"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...
more"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. It is being reproduced here with thanks to Daily Pioneer, New Delhi.]"
