In the 1960s, in Bangalore, there was not a trace of India in our classrooms blazing with photographs of flowers that grew 10,000 kilometres away. All our textbooks came from Britain. Geography by Stembridge. History by Vincent Smith. Even our Nature Study book was written by someone who could never have known what 90° in the shade felt like.
Our only glimpse of India lay in our Hindi books — Kabir, Rahim, Tulsidas, Harivansh Rai Bachchan, Sumitranandan Pant. In that post-colonial high noon, the names and words our Hindi teacher read aloud sounded exotic to our Anglicised ears. But hours of tedious grammar instruction did their job: we read Hindi fluently.
“Open to page...”
It was ‘Panch Parmeshwar’ in a little book by the Hindi Prachar Sabha written by someone named Premchand.
Two originals
He was born Dhanpat Rai Srivastava, a name so much grander than, say, Robert Louis Stevenson. The melodrama and sentiment in the lives of his characters Jumman Sheikh and Algu Chaudhary made their mark on me though I was 50 years away from his world. The impact of that story in an Indian language that I could read for myself was unforgettable. The idea of right and wrong and friendships gone sour stirred my mind in a way that no story in English ever had. I speak here not of language or understanding but of the importance of emotion in a classroom
How else can one learn anything of value?
At the time I wasn’t to know that I was reading Urdu words glinting through the Hindi or that a few weeks before Premchand published ‘Panch Parmeshwar’ in Hindi it had appeared in Urdu as ‘Panchayat’. Which version had he written first?
As his fame spread, scholarship gradually revealed that the writer had lived in two languages. His literary career had seen five novels and 50 stories in Urdu before he shifted to Hindi because Urdu publishing had dwindled and the air of the times favoured Hindi.
Of the 300 stories he wrote — all now available in English thanks to M. Asaduddin’s stupendous project of editing them in Premchand: The Complete Short Stories in four volumes — my favourite is ‘A Strange Holi’ translated by Harish Trivedi, which appeared as ‘Vichitra Holi’ in Hindi and ‘Ajeeb Holi’ in Urdu. Are ‘strange’, ‘peculiar’ and ‘marvelous’ interchangeable? Ask Premchand!
Premchand’s virtuosity in both Hindi and Urdu (as well as Persian) gave him the handle he needed to write blunt, moving stories about both societies, and some of the earliest creations about that much loved genre, ‘the family story’, came from Premchand’s two-nibbed pen.
Realism reigned in this fiction about landholdings, failed crops, about petty cruelties and tiffs in joint families. Whether the setting was village or town, Premchand’s deep affinity for the common person shone through. His strongest criticism was reserved for caste injustice, and the misogyny of our patriarchal and hypocritical society with its vast repertoire of verbal abuse towards people of lower castes and women.
Often hauled up by government censors, Premchand played his part in the freedom movement, resigning from his government post and often facing court trials and fines for his anti-government writings. At one time almost anything he wrote was considered seditious.
Asymmetric bilingualism
Premchand soon became his own translator and took immense liberties with his originals. Indeed the closing paragraph of the Urdu version of ‘A Night in the Month of Poos’ is entirely missing in the Hindi.
Many of his later works were translated either from Urdu to Hindi or vice versa by people who were never acknowledged, including in the final draft of Rangbhoomi in Urdu, for which the anonymous translator charged a steep fee.
With two versions of the same story on offer, translating Premchand into English becomes a larger challenge. So, since any translator is a literary producer (not just a reproducer), whom exactly are we reading?
A few months before his end in 1936, addressing the first conference of the All-India Progressive Writers’ Association, Premchand spoke in Urdu. This brings us to the politics of language.
Before colonial intervention, literary India was packed with rich veins of multilingualism: Arabic and Persian had transformed Indian literatures and society in significant ways. (Few know that Raja Ram Mohan Roy’s first book was in Persian with an introduction in Arabic.) This era ended when Persian was pick-axed out of India to make way for English. Roy himself led an appeal that Indians be taught English.
The multilingualism of earlier times was replaced in the 19th century by asymmetric bilingualism where English was the language of the intellect and Indian languages the inferior other.
A more damaging fracture was the polarisation of Hindi and Urdu speaking populations which some sociologists see as the root cause of the alienation which eventually led to Partition.
Should we be surprised to learn that when an admirer called on an ageing Premchand he found him making notes in English?
The writer edits translations for Oxford University Press, India.
