He held a mirror to society

After Prem Chand’s 125th birth anniversary year, R.L. Singhal takes a look at the seminal contribution of the pioneering author

Munshi Prem Chand, whose genius has not yet been fully recognised in India (the land of his birth), is one of the greatest novelists that the world has produced. He is undoubtedly the most widely read author in modern Hindi literature, and in the domain of fiction he remains peerless to this day. This doyen of Hindi letters was born on July 31, , in a small village, Lamhi, near Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh.

Prem Chand salvaged Hindi fiction out of the mire of crime and sex and made it the mirror of pulsating life — life as he saw it in the Indian village, its homes and hearths, its barns and byres. Before he appeared on the scene, Hindi fiction was either detective and picaresque or didactic and religious. No one had written a novel of contemporary social life portraying the toiling men and women of India, their joys and sorrows, their hopes and frustrations. Almost all his predecessors wrote either to amuse or to preach. Devaki Nandan Khatri in his Chandrakanta and Chandrakanta Santiti gave us fairytales — a unique world of magic, adventure and chivalry, of princes and princesses and their romances in the palaces of the nether world.

It was Prem Chand’s destiny to break away with the past.He mirrored the complex social life of his times and depicted the doings of ordinary people in a familiar setting. His characters are ordinary men and women, running their normal course of life with their joys and sorrows, their strengths and weaknesses. Prem Chand wrote sincerely and realistically with the deep understanding and compassion of an imaginative artist. The Indian peasantry found in him a great exponent of their cause, one who knew the tragedy of their dark lives and could paint it in its entirety.

Prem Chand had been the victim of that crushing poverty and social tyranny which he found enveloping the Indian village. He had seen from close quarters the many vultures preying upon the Indian peasants — the zamindar, the money lender, the patwari and the police official — all making a meal of him. His penetrating vision had noted the hypocrisies and tyrannies practised in the guise of religion. He has exposed all these in a remarkably ruthless manner in his writings. Prem Chand was in the beginning a reformist. He gave vivid descriptions in his novels of the tyrannous social customs and practices that were eating into the vitals of Indian society and he suggested ways and means to remedy them. He was an idealist. He had faith in man and his destiny, and that is why he did not lose hope even amidst total destruction. In his first great novel, Sevasadan, he took up the problem of prostitutes, and after depicting the vicious and miserable life of the fallen women, he suggested his well-considered remedy in the establishment of sevasadan with his heroine Suman as its directress. His optimismes discernible in Rangbhoomi in the spiritual and moral triumph of Surdas. But the kicks of life, the unending defeats and the incorrigible scheme and system of things that he surveyed all around, made him lose all hopes of reform, and by the time this great artist began writing Godan, his sanguine spirit had totally left him and he depicted in this last masterpiece of his complete ruin of the Indian village and all that it stood for.

Godan is the consummation of Prem Chand’s great genius. It is here that his art of story-telling finds a luscious ripeness. The simple dignity of his style and the transparent sincerity in the treatment of his subject matter can nowhere else be better seen. Godan’s hero Hori is the most memorable character that Prem Chand has produced. He is the true representative of the toiling and suffering Indian peasantry.

All his life Hori feeds his oppressors and fattens them at his cost. His spiritual resilience holds him even in the face of stark hunger and poverty. He continues to toil till the end without raising a word of protest or revolt. He finds it impossible to save his small piece of land. He is even driven to marry off his young daughter Roopa to a middle aged man in return for Rs 200. What a pathetic defeat for him. Even the family honour, for which he had suffered and toiled, was gone. He resolves that he would not rest till he has paid back this amount. The peasant Hori turns a labourer working on the road. His passion to own a cow also persists and he works harder still. His feeble and emaciated body cannot stand this added strain. So one day he falls unconscious on the roadside never to rise again.

Prem Chand has no impersonal forces to contend with. Prem Chand’s characters are pitched against the tyrannous social order. They struggle and toil and give visions of the millennium that Prem Chand was striving for. Very often his characters triumph in the end, hold the torch high to illuminate the path for others. Suman of Sevasadan, Prem Shankar of Premashram, Surdas of Rangabhoomi, Chakradhar of Kayakalp and Amar Kant of Karmabhoomi — all resolutely struggle and do achieve something at the end.

They constitute Prem Chand’s optimism incarnate. Prem Chand does not believe that chance and destiny are out to frustrate man’s efforts. There are no blind forces or supernatural powers controlling human action and producing catastrophe.

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