This volume explores the reception of Premchand’s works and his influence in the perception of India among Western cultures, especially Russian, German, French, Spanish and English. The essays in the collection also take a critical look at multiple translations of the same work (and examine how each new translation expands the work’s textuality and annexes new readership for the author) as well as representations of celluloid adaptations of Premchand’s works. An important intervention in the field of translation studies, this book will interest scholars and researchers of comparative literature, cultural studies and film studies.
The book Premchand and The Arab World is an attempt that states that Munshi Premchand’s literal work holds an exclusive position in Indian literature as well as in world literature. Even eighty-six years of his death, the discussions and research on Premchand and his achievements through his literary work are not only in the department of Hindi, Urdu, English, and Arabic of Indian Universities but also in several universities of the Arab World. We have tried to ensure that the cultural, political, and social imports of his work are not neglected. We have attempted to bring out its cultural and moral significance. The primary stress in the rest of the study is on a close analysis of the individual short stories and novels, respecting their integrity and autonomy as works of art owing to space limitations.
"The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures is a compilation of scholarship on Indian literature from the 19th century to the present in a range of Indian languages. On one hand, because of reasons associated with national academic structures, publishing resources, and global visibility, English writing gets privileged over all the other linguistic traditions in the scholarship on Indian literatures. On the other hand, within the scholarship on regional language literary productions (in Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, etc.), the critical works and the surveys focus only on that particular language and therefore frequently suffer from a lack of comparative breadth and/or global access. Both reflect the paradigm of monolingualism within which much literary scholarship on Indian literature takes place. This handbook instead focuses on the multilingual pathways through which modern Indian literature gets constituted. It features cutting-edge literary criticism from at least seventeen languages, and on traditional literary genres as well as more recent ones like graphic novels. It shows the deep connections and collaborations across genres, languages, nations, and regions that produce a literature of diverse contact zones, generating innovations on form, aesthetics, and technique. Foregrounding themes such as modernity and modernism, gender, caste, diaspora, and political resistance, the book collects an array of perspectives on this vast topic"--
This book examines the questions of conformity and resistance with respect to Premchand’s literary corpus. Mapping the various complexities, challenges, and contradictions of interwar India, it demonstrates how the passive peasant protagonists of the writer’s fictional works present a diametrically opposed definition of dharma as compared to their dissident nationalist counterparts. Through a relatively similar logic of comparative assessment, it further foregrounds the fundamental asymmetry that exists between Premchand’s literary representations of women as compliant domestic subjects and those that portray them as rebel patriots of colonial North India. Juxtaposing several genres, including novels, short stories, letters, and journalistic writings to offer a reconsideration of Premchand's work, this book will interest scholars of peasant narratives, nationalist fiction, and gender studies. Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan or Bhutan)
Godaan is one of the most celebrated novels of Munshi Premchand. Set in pre-independence India, the novel captures social and economic conflict in a north Indian village. The story revolves around Horiram, a poor village farmer, and the struggle of his family to survive and maintain their self-respect. Horiram does everything in his capacity to fulfil his sole desire to own a cow, which is considered a farmer's source of wealth and happiness. One of the classics of Indian literature, the book offers an insight into the colonial history of India, captures the ethnic flavour of the Indian villages and also catches the human emotions in all their rawness.
Premchand on Culture and Education is a select collection of Premchand's journalistic articles, essays, and editorials, in English translation, written in journals like Madhuri, Hans and Jagran from 1928 to 1936. Indian society then witnessed an extemely perilous phase with British imperialism, capitalism, and aggressive nationalism distracting indians from the path of honesty, equality, and brotherhood. The present collection of Premchand's non-fiction prose is an amalagamation of his impressions of, and responses to, the upheavals taking place in the politically and socially charged decade of the 1930s of the 20th century. Like a torchbearer, Premchand educated and guided public opinion on a wide range of issues such as education, culture, communalism, language, arts, and the Gurukul system of education, famous universities, broadcasting, and cinema. Nearly all the articles/essays/editorials were written to combat the topical crisis, but the nature of the articles and the solutions provided have a bearing even today. Just as non-fiction is called the genre of the future, this collection of Premchand's non-fiction prose will be conducive for posterity and will facilitate fresh avenues of research on Premchand. This book is co-published with Aakar Books, New Delhi. Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the print versions of this book in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
It is an attainment for the Hindi Literature that at the very initial times of its journey, it got a deft painter of human mind like Munshi Premchand. As a story writer Munshi Premchand had become a legend in his own life time. The themes of his stories are rooted to the rural life with urban social life appearing as the contrast to illustrate a complete picture of contemporary life. They also effected the foundation of a new philanthropic heritage of welfare of society. His distinctive style and content are deeply steeped in the hardcore of reality. In view of variety of topics, he, as though, has encompassed the entire sky of humane world into his fold, and are generally based upon some inspiration or experience. Each of Munshi Premchand’s stories unravels many sides of human mind, streaks of human’s conscience, the evils in some societal practices and heterogeneous angles of economic tortures. His stories are the strongest assets of our literature, thus are still relevant today, as much as they were five decades ago. His stories have been translated in almost all the languages of India and world.
