MUNSHI PREMCHAND Premcband MUNSHI PREMCHAND a Llterary Biography
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MUNSHI PREMCHAND Premcband MUNSHI PREMCHAND A llterary Biography MADAN GOPAl ASIA PUBLISHING HOUSE BOMBAY CALCUTI'A NEW D.£Llll MADRAS LUCKNOW LONDON NEW YORK ANGRAU 920. N64GOP A~c No. 13760 COPYRIGHT © 1964 MADAN GOPAL '~RINTED IN lNDIA BY BIKAEB t:nANDRA RAY AT t. M. H; PRESS, 'CRANDNt CHOWK, DI!LHt, AND PUBLISHBJ) "BY P. :S. UYASINGH£,'/ASIA 1t>tmLISHING HOUSE, BOMBAY To Premakanta, Neeraja and Sachin and Shivrani Devi, Sripatrai and Amritrai Prefac( THIS BIOGRAPHY OF the late Munshi Premchand aims at pro jecting his personality and development as a writer, who voiced the aspirations of the people of India in the early part of the century and during the Gandhian era, and also as a man and as a thinker. In a sense it represents the fulfilment of a commit ment made in my earlier book (Premchand, Lahore, 1944), where in I had promised to attempt a full-dress biography of the great author. In doing this literary portrait, my familiarity with Hindi as well as :Urdu has given me an advantage over many writers who, because of their knowledge of one or the other, had to depend solely on literature available in one of the languages. I have in general consulted almost everything of consequence written on Premchand, including Shrimati Shivrani Devi's Premchand Ghar Men, the reminiscences of a large number of Premchand's friends and contemporaries as recorded in the Premchand memorial numbers ,of Hans and Zamana, and the writings of other littera teu~s published from time to time. The single source of greatest help, however, has been the rich material contained in the unpublished letters of Premchand, which I have collected at great expense in money and time from many places in India. The story of their collection is a long one, and goes back to the time when I was writing my first book. Having already collected some letters in that connection, I rea lised that attempts must immediately be made to collect other letters of Premchand. I wrote to Sripatrai, the elder son of Premchand, if this work had been undertaken already. As· early as March 5, 1943, he wrote to me that Premchand's letters "could not be collected; the entire project postulates the whole time energy of a man and, unless somebody takes it up as a niission, I do not think we may make much headway." Aware of the all-round apathy towards a work of this nature, I took: it x Preface up as a mISSIon, and set about the difficult task of collecting letters. This work, spread over the last twenty years, continues to this ·day. An important part of this work was to find out the names and addresses-of persons who might have known Premchand and, among them, those who might have had a chance of being in correspondence with him. This required a good deal of research and study and meant approach to various persons in different parts of the country, as also correspondence with those whose addresses were so ascertained. At times this proved a wild-goose chase; by and large, however, the results were good. The next step was to approach those people who possessed some of the letters, either through correspondence .or perso~ nally, for the purpose of securing the originals or their copies. While some, such as Daya Narain Nigam, Mahtabrai, M. G. Joshi, K. R. Sabarwal and Vishnu Prabhakar, generously and 'Voluntarily parted with the original ones, others, like Jainendra Kumar, loaned me the letters to enable me to make copies or photostats; some others allowed me to make copies in their own presence, and yet other friends, such as Bhisham Sahni, made copies of the letters collected by them available to me. The effort involved in making out copies or preserving the text of these letters has proved extremely rewarding in the sense that the originals of many of these letters have since either been lost or become untraceable, or, as a result of the partition of the country, lie across the border and are inaccessible', I might mention here that the procurement of the letters, either in original or copies thereof, was not the most important part of the job. Many of these letters, specially those of the 'earlier phase, bore no mention of the place or the date of writing. An attempt had, therefore, to be made to determine the correct date, month and year, on the basis of the postal marks on the postcards or the clues contained within the body of the letters, or with the help of the international calendar, or by checking and cross-checking facts with the aid of old files ofjournals which published the articles or short stories, etc . .referred to in the letters. Tracing of old files of journals, now extinct, has in itself been a very arduous job and, li:r<.e the collection of th!? letters, entailed 'visits to various people and places in different parts of the country. In some cases this checking and cross-checking became preface all the more necessary because Premchand himself had given more than two or three dates for one single event (e.g. the publi cation of his early works); and the confusion was made worse confounded by the data given by his close friends and contem poraries and by Mrs. Premchand. Recognising the value of these letters in throwing light on the life and literary career of Premchand, Amritrai, his younger 'Son, wrote to me in 1952 that my work "meant the fulfilment of what I had treasured as a mere wish." He asked me to publish my compilation but I wanted to make the collection richer and more comprehensive, so that it could depict the true-t9~]ife image of the greatest Hindi writer of the age-Premchand. Early in 1959 Amritrai came to me personally and told me that he had been able to collect a large number of letters on his own, and that, with the letters in my collection, the desired true-to-life image of Premchand could be projected. As he wanted to pub lish the book from his own publishing house, I gave my consent to the publication of a book of the letters of Premchand under our joint authorship, either in one volume or in two. Amritrai proposed to publish the letters in two volumes. I agreed, and made available a typescript of some three hundred pages. The volumes, I understand, would be out shortly. My collection of letters, incidentally, is So rich in providing details of his life and his works that, I feel, without these letters no biography could be really authentic. It may also be mentioned that whereas the bulk lof the work and the. first draft of the book were completed before I left the staff pf the Statesman, New Delhi, in 1952, it has taken me nearly a decade to check and cross-check the chronology and correct ness of the material gathered. It necessitated frequent visits to libraries or to private collections. All these labours beca~e necessary because my attempt has all along been that the work should be as authentic as possible and that it should convey to the reader an integrated and faith ful picture of Premchand. With this end in view, I have quite freely used quotations from his letters and autobiographical short stories, articles, etc. (The rendering from Urdu and Hindi into English in most cases is free.) In response to a suggestion made by some friends and kind .critics of my earlier book, notablY Shri K. M. Munshi, who xii Prefr~ce. thought that without the summaries or synopses of the short stories and novels, a reader in English Would not be able to get an idea of the development of Premchand as a writer, I have given brief summaries of his novels, short stories and gist of important viewpoints expressed in his essays and articles, etc. Before concluding, I would like to record my thanks to my wife for her valuable assistance in arranging the pile of material collected by me over the years and in handling the secretarial part of the work. New Delhi MADAN GOPAL May 29, 1962 Acknowledgements THIS IS TO acknowledge my gratitude to numerous individuals as well as institutions who have assisted me over the past twenty-two years in my research work on the life of the late Munshi Premchand. Special thanks are due to: Sripatrai, the elder son of Premchand, not only for his kind help and guidance from time to time, but also for his warm friendship since 1941 which has been a source of much encouragement in undertaking this task; Shivrani Devi (Mrs. Premchand), whose book Premchand Ghar Men has been of immense help in providing close glimpses of Premchand's life, especially his views, which have been quoted at appropriate places; Amritrai for the information contained in his essay Vans Bel, published in November 1960 in Kadambini, Allahabad; Jainendra Kumar, Imtiaz Ali Taj, the late Daya Narain Nigam, the late Mahtabrai (Premchand's stepbrother), K.R. Sabarwal, Vishnu Prabhakar M. G. Joshi, Upendra Nath Ashk, Sri Ram Sharma, B. D. Chaturvedi, B. P. Bajpai, and Bhisham Sahni, who, either on their own or on persua sion, gave me the originals or copies of letters of Premchand, or loaned me the same for copying out, or allowed me to make copies in their presence; Dr. I. N. Madan, Akhtar Hussain Raipuri, and Vinod Shankar Vyas, let,ter,s'to whom have been taken from published journals; Chandragupta Vidyala!lkar, Dr.