker. He was their fourth child.

He received his early education at a madrasa in Lalpur where he learned Urdu and Persian. He learned English at a missionary school later on.

His mother died when he was just eight years old and his father soon remarried. But he did not enjoy good relations with his step-mother, and felt very isolated and sad as a child. He sought solace in books and became an avid reader.

His father too died in 1897 and he had to discontinue his studies.

After struggling for a few years as a tuition teacher, Premchand was offered the post of an assistant teacher at the Government District School in Bahraich in 1900. At around this time he also started writing fiction.

Initially he adopted the pseudonym “Nawab Rai”, and wrote his first short novel, ‘Asrar e Ma'abid’ which explores corruption among temple priests and their sexual exploitation of poor women. The novel was published in a series in the Benares-based Urdu weekly ‘Awaz-e-Khalk’ from October 1903 to February 1905.

He shifted to Kanpur in 1905 and met Daya Narain Nigam, the editor of the magazine ‘Zamana’. He would write several articles and stories for the magazine in the coming years.

A patriot, he wrote many stories in Urdu encouraging the general public to participate in India’s struggle for freedom from British colonial rule. These stories were published in his first short story collection, titled ‘Soz-e-Watan’ in 1907. The collection came to the notice of the British officials who banned it. This also forced Dhanpat Rai to change his pen name from “Nawab Rai” to “Premchand” in order to escape persecution at the hands of the British.

By the mid-1910s he had become a prominent writer in Urdu and then he started writing in Hindi in 1914.

His novel, ‘Godaan’, is considered one of the greatest Hindustani novels of modern Indian literature. The novel explores several themes such as caste segregation in India, exploitation of the lower classes, exploitation of women, and the problems posed by industrialization. The book was later translated into English and also made into a Hindi film in 1963.