From the small office upstairs where five pesky hacks dish out a delightful magazine week after week, a tiny booklet was thrust on me some time back. “Do your review,” I was told, with increasing frustration over the weeks as I kept pushing deadlines. As a function of our collective narcissism, of social media and ready distractions, it was easy to lose track of this reminder of the greatest 20th-century writer in Hindi — Munshi Premchand aka Dhanpat Rai Shrivastava.

I procrastinated, intimidated perhaps by the prospect of dealing with thoughts and writing that have the power not just to make you cry and laugh, but also heighten the fragility of our facetious beings by the writer’s profoundly reflective idealism.

Premchand was not simply an inspiring author; his writing spurted out of a life lived truly from within. He dealt with the human condition, with the vast masses living eternally on the periphery in our rural hinterland holding on to the idea of better days.

When I finally got around to relive and re-read a few gems from his collection — a vast body of work including over 300 stories, 10 novels and three plays — I began to get some sense of what drove a satirist of the stature of Harishankar Parsai to write this gushing tribute, verse-like in its ode, to the master of Hindi literature.

Premchand ke Phate Joote ( Premchand’s Torn Shoes ) is a short tribute by humorist Parsai to the understated brilliance of Premchand, translated by MJ Pandey to English and published by Vividha, a non-profit organisation, with beautiful sepia-tinted illustrations by Shrujana Niranjani Shridhar.

 

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Parsai pays homage to the zeitgeist of an era that witnessed revolutionary, anti-colonial struggles that ranged from Bhagat Singh’s admiration for comrade Lenin and the near Bolshevism of Nehru to the humanism of Mahatma Gandhi. Parsai drops his caustic wit and humour in this short tribute; moved, as he was, in the way only the greatest works of art can move you.

Parsai is intrigued by a faded picture of Premchand, an ironic smile on his weather-beaten face, as he posed with his wife. Premchand was typically dressed in dhoti-kurta, the dhoti hitched up nearly to his calves and displaying mud-laden shoes, torn so badly that two left toes peeped out, while the others remained barely covered.

“What kind of man is this, who poses for a photograph in torn shoes but is also laughing at somebody,” wonders Parsai, “Doesn’t he know that by just stretching his dhoti a little further down, he could have covered the offensive, torn shoes”.

But then, Premchand was not like anyone else. He, a man who redefined literature with his earthy realism, did not look at himself from the outside. What he wore, how torn his shoes were, none of it mattered; he wouldn’t bother to cover a torn shoe, or mend a tear in his clothes. “You do not know the importance of covering, while we sacrifice ourselves for the sake of coverings,” says Parsai.

Parsai reimagines the unforgettable characters Premchand created, forcing you back to the chilling realism of ‘ Kafan ’, a short story depicting the dehumanising effect of poverty. Ghisu and Madhav, father and son in the chamar colony, eat potatoes stolen from a nearby farm when Madhav’s wife Budhia is writhing in labour. Budhia has no one for help, her husband refuses to leave his father’s side because if he does, the father will eat up the potatoes they have stolen. They let her, a woman who has toiled to feed the two parasites, die unattended as they eat and argue outside. They collect money for her funeral, her kafan , and spend it to drink and eat.

By the time he wrote ‘ Kafan’ , the writer/philosopher had interpreted the world and perhaps concluded that there was very little point in trying to change it. The stirring idealism of Seva Sadan , his first novel on the life of a sex worker and how it changes with her running an institution for women in the end, slowly dissipated by the time the other masterpiece, Godan, was written. From an idealist, Premchand had become a stark realist.

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Premchand ke Phate Joote(Premchand’s Torn Shoes)Harishankar ParsaiTranslated by MJ PandeyNon-fictionVividha ₹100

 

But even when he was depicting reality, Premchand’s genius lay in never letting it become routine. He had that elusive quality that makes a writer convey what is being felt by tiny nuances; by just that right word and phrase that touches you. In Godan , the little hurts, angst, jealousies and, beyond all, the utter sense of helplessness, the cruel dousing of the tiniest hopes of Hori, his wife Dhania, their son Gobar and daughter Rupa, are feelings that you, the reader, feels. Premchand has the power to disturb and to move. Even a superficial engagement with Premchand is a revelation of the heights human intellect can scale.

And so, I thank Vividha for this tribute. In the banality of my everyday existence, it was a moment of elevation.

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