Co-Wife & other Stories

Ruth Vanita

Description

Premchand is India . . . If you haven t read Premchand, you have missed out on a lot The Hindu Considered one of the greatest fiction writers in Hindi, Munshi Premchand (1880 1936) wrote over three hundred short stories, a dozen novels and two plays over a prolific career spanning three decades. Though best known for his stories exposing the horrors of poverty and social injustice, he wrote on a variety of themes with equal facility romance, satire, social dramas, nationalist tales, and yarns steeped in folklore. The Co-wife and Other Stories brings together twenty classic tales of Premchand which provide a glimpse of the author s extraordinary range and diversity. While some cast a harrowing look at poverty, reflecting Premchand s sympathy with the underdog, others expose human foibles without being judgmental and tackle gender politics in a humorous and ironic manner. This collection also includes an imaginative foray into historical fiction, a nostalgic look at childhood, a comic exploration of the theme of women s autonomy, and stories that reveal the writer s profound empathy with animals. Ruth Vanita s sensitive translation captures the power and beauty of Premchand s language, conveying the nuances of the original and bringing to life the author s inherent humanism.

Sujets

• Short story

Informations

• Publié par: Penguin Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 14 février 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9788184757309
• Langue: English

Extrait

PREMCHAND
The Co-wife and Other Stories
Edited and translated with an introduction by RUTH VANITA

PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
Dedication
Introduction
The Grinding Woman s Well
Stigma
Rani Sarandha
The Farce of Brahm
Two Graves
Family Break-up
Subhagi
The Anxiety of Authority
The Co-wife
Theft
Newly-weds
A Widow with Sons
Atmaram
Intoxication
The Child
The Story of Two Bullocks
The Price of Milk
The Voice of God
A Winter Night
The Shroud
Acknowledgements
Copyright Page
PENGUIN BOOKS
THE CO-WIFE AND OTHER STORIES
MUNSHI PREMCHAND (1880-1936) was born in a village near Varanasi in a Kayastha family, and was named Dhanpat Rai. His parents died when he was young. At the age of fourteen, he became responsible for supporting his stepmother and siblings. He was married at fifteen but this marriage failed. He passed the matriculation examination with difficulty, and became a schoolteacher, and later deputy sub-inspector of schools. Premchand began writing in the Urdu script under the pen-name Nawab Rai. In 1910, his collection of short stories, Soz-e Watan , was declared seditious and all copies were burnt.
After this, he began to write in the Hindi script under the pen-name Premchand. He married again, a child widow named Shivrani Devi, and had three children. Premchand was actively involved in the Hindi literary world of his day and also in the Gandhi-led movement for national independence. In 1921, he was one of the few people who responded to Mahatma Gandhi s call by resigning his government job. He supported his family by writing and journalism, editing journals like Hans , and was also a prominent member of the Progressive Writers Association. He wrote around three hundred short stories, a dozen novels, and two plays. Yet, he struggled with poverty all his life. Today, he is considered one of the greatest modern Indian writers.
RUTH VANITA is Professor of Liberal Studies and Women s Studies at the University of Montana, and was formerly Reader in English at Delhi University. She was founding co-editor of Manushi from 1978 to 1991. She is the author of several books, including Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same-Sex Love and the English Literary Imagination , A Play of Light: Selected Poems , Same-Sex Love in India: A Literary History (with Saleem Kidwai), Love s Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India and the West , and Gandhi s Tiger and Sita s Smile: Essays on Gender, Sexuality and Culture . She has translated many works of fiction from Hindi to English, and also some poetry from Urdu to English.
This translation is affectionately dedicated to Kirti, Y.P., Tara and Namrata
Introduction
MUNSHI PREMCHAND (1880-1936) IS PROBABLY THE MOST TRANSLATED of modern Indian writers, with the possible exception of Rabindranath Tagore. The stories of Premchand that are most frequently anthologized are those that highlight the oppression of the poor, Dalits and women. Some of these stories about oppression are indeed among his greatest, although others are formulaic and predictable.
While victimization of the powerless was doubtless Premchand s main theme, placing him in the company of the great truth-tellers like Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, there are also many other Premchands, some of them less in tune with modern progressive tastes-the Gandhian Premchand, the Hindu Premchand, the Romantic Premchand, the conservative moralist Premchand. Reading the three hundred or so stories collected in Mansarovar is an instructive experience, not only for the number of stories of indifferent quality that one encounters but also for the unexpectedly wide range of plots, themes and genres, and for the shock of recognition when one rereads the immortal ones, like The Shroud ( Kafan ), A Winter Night ( Poos ki Raat ) or The Voice of God ( Panch Parmeshwar ).
Selecting only or primarily stories about the oppressed for translation or anthologization may result in the misleading impression that Premchand s outlook is gloomy or depressing, an opinion I have heard from some non-specialist readers. For this anthology, I have selected stories that are representative of what seem to me Premchand s major thematic groups: nationalist stories; stories about oppression based on caste, class, gender, age and species; rural idylls; historical fiction; social dramas that often end in suicide; stories imbued with the spirit of folklore; and first-person narratives about a middle-class person s life. My other principle of selection is literary quality, which means that the story selected may not necessarily be the most typical one of its kind, precisely because it is more complicated and interesting than the average story in its category. I have arranged the stories from the lesser known to the better known, which more or less but not entirely corresponds to chronological order. 1
Sympathy with the underdog is perhaps Premchand s most characteristic quality. Because of his association with the Progressive Writers Association, this sympathy is often assumed to arise from left-wing politics, but in the stories the sentiment emerges as more Romantic, Victorian and Gandhian than communist. 2 The stories are also imaginatively in tune with the tendency of many religious traditions to envision God as siding with the weak or powerless (in the Hindu tradition, for example, Krishna backs the Pandavas against the Kauravas, protects Draupadi, embraces Sudama, and always comes to the aid of his devotees).
The best-known are stories that expose the horrors of poverty, especially in conjunction with those of untouchability, and sharply critique the wealthy, especially upper-caste landlords, moneylenders and politicians. These include farcical satires which resort to caricaturing Brahmans as fat and greedy (with names like Mote Ram, the Pandit in Invitation [ Nimantran ] who disguises his wife and children as scholars so that they can all feast at his patron s expense), Banias as fat, miserly and superstitious (like the Sethji in Demanding Payment [ Thagada ] who flings away his purse in his precipitate flight from a Muslim woman who is trying to feed as well as rob him), and sadhus as exploitative rogues (as in Babaji s Feast [ Babaji ka Bhog ]). More often, these stories function with the tools of social realism, delineating the psychological and material effects of oppression on both oppressor and oppressed.
Ironically, in recent years, some Dalits have denounced Premchand as casteist, largely because he depicts two Dalit men in The Shroud as wastrels who oppress women. 3 These critics make the mistake of viewing only men as Dalits, thus rendering Dalit women invisible. This, of course, repeats the underlying assumption in male oppression of women, namely, that men are human and women a less important subgroup of humanity. The woman in The Shroud is a hardworking victim, oppressed by the men of her family, and she too is a Dalit.
This is one of the very few stories in which Premchand depicts this aspect of Dalit reality. Because he routinely attacks male oppression in every class and caste, it cannot be argued that his depiction of this Dalit woman as mistreated and devalued by her husband and father-in-law betrays casteist prejudice. He much more frequently and harshly depicts upper-caste male oppression of women. For example, in The Funeral Feast ( Mritak Bhoj ), the Brahman men who drive a Brahman widow to destitution and her young daughter to suicide are far less sympathetic characters than the two Dalit men in The Shroud . In Banishment ( Nirvasan ), a heartless upper-caste husband throws out his wife who got lost at a religious fair, because he considers her impure for having stayed a night outside the house.
It is a short-sighted radicalism that wants the oppressed to be portrayed as impossibly virtuous victims. Premchand, unfortunately, often succumbs to this pressure. In most of his stories about Dalits, Premchand depicts them as hardworking, good-hearted, oppressed victims, with no faults at all-famous examples include A Blessed State ( Sadgati ) and The Thakur s Well ( Thakur ka Kuan ). The Shroud is justly more celebrated than these stories, because of its nuanced portrait of the two male characters, who are much more than mere victims or mere villains. They embody an acute analysis of how middle-class virtues like thrift and industry are used as weapons against the poor. The narrator points out that those who live off others are dubbed wastrels if they are poor, whereas if they are rich, they become politicians and bureaucrats. The Price of Milk (Doodh ka Daam) is remarkable for the dynamic it portrays-its unflinching critique of the heartless upper-caste family, who adjust their notions of purity to their changing needs, coexists with a wonderful portrait of the intelligent Dalit child who stands up for himself when he has a chance, and of his relationship with his dog. 4
In his profound sensitivity to animals, Premchand is heir to a long tradition, but stands out among his contemporaries. The peasant and his dog in A Winter Night , the deserted wife and her bullocks in The Co-wife ( Saut ), the lonely old man and his parrot in Atmaram -each presents a study of a highly individuated relationship between human and non-human. The Story of Two Bullocks ( Do Bailon ki Katha ) develops a deep empathy with draught animals, who are among the most mistreated creatures in India. It has an allegorical dimension where the bullocks stand in for all oppressed beings, and perhaps even specifically for colonized Indians, yet Premchand never loses sight of the specificity of a bullock s existence. The Anxiety of Authority ( Adhikar-Chinta ) is not really an animal story because it is a transparent and not very successful allegory, but I include it because it shows Premchand experimenting in a genre outside his usual range.
Old people are another group whose opp