DAILY PIONEER, New Delhi, 26-06-1996
CRUMBLING BRICKS OF LITERARY GRANDEUR
Katha Samrat
Premchand’s residence in Lamhi
Village has fallen a prey
to criminal neglect. Shamsul Islam visits the ruins of a historic site.
Hum kono Premchand ke nahin janit. Ehan savere se sanjha tak chillum
piye waley auro ganda ganda kam karat waley padal raha na. E ghar purey gaon ka
kuda khana ban gail ha. Hum apney bachhan ke nahalwawat hai ta kaun pap karat
hai?” (I do not know any Premchan. Here from morning till night the drug
addicts and people involved in dirty deeds lie around. It is a house which has
become a dustbin for the whole village. If I am giving bath to my children, is
it a crime?)
Thus spoke Phulpatti while
washing clothes and giving bath to her children on a hand-pump standing in the
midst of the ruins of a house in the village Lamhi near Varanasi, where the
greatest writer of Urdu-Hindi literature was born in the year 1880, wrote most
of his works and died in 1936.
The functioning of this historic
site as a community dustbin is a stark testimony to the insensitivity and
ungratefulness of a nation to one of its writers whose fame went beyond the
seven seas and who has always been acclaimed as the greatest narrator of the
sorrows, joys and aspirations of the Indian peasantry.
Premchand was a worthy
contemporary of Maxim Gorky and Lu Xun—incidentally all three died in the same
year, 1936. It is really heart-breaking to see the crumbling state of the house
where once the Katha Samrat (master story-teller) lived and created works like
Soz-e-Watan, Godan, Ghaban, Nirmala, Shatranj ke Khilari, Seva Sadan, Kafan and
characters like Hori, Gobar, Dhaniya, Pt. Datadin, Mote Ram Shastri and Surdas
who are as real and living today as they were in the first half of this
century.
Premchand was bron on July 1, 1980 in Lamhi as
Dhanpat Rai Srivastav in a family of Kayasths. His initial education took place
in the village madrasa and his first piece of writing was a biography of Oliver
Cromwell (1903). But it was the publication of his collection of short stories
Soz-e-Watan in Urdu (1909) which made him a household name in northern India. Not
everyone knows that till Soz-E-Watan in Urdu (1909) which made him a household
name in northern India. Not everyone knows that till Soz-e-Watan Premchand was
using Nawab Rai as his penname.
Soz-e-Watan was full of
nationalistic fervour and was written against the backdrop of the rising tide
of revolutionary terrorist movement throughout India which reached a high-water
mark with the hanging of Khudiram Bose by the British rulers.
The popularity of the Soz-e-Watan
alarmed the British administration and soon they were able to find out through
their intelligence network that Nawab Rai was non other than Dhanpat Rai posted
in the Department of Education at Mahoba. The English collector of Mahoba
called him for an explanation.
Premchand wrote about the
incident in his memoirs: “Saheb asked about the theme of each story. At the
end, he was very angry and said that my stories were filled with sedition… were
one-sided and had insulted the British Government. He also passed the orders
that I should hand over all the copies of Soz-e-Watan to the Government and
should not pen anything without his consent.” To cease to be a writer was not
acceptable to Premchand. Since it was Nawab Rai who was prohibited from
writing, he chose ‘Premchand’ as the other penname and started writing in Hindi
as well. It is as Premchand that he has been immortalized.
Premchand was a rebel by nature.
He married a child widow, Shivrani, in the year 1906 even though his biradri
and family socially boycotted him. He not only wrote against practices like
kanyadaan but also refused to practice the same at the time of his daughter’s
marriage. He wrote, “Why kanyadaan? Either we give lifeless things as alms or
only cow among living things. Is the girl a cow?”
After resigning his Government
job he was often hard-up for money but he refused to be a court writer for the
British or native rulers. Once when he was offered a post in the War Journal of
the British Government, he turned down the offer by saying, “Unfortunately, I
do not treat it as a nationalistic act.” In the like manner, he was invited by
the Raja of Alwar to be his court Katha Samrat. He declined the offer by saying
that by accepting the offer he would not be able to serve the cause of
literature.
A fearless and uncompromising
writer who fought against all that was feudal, who relentlessly exposed the British
and native tyrannical regimes, who upheld the causes of the downtrodden against
heavy odds, who symbolized the freedom struggle and who was often referred to
as the Kalam ka Sipahi (solider with a pen), did he not deserve better
treatment from posterity? Premchand’s
namesake who worked as pressman in the printing press run by Munshiji, for more
than ten years, holds Premchand’s sons Amrit Rai and Sripat Rai responsible for
such a shameful scenario “Munsiji’s sons earned crores of rupees by selling his
works throughout the world but never bothered to visit Lamhi or take care of
this historic home.”
Dr. Ram Narain Shukl of BHU holds
literary organizations and the Government responsible for such an unfortunate
situation. “There are more than ten big literary orgainsations which lay claim
to his heritage. They shout from house-tops that they are his real inheritors,
but all that is meant for publicity or pocketing government funds. They don’t
visit Lamhi even for ceremonial purposes. About five years back, the sons of Premchand
donated this house to the Government for constructing a suitable memorial for
the literary doyen. A contractor even started some repair work but one fine
morning he simply disappeared with the doors and almirahs of the house, as no
payments were made to him.”
Dr. Shukl laments the fact that
besides the family, Government, and literary organizations which failed in
their duties, there are no public spirited people around to save Premchand’s
house for the coming generations. “In the case of Mahadevi Verma, few local
poets, and writers joined hands to turn her house into Mahadevi Sahitya
Sangrahalaya at Ramgarh after her death. They did not wait for the Government
of some literary establishment,” says Dr. Shukl.
Of course, one can have solace
from the fact that it is not the memories of only Premchand which are being
washed off. Mirza Ghalib’s house in Ballimaran, Delhi and great humanist poet Surya Kant
Tripathi Nirala’s house at Mahishadal in West Bengal
have already been lost to junk dealers and commercial appetite.
[The print version carried 4
photographs corroborating the shocking state of Munshi Premchand’s house in
Lamhi village snapped by the author of this piece.]
