snehal shingavi

Premchand and Language: On Translation,

Cultural Nationalism, and Irony*

ham k b ky ky maz k dstn yd t

lkin ab tamhd-e ikr-e dard-o-mtm h ga
I, too, used to remember such wonderful tales of adventure
But now all I can recollect has turned into painful dirges.
rusva, Umr Jn Ad

The epigraph to this essay is taken from the opening of Umr Jn Ad,
Mirz Muammad Hd Rusvs most famous novel, which begins with a
lamentation on the prospects of storytelling in the present moment (the
novel was published sometime between 1899 and 1905).1 The couplet ex-
plains that what once was an archive of the pleasurable possibilities of
fantastical fiction (maz k dstn) has now given way to the over-
whelming immanence of dirges of pain and mourning (dard-o-mtam): it
famously signals the shift that will take place at the end of the novel after
the romantic escapades of the courtesan and her lover are brought to an
abrupt end with the declining fortunes of the lite. The novel itself contains
an almost innumerable number of such ghazal couplets strewn throughout
the conversation between the eponymous courtesan and the author, all
part of the elaborate pseudo-seduction that takes place between a now
aged Umr Jn and the ever-flirtatious Rusv. But opening the novel in
this way is, in part, Rusvs acknowledgement that the novel understands
itself as straddling two traditions from the start, or more precisely, under-

*
This is a revised version of the paper presented at the International Seminar
on Premchand in Translation, held at Jamia Millia, New Delhi, 2830 November 2012.
1
Fathpr puts the publication date at 1899 (see Rusv 1963, 11), while Khush-
want Singh insists the novel was published first when Rusv was 48 years old (put-
ting the date of publication at 1905) (Rusv 1993, ix).

149
150 The Annual of Urdu Studies, No. 28

stands itself as documenting one tradition about to be eclipsed by another.

The next fifteen years would reveal just how dramatic those changes ac-
tually were.
Umr Jn Ad has become important in the world of Urdu letters
precisely because of its self-conscious representation of the impact of im-
portant historical changes on the forms of literary production: first, the novel
documents the transformations underway in North India in the wake of the
failed 1857 War for Independence and the subsequent decimation of Mughal
and Navb power; and second, it meditates on the effect of that decline on
Urdu literary institutions, especially the k, which depended on that
power for patronage. The changes taking place in North India were not
merely political and economic, but also religious and social. Even Rusv
notices the pressures to censor and mute his own narrative becoming ever
more forceful, even as he slyly challenges those same pressures. When dis-
cussing the bawdier performances done in the cities, Rusv comments we
are no reformers to get worked up by these [obscene] customs (Rusv,
1993, 27).
The range of changes taking place within an Urdu literary sensibility
in which the decline of the aristocracy, the rise of British power, and the
growth of religious modernism and ancillary literary movements such as
the New Light played a prominent partwere staggering. One of the most
profound ways that these changes manifested was a temporary shift away
from the ghazal, now seen as part of the reason for the decadence of Urdus
cultural institutions, and towards prose with a more markedly chaste idiom
(a kind of inversion of the process that Umr begins her narrative with).
This essay is an attempt to tell part of the story about literary publics
in North India and the transition from poetry to prose, from romance to
realism, from lite to democratic sensibilities, from pleasure to asceticism,
and from Urdu to Hindi, all of which are involved in the production of
what Rashmi Sadana calls a literary nationality (2012, 177).
Munshi Premchands contribution to that literary nationality has long
been understood as the domestication of the Romancein Gopi Chand
Narangs formulation, by introducing into it the living truth of human
existence (1991, 127), and in Ali Jawad Zaidis formulation, by enriching it
with a robust sense of realism (1993, 412)but in both instances the shift
is away from Umr Jn Ad. When we turn to histories of Indian liter-
ature (because Urdu still does not always make the cut) or Hindi literature,
then Premchands genealogy reaches through Tagorean romanticism back
to the religious epics in Braj and Khari Boli, in which Premchands pro-
gressivism is seen as a result of nationalist agitation and Gandhian asceti-
 Snehal Shingavi 151

cism (Machwe 1977, 49).2 So the movement in Premchands fiction is away

from Romance doubly: away from the sprawling, adventure-filled narratives
that were more properly the provenance of genres such as the dstn (a
process that Rusv begins, but does not complete), as well as away from
the erotic and material rewards that romance might offer the true adven-
turer in favor of the more sober and less immediately tempting conclusions
of the real. It is in this specific sense that the combined legacies of Umr
Jn Ad, the dstn, and the ghazal all haunt Premchands novelistic rep-
resentation of the k ; all hang over his fictional courtesans as precisely
the representational norms against which Premchand is resisting and
writing in Hindi.
Alternatively we might suggest that despite being a writer who works
in Urdu, Premchand is also abandoning many of the accreted traditions so
central to the canon of Urdu letters, not in some crass deference to a com-
munalist geist, but as a consequence of intellectual, historical and market-
driven responses to developments taking place in colonial North India.
But even still, critics have yet to disaggregate which of the literary changes
that Premchand introduced were developments within Premchands own
artistic innovations in the novel, in general, and which were responses to
the newly differentiated reading publics that had begun to coalesce vari-
ously around Urdu and Hindi. Understanding this requires asking a counter-
factual: if the genre of the novel about the courtesan, especially in North
India, is closely connected to the history of the ghazal and if the primary
way for aristocratic men to receive their education in poetic culture would
have been in the k, why is Premchands novel about courtesans, Bzr-e
usn (The Marketplace of Beauty) in Urdu and Svsadan (The Orphan-
age) in Hindi, so devoid of any reference to the ghazal, in particular, or to
Urdu poetry in general? What had happened in the intervening twenty
years between Umr Jn Ad and Premchands novel(s) to shift the
expectations and demands of the genre so dramatically that Premchand
need not have produced a single ghazal or umr in the entire novel?
To put the problem as polemically as possible, we might also ask
how exactly Premchand, a novelist who sets the standard for literary anti-
communalism in South Asia, might have participated, wittingly or no, in
the production of certain politicizable boundaries between the world of
the Urdu ghazal and the world of the Hindi novel. (I will ultimately argue

2
It is important in this respect that Premchands novel was never tainted with
the charge of obscenity which so many other novelists who dealt with themes of
female sexuality explicitly faced. The story of how this contributed to the devel-
opment of a reading public in Hindi is taken up by Gupta (2001, see especially
chapters 1 and 2).
152 The Annual of Urdu Studies, No. 28

that Svsadan does this more forcefully than Bzr-e usn). Part of what
this paper wants to interrogate is just exactly what was at stake in Prem-
chands famous shift from writing and publishing in Urdu (until around
1918) and the decisive shift he made to publishing and writing in Hindi after
1924 (Trivedi 1984), all the more so since the shift seems to have taken place
first in a novel about courtesans and their relationship to an emergent
bourgeois nationalist culture in Benares.
The question still facing all Premchand scholars is whether the fiction
he produced in Hindi is a translation of what he produced for his audiences
in Urdu or not? Shall we call them revisions, transcreations, reinterpreta-
tions, or something completely different? And if what is at stake in the move
between Hindi and Urdu reading publics is in part a whole set of expec-
tations about differentiable communities, what does this do to our under-
standing of Premchands anti-communalism?
Such a discussion of Premchands fiction, especially when dealing with
his works that exist in both Urdu and Hindi, is already made complicated
by certain important facts. First, as a writer who stands at the head of the
novelistic tradition in both Hindi and Urdu, he has earned a reputation for
being an anti-communal writer, one sensitive to the cultural viability of both
Hindu and Muslim traditions as they have been conceived in the twentieth
century, and an anti-communal activist, one who spoke out against com-
munal violence as it began to become a regular feature of late colonial
India (Rai 2000, xiii). This reputation, however, occasionally occludes the
important role he played in shifting the center of gravity of North Indian
literary publishing from Urdu to Hindi and its consequences for the com-
munal politics of language, with the result that the Hindi Premchand and
the Urdu Premchand have now almost completely different critical legacies
(Trivedi 1984).
Second, Premchands own ideas about translation, his own work as a
translator, and the proliferation of translations of his work make theorizing
his translatability a knotty problem, especially since he tended to ignore
his own advice when it came to his translational practice, but also because
many translators follow his example and translate Premchand without an
eye towards his own views on translation.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, the critical and scholarly audience
which is able to read in Urdu and Hindi simultaneously and account for the
varied critical reception of Premchands Hindi and Urdu materials is infin-
itesimally small and almost entirely insignificant in the scholarly corpus.
One of the most devastating legacies of Partition has been the separation of
Urdu and Hindi into two now almost completely separated literary traditions.
To make matters worse, Premchands own brand of cultural nationalism,
 Snehal Shingavi 153

which was interested in interrogating the corrosive effects of British colo-

nialism on Indian thought but also on defending Hindi as an infant language,
makes the work of translating him as well as theorizing his shuttling back
and forth from Urdu, at the least, an ironic project (if not an outright failure)
from the start.
In order to understand Premchands unique intervention into the
canons of both Urdu and Hindi literature, we have to think about him as a
writer who only makes sense under the sign of translation, as a writer
whose intellectual concerns are only made manifest by putting his trans-
lations (and translations of his works) at the center of our attention. In
part this is a necessary corrective to the way that he is more commonly
read as either a Hindi or an Urdu novelist, despite both critical traditions
having knowledge of the other. But aside from correcting a critical over-
sight, this attempt to highlight Premchands concerns with translations and
his understandings of what the work of translation is helps us not only
understand the contours of his language politics but also his responses to
the developments taking place unevenly in the publishing world in late
colonial India.
Premchands relationship to this problem of literary translation, I con-
tend, is best understood by looking carefully at the Bzr-e usn/Svsa-
dan combine as it is his first serious attempt at writing a novel for two
different reading publics simultaneously.3 There are three reasons for
focusing on this pair of novels at the expense of, say, his more frontal
engagement with translation theory or his own translations of novels from
English. First, that the way he approached the question of English-language
communication and art under the yoke of colonialism was fraught with
contradictions. The problem that he notices is that Hindi was being
crowded out by English and suffered from being a largely derivative pub-
lishing field dominated by translations into Hindi from the other regional
vernacularsUrdu, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati are the ones that he names
in Svsadan and hints at in Bzr-e usnand the classical languages,
especially Sanskrit. Most critics, on the other hand, notice the following
speech toward the end in the novel and then assume that the primary
problem the novel wants to contend with is one of Anglophone linguistic

3
Even though Bzr-e usn was completed first, it was published after Sv-
sadan, making the problem of translation all the more vexed as both texts were
undergoing revisions at around the same time as he tried to make them ready for
publication. This process was even more protracted in the case of Bzr-e usn
since it was much more difficult for Premchand to convince a publisher to under-
take the task of publishing the novel. For more on this, see Gopal (1965, especially
chapters 11 and 12).
154 The Annual of Urdu Studies, No. 28

and cultural hegemony:

And if intelligent people like you are devoted to English, a national language
will never be born [] people have found a lofty language like English and
have sold themselves over to it. I dont understand why people think it
honourable to speak and write in English. I, too, have studied English. I
spent two years abroad and learned to speak and write from the best Eng-
lish teachers, but I hate it. It feels like I am wearing an Englishmans soiled
clothes.
(Premchand, 2005, 193)4

The temptation to read this kind of robust cultural nationalism as the

dominant strain in Premchands work obscures other important literary
debates about translation that the novel was also contending with, many
of which do not fit the usual pattern of his nationalist credentials. The Prem-
chand that emerges from closer attention to translational politics is more
contradictory and provisional, as the battle lines that would become more
cleanly defined the closer India got to independence were still poorly
marked and often obscure. These contradictionsbetween national and
local level loyaltiesalso structure the ways that the novel thinks about
all politics, despite its straightforward and pious representational modes,
which have led to the oversimplified assignation of progressivism to Prem-
chands work.
The second reason is the novels deep interest in Suman, a young,
Brahmin wife who turns sexlessly, but still romantically, to the k as a
solution to her dissatisfactions with her impoverished, married life. This
interest is not only the terrain on which the novels gendered politics are
resolved, but also the terrain on which it subconsciously deals with the
vexed inheritance of the Hindi novel from Urdu cultural institutions, such
that Sumans peripatetic and undirected transit through parental home,
marital bed, guest quarters of the Benarasi lite, the brothel, the widows
home, the servants quarters, and finally the orphanage mark also the novels
politics and anxieties about genre, translation, and the status of Hindi aes-
thetics. Another way of saying the same thing: this is the arc of the trans-
formation of the Romantic inheritance of the Urdu novel into the national
Bildungsroman of Hindi.
And finally, Premchand is best understood as a novelist of translation,
a novelist both personally and thematically interested in translation, and
someone who produced novels in the middle of cultural debates about the

4
In every instance available, I have offered citations from the extant English
translations of Premchands novels to allow as many readers as possible access to
the works in English.
 Snehal Shingavi 155

problems and advantages inherent in translation, most importantly because

Svsadan signaled the important shift from publication in Urdu to publi-
cation in Hindi as demand, markets, education, and politics made possible
new, single-script readers in Devanagari. I want to attend to these debates
as they appear in Premchands Svsadan and then attempt to think about
the structure of this novel as thematically interested in translation in a
number of modes twinned together in it as alternative possibilities: conver-
sion and seduction, redemption and ruination, repentance and depredation,
transaction and corruption. Whether the Brahmin wife can be reunited
into the Hindu jati after she has become a avif is also a questionto
put it polemicallyof translation. To put the problem another way, are
we certain that cultural nationalism or anticolonial aesthetics are resistant
to translation in precisely the ways that we imagine?
The debates about Anglophone culture in Svsadan happen along-
side the more prominent debate in the novel about courtesans and their
relationship to an lite (read Muslim and Mughal) culture. A new group of
modernist, English-educated thinkers in the Municipal Council in Benares
and a few liberal-minded religious personalities have combined forces in
order to remove the courtesans from Dalmandi in the hopes of improving
the lives of the citizens of Kashi. This puts them at odds with the communal
elements, both Hindu and Muslim (who see the eviction of courtesans as
a ploy to either attack property values or reduce the number of Muslims
in the city), and some of the landed gentry and powerful industrialists,
who are amongst the courtesans best clients.
The arguments advanced against the removal of the courtesans from
the city variously interrogate whether or not eviction is the best course for
the Municipal Council to take, but the debate also brings up the problem
which is the intimate connection between the avif and a national literary
and musical culture. Throughout the course of the novel, a number of
contradictory arguments are put forth about the causes and solutions for
the expansion of the k and its ancillary cultural effects: that the ap-
preciation and tolerance of courtesans is the result of a new, lite, modern
(read English) education and that it is the uneducated, rural peasants who
supply the demand for courtesans, especially at weddings; that courtesans
are responsible for the preservation and spread of national musical and
poetic traditions and that the culture that the courtesans control is decadent
and responsible for the vice of prostitution; that courtesans are a part of
the national and cultural heritage and that courtesans threaten the most
important national and cultural institution, namely marriage; that spending
money on mujrs and concerts is swadsh since it provides jobs for Indian
musicians and the like and that mujrs and concerts bankrupt families
156 The Annual of Urdu Studies, No. 28

during weddings with unnecessarily lavish expenditures; that courtesans

are pious and reformable and that courtesans are only sinners and irredeem-
able; that courtesans would not exist without patrons and that certain men
and certain women are natural-born sinners; that there is no difference
between the economic transactions of prostitution and marriage and that
marriage is always preferable to the k. The debate is sociological,
political, and religious, but it is also a consequence of the mode of Prem-
chands novel, as a novel primarily organized by debate and rhetoric
Svsadan is, after all, one of Premchands most dialogic novels with
almost every chapter being the scene of some important debate or other,
almost always left unsatisfyingly resolved at best.
But the provisional nature of each of these debates, the way that the
novel presents arguments and ideas inconsistently from chapter to chapter,
the fact that despite our fondness for the reform-minded members of the
Benares Municipal Council, even they do not ultimately agree on what it
is that they are trying to accomplish or whyleaving Suman, ultimately,
very much aloneplaces the novel very importantly historically at the be-
ginning of an ideological opening that the novel only uneasily acknow-
ledges.
This is a novel still in search of an ideology and an idiom: here is one
of the first attempts of Hindi trying to argue its case as an equal player in
the world of Indian letters. One such argument takes place during the
debates in the Hindu section of the Municipal Council. In the course of a
touchy repartee about whether financial losses should be suffered for the
sake of moral reform, Kumvar Aniruddh Singh, in a moment of bright irony,
interrupts the conversation and changes its direction by wittily attacking
Prabhakar Rao, the editor of the local paper, Jagat:
Sir, you spend all your time in editing your newspaper. You dont have the
time to enjoy the pleasures of life, do you? But those of us who are carefree
need some way to entertain ourselves, dont we? We can spend our eve-
nings playing polo, our afternoons napping, and our mornings in talking to
government officials or riding our horses. But what are we to do between
the evening and ten oclock at night? Today you suggest that we should
evict the courtesans from the city. When tomorrow you propose that every
dance, concert, or party in this district should have approval from this board,
it will become quite impossible for us to survive.
(Premchand 2005, 140)

When Prabhakar Rao suggests that Kumvar Aniruddh Singh should read
something if he needs entertainment, the latter mocks the importance of
books altogether:
 Snehal Shingavi 157

We [the rich] are debarred from reading. We dont want to become book-
worms. We have already learned all of the things that we need in order to
lead a successful life. We know the dances of Spain and France. You may
not even have heard of them. You can put me before a piano and I will
play a tune that will put even Mozart to shame. We know all about English
morals and customs. We know when to wear solar topis and when to put
on a turban. We read books as well. You will find that my bookshelves are
filled with books, but I dont rely on them. This resolution of yours will be
the end of us.
(ibid.)

Aniruddh Singh is undoubtedly Premchands favorite character in these

debates, as his most important function seems to be to expose the hypoc-
risy and stupidity of the people around himand it is clear that Premchand
has contempt for most of the council members, whose rhetorical flourishes
are so incommensurate with their own personal ethics. The moral heroes
of the narrativePadamsingh, a lawyer, and Vitthaldas, a social worker
are characterized by their perfect earnestness and sincerity, while the
members of the Municipal Council are, more or less, all hypocrites and
opportunists. Aniruddh Singh, the wealthiest zamindar in the district,
brings a patrician irony that cuts through the posturing of the nouveau
bourgeois who populate the Council. Here, Aniruddh Singh caricatures
the self-interestedness of the people around him by translating it into an
ironic expos of his own lifestyle. The basic positionthat the taste for
luxuries must be indulged and that there is nothing of value in literature
that is not better realized in real life, even when describing rare, foreign
thingsis clearly a ridiculous proposition, as is the self-satire of the lives
of the idle rich. But the ironic intervention is perfectly misunderstood by
everyone, who, as Kumwar Singh points out, cannot see the way that their
class interests dictate their feigned moral outrage. Later in the novel, when
Padamsingh attempts to win Aniruddh Singh over to his position because
he believes that the zamindar actually wants courtesans to continue working
in Benares, he learns that Aniruddh Singhs position has been misrepre-
sented to him by the other members of the Hindu council.
Aniruddh Singh responds to the charge that he has opposed the res-
olution to move the courtesans out of Dalmandi:
I expended all my energy in support of your resolution. I didnt think that the
opposition deserved a second thought. I handled it all with a touch of irony.
(Remembering) Yes, that possibility exists. I know. (Roaring with laughter
again) If thats the case then you must see that the municipal council is
filled with simpletons. Surely, you understand my sarcasm. Some people
must have misunderstood. Its strange that none of the most learned and
158 The Annual of Urdu Studies, No. 28

respected municipal council commissioners understood my simple irony.

Shame! What a terrible shame!
(ibid., 163)

When Padamsingh reflects on Aniruddh Singhs explanation, he thinks, If

these men were so easily fooled, they are thick headed. But Prabhakar
Rao was fooled as well, and that doesnt make sense. It seems as if his
daily translations have worn out his brain (ibid., 164).
Translations, here, are responsible for the diminution of an ironic, nu-
anced, aesthetic sensibility, because they reduce the translator to a mere,
literal amanuensis rather than raising his/her abilities to the level of a cre-
ative, original thinker. Too much translation, the argument seems to go, dulls
the literary refinement of any linguistic professional editor.
The joke, though, about translations only makes sense in context, and
it derives much of its power from the fact that Padamsingh is not a mean-
spirited man, so his biting jab at Prabhakar Rao is all the more poignant
because it is so out of his character. What, though, is the problem with
translation, here? It is of course one thing to be tone deaf to irony (and it
must be said that it is impossible to mistake the irony because the rest of
the novel is so plainspoken), but it is another thing altogether to under-
stand the practice of translation as responsible for the inability to read
between the proverbial lines.
The inversion that Premchand is making, interesting because it is so
unusual, is that translations make one unable to see creativity in ones own
language, that translations make one believe that all innovations happen
elsewhere and must be smuggled into ones own language, that they per-
manently retard the development of a genuine literary sensibility. Trans-
lation into Hindi is necessarily the acknowledgement of the hegemony of
other languages. Disavowing translations, then, becomes the idiosyncratic
formulation of Premchands cultural nationalism. If, as postcolonial scholars,
we normally attribute the practice of translation to the colonial apparatus
and its attempt to exert power and authority over vernacular languages,
Premchand here accepts a variant of the argument, put forward variously
by Derrida, Spivak, and Benjamin, that translation involves an acknowl-
edgement of the otherness of the other, a necessary defamiliarization of
the self in favor of a more ethical approach to the politics of speech and
access to media and power. At the same time, though, Premchands posi-
tion is also different in that he seems to be arguing that translations into
Hindi actually hurt the ability of Hindi to develop its own literary sensibility.
Translation here is not a risky ethical maneuver that might raise the status
of the voiceless or a procedure which necessarily tramples over the rights
of the subaltern, but a process of undermining the very language into which
 Snehal Shingavi 159

a literature is being translated.

The joke had really been established when Aniruddh Singh had only
a few lines before argued that translations were ruining Hindi:

Its really a shame that the country that produced priceless epics like the
Ramayan, gave birth to wonderful poetry like Sursagar, has to rely on trans-
lations for even ordinary novels. In Bengal and Maharashtra, where they
have a strong tradition of music, they havent lost their sense of beauty.
They still have wonderful imaginations and aesthetic sense. I have stopped
reading Hindi novels altogether. The translations aside, there is really noth-
ing of worth other than a few plays by Harischandra and a few things such
as Chandrakanta Santati. This must be the most pitiful literature in the
world. And worse, there are some individuals who have translated a couple
of English novels with the help of Bengali and Marathi translators and who
think that they are prominent literati in this country. One such man gener-
ated a word-for-word translation of Kalidasas plays, and now he considers
himself the Hindi Kalidasa. One scholar translated two books by Mill, not
himself, but with the help of Marathi and Gujarati translators, and he thinks
that he has single-handedly revived Hindi literature. I think that all these
translations are ruining Hindi literature. Originality never has a chance to
thrive.
(ibid., 16263)

The problem with translation is determined by a specific set of histor-

ical phenomena that were produced by the material realities of publication
at the turn of the century. Premchands own fear that inferior translations
were overwhelming the market, as well as the talent for Hindi prose, are
here represented as a distaste for translations in general, despite the fact
that Premchand had already established himself as an important translator
in his own right, from many of the languages here objected to. That the
clearly awful Chandrakanta Santiti is held up here as a marker of the rich
talent in Hindi prose is some index of how much Premchand was strug-
gling to make the case for Hindis vulnerable power: every other vernac-
ular language had a more seriously established reputation, while Hindis
had to be manufactured anew. That this is happening precisely in the
middle of the debates about the abolition of the k should force us to
reconsider just how contradictorily Premchand argued for a liberal view
of courtesans and a conservative view of the k.
The argument that Hindi is in bad shape and that translation of great
works from other languages into Hindi is ruining Hindis chances at pro-
ducing great literature is aimed at Hindis chief competitors, not singularly
identified as English. In fact, in some ways the argument is at least also
aimed at Urdu, since as Kumwar Aniruddh Singh argues, everywhere one
160 The Annual of Urdu Studies, No. 28

goes now in Benares, all one hears are ghazals and qawalis (ibid., 162).
And the problem is also the decline in musical traditions in North India. In
so doing, Premchand is merely advocating for a kind of linguistic and literary
autarky that we might associate with the cultural nationalism of swadsh
and its demand for Indian-origin commodities, only Premchand is nar-
rowing the field not to India but to the Hindi-speaking belt of the north
and to the Hindu jati. This is also the reason that he has to stretch backwards
in time to the Bhakti period of Tulsidas and Surdas, because the contem-
porary scene is so pitiful. But the argument is also a fairly conservative
one when it comes to linguistic mixing or aesthetic sensibility. Many of the
translations are good because the original languages have aesthetic quali-
ties, while many of the translations are bad because they substitute crea-
tivity in Hindi for the borrowed creativity of others. It is possible perhaps,
Premchand could have written the lines ironically, except they do not all
appear in Bzr-e usn, where presumably they would have clearly marked
the novels Hindi-centric and perhaps even Hindu-focused ideological
ambitions. The version in Bzr-e usn is far more gentle:

How unfortunate it is that the same people who produced a peerless work
like the Ramayan now have to depend on translations even for light litera-
ture. In Bengal and the Deccan the tradition is still alive, so the people there
are not so wanting in feeling.
(Premchand 2003, 155)

In Urdu, the passage gently nudges in the direction of nurturing literary sen-
sibility in general; in Hindi, the same passage militates in favor of fortress
Devanagari.
The problem about the different treatment of Urdu and Hindi in what
is putatively the same novel is compounded by the fact that every passage
about translation and about Hindi literature is expanded and more devel-
oped in Svsadan than its corresponding passage in Bzr-e usn, which
can only serve to highlight just how important both of these questions
were in Premchands mind as he rewrote the novel for a new reading
public. In Bzr-e usn, for instance, the passage where Aniruddh Singh
explains his ironic intervention to Padamsingh reads very differently from
the one in Svsadan:
You probably misunderstood me. In my speech I said everything in my
power to support you; what else could I do? In fact I thought it useless to
talk seriously with those who were opposing your scheme. Instead, I
adopted a style of satire and ridicule; (remembers) ah, yes, I see (laughs
aloud) if that is so Id say that the Municipal Board is made up of fools.
They probably didnt even understand my satire! The city of Benaras does
 Snehal Shingavi 161

not have a single discerning individual among the enlightened, cultured,

and wise members of its Board! I am very sorry indeed that you misunder-
stood me. Please forgive me. I agree with your proposal completely.
When Padam Singh left Kanwar Sahibs house he felt as refreshed as
though he had been on a pleasant outing. His hosts warmth and geniality
had captivated him.
(ibid.)

In the intervening years between Bzr-e usn and Svsadan the

contours and complexities of publishing in Hindi (as opposed to Urdu)
must have become far more pronounced for Premchand. If the problem
in Bzr-e usn is merely the stupidity of municipal councils in general,
the problem has clearly shifted by Svsadan to include crucially the del-
eterious impact of those dreaded translations. That this comment could
only be made later and in Hindi also reveals just how differently Premchand
understood the newly differentiable readers he was encountering. But this
is not reducible to the problem of hiding certain political commentary from
certain readers; the deficiencies of Hindi were palpable to Premchand
precisely because he had such an intimate knowledge of the publishing
and literary culture in Urdu. In a letter to Imtiaz Ali Taj, composed around
the same time as both novels, Premchand writes:
, ,
. .
. -- .
, , .
(qtd. in Gopal 1965, 99)
In Urdu, a number of literary journals and newspapers are published,
perhaps more than necessary, because the Muslims are a literary commu-
nity. Every educated individual thinks himself qualified to become a writer,
and there is an absolute dearth of publishers. In this ink-drenched India
there is not even one proper publisher. The ones that remain are as good
as nonexistent because their entire universe is a few cheap novels, which
offer nothing of value to either the nation or the language.5

Here, Premchands complaint is about the silliness of the publishing

agenda that Hindi publishers pursue, as their entire universe is composed
of a few trashy novels (sr kyant and radde nval hai) while the
world of Urdu is marked by sophistication and refinement. The elision that
he makes here, though, is of interest, because Urdu becomes a metonym
for Muslim (musalmn k literary qaum hai). Many of the terms by which

5
Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine.
162 The Annual of Urdu Studies, No. 28

Premchand would begin to distinguish the failures of Hindi vis--vis Urdu

could easily later be utilized for an agenda that would have horrified
Premchand.
One index of just how decisive a shift was being made in the world of
Hindi letters was that Aniruddh Singhs argument about the relationship
between Hindi and the other more established literatures in India was re-
peated, almost verbatim, in the Hindi presses which reviewed the novel
initially. One reviewer, Kalidas Kapur, compared the literary scene in Hindi
before Premchand to a garden overrun by foreign plants:
- - -
,
-
- , - - -

(qtd. in ibid., 94)
You can find every kind of plantgood or badhere. If you look over
there you will see trellises of literary blossoms from the Bengali Bankim
and Ravindra, and over there a vine of Saraswatichandra brought over from
Gujarat. In other places, there are attempts to plant the historical novels of
Hugo and Dumas. Elsewhere a few gentlemen are attempting to decorate
the garden with the litter and debris of English literature. And hiding in some
corner, a few lovers of literature can be spotted planting the seeds of a true
literary service.

The thankless labor of nurturing indigenous flora eventually bears the

fruit of a fine literary tradition; the reference to shitya sv (literary service)
could only be a nod to the ending of Svsadan, itself: the sublimation of
sexual desire and material wants in the sublime devotion to divinity in
service. The hope, Kalidas Kapur concluded, was that novels like Sv-
sadan would fertilize the soil well enough that there would be a day
when there would be no shortage of Thackerays, Dickenses, Scotts, and
Rabindras in Hindi literature (see ibid.).
Premchands position would not fit in easily with the dominant ways
we have of thinking about linguistic politics in postcolonial literary studies.
The cultural nationalist proposition is understood easily enough, but that
the risk is not from excessive translation of Hindi but rather from the de-
pendence on other languages and literatures whose already established
literary credentials threaten the new, weaker markets of Hindi makes the
mapping of this onto a colonial problematic difficult. Part of this has to do
with the fact that while Premchand seems to have had a robust critique of
colonial domination on India, it was not the only problem that he saw in
North India, which was cleft by all manner of religious, class, and political
 Snehal Shingavi 163

power bases that preyed on the weak. The novel is also written at a mo-
ment when modern communalism was in its earliest stages so the debate
with Muslim cultural institutions is still part of the repertoire of nationalist
renewal. The decentering of the colonial problematic for Premchand was
also in some ways a reflection of the idea that colonialism did not appear
to be waning in the years before the national agitations and World Wars.
Social reform threatened culture inasmuch as that culture depended
on the institutions which held up the exploitative social and sexual rela-
tions in any economic arrangement; put another way, the feverish need to
defend a cultural tradition comes at the expense of an ability to critique the
economic and sexual institutions which maintain that tradition. But the
reason why the novel can so easily abandon the k is because its cultural
capital no longer comes from the poetic traditions that the k curates.
This is in part what makes Svsadan interesting: in a novel about courte-
sans there is relatively little Urdu poetry, as compared to what there would
have been in a novel like Rusvs Umr Jn Ad. In place of the Urdu
ghazal, Premchand turns to the Braj and Awadhi poetry of an earlier
moment in Hindis literary history to represent the music of courtesanal
seduction and temptation; once the ks have been displaced from the
center of Benares, the poetry and song that the novel captures are in a newly
minted, modern standard Hindi, and the texts are much more about
nationalist abnegation than about desire. In many ways, Svsadan is
already a post-Mughal, post-Urdu, and importantly a post-courtesanal
novel, born of a certain kind of ideological moment in which social reform
had already displaced one set of cultural institutions and created literary
sensibilities that were removed from the world centered on the k.
As an aside, very little in Svsadan happens in the k; it is mostly
a scene of comedic anti-seduction and religious or moral instruction. All
that remained was for the formation of a new tradition, the selection of a
new canon through which Hindi could claim that it had never really devi-
ated from the standard. And that is despite the fact that the novel was ini-
tially written in Urdu. Saving Suman from the k is also about rescuing
Hindi fiction from the supposed decadence of Urdu institutionswhich is
the way that we understand l and zds interventions into Urdu literary
criticism at the turn of the nineteenth centuryas well as the actual power
and prominence of the Urdu literary scene and the seductions of other
languages.
This is perhaps where understanding Premchand as a novelist under
the sign of translation is helpful in allowing us to cut through some of the
hagiographic modes of thinking about him and understand the real con-
tradictions that he faced. The weak position of Hindi was like the weak
164 The Annual of Urdu Studies, No. 28

position of feminism in India in the early twentieth century, and sexual and
literary reform would often require rearguard political positions, especially
the patronizing and paternalistic solutions that are put forward in the
novel. This is not meant as an argument that Premchand is a latent com-
munalist or closeted antifeminist. It is meant rather to demonstrate that it
is only when we think about the risks of translations, and the ways that
translation is not merely an exercise in colonial domination or cultural
chauvinism, that we can bring out the ideological and aesthetic force of a
novel such as Svsadan. q

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