The Co-Wife & other Stories

by Ruth Vanita

  PREMCHAND

  The Co-wife and Other Stories

  Edited and translated with an introduction by

  RUTH VANITA

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Introduction

  The Grinding Woman’s Well

  Stigma

  Rani Sarandha

  The Farce of Brahm

  Two Graves

  Family Break-up

  Subhagi

  The Anxiety of Authority

  The Co-wife

  Theft

  Newly-weds

  A Widow with Sons

  Atmaram

  Intoxication

  The Child

  The Story of Two Bullocks

  The Price of Milk

  The Voice of God

  A Winter Night

  The Shroud

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright Page

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE CO-WIFE AND OTHER STORIES

  MUNSHI PREMCHAND (1880–1936) was born in a village near Varanasi in a Kayastha family, and was named Dhanpat Rai. His parents died when he was young. At the age of fourteen, he became responsible for supporting his stepmother and siblings. He was married at fifteen but this marriage failed. He passed the matriculation examination with difficulty, and became a schoolteacher, and later deputy sub-inspector of schools. Premchand began writing in the Urdu script under the pen-name Nawab Rai. In 1910, his collection of short stories, Soz-e Watan, was declared seditious and all copies were burnt.

  After this, he began to write in the Hindi script under the pen-name Premchand. He married again, a child widow named Shivrani Devi, and had three children. Premchand was actively involved in the Hindi literary world of his day and also in the Gandhi-led movement for national independence. In 1921, he was one of the few people who responded to Mahatma Gandhi’s call by resigning his government job. He supported his family by writing and journalism, editing journals like Hans, and was also a prominent member of the Progressive Writers’ Association. He wrote around three hundred short stories, a dozen novels, and two plays. Yet, he struggled with poverty all his life. Today, he is considered one of the greatest modern Indian writers.

  RUTH VANITA is Professor of Liberal Studies and Women’s Studies at the University of Montana, and was formerly Reader in English at Delhi University. She was founding co-editor of Manushi from 1978 to 1991. She is the author of several books, including Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same-Sex Love and the English Literary Imagination, A Play of Light: Selected Poems, Same-Sex Love in India: A Literary History (with Saleem Kidwai), Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India and the West, and Gandhi’s Tiger and Sita’s Smile: Essays on Gender, Sexuality and Culture. She has translated many works of fiction from Hindi to English, and also some poetry from Urdu to English.

  This translation is affectionately dedicated to

  Kirti, Y.P., Tara and Namrata

  Introduction

  MUNSHI PREMCHAND (1880–1936) IS PROBABLY THE MOST TRANSLATED of modern Indian writers, with the possible exception of Rabindranath Tagore. The stories of Premchand that are most frequently anthologized are those that highlight the oppression of the poor, Dalits and women. Some of these stories about oppression are indeed among his greatest, although others are formulaic and predictable.

  While victimization of the powerless was doubtless Premchand’s main theme, placing him in the company of the great truth-tellers like Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, there are also many other Premchands, some of them less in tune with modern progressive tastes—the Gandhian Premchand, the Hindu Premchand, the Romantic Premchand, the conservative moralist Premchand. Reading the three hundred or so stories collected in Mansarovar is an instructive experience, not only for the number of stories of indifferent quality that one encounters but also for the unexpectedly wide range of plots, themes and genres, and for the shock of recognition when one rereads the immortal ones, like ‘The Shroud’ (‘Kafan’), ‘A Winter Night’ (‘Poos ki Raat’) or ‘The Voice of God’ (‘Panch Parmeshwar’).

  Selecting only or primarily stories about the oppressed for translation or anthologization may result in the misleading impression that Premchand’s outlook is gloomy or depressing, an opinion I have heard from some non-specialist readers. For this anthology, I have selected stories that are representative of what seem to me Premchand’s major thematic groups: nationalist stories; stories about oppression based on caste, class, gender, age and species; rural idylls; historical fiction; social dramas that often end in suicide; stories imbued with the spirit of folklore; and first-person narratives about a middle-class person’s life. My other principle of selection is literary quality, which means that the story selected may not necessarily be the most typical one of its kind, precisely because it is more complicated and interesting than the average story in its category. I have arranged the stories from the lesser known to the better known, which more or less but not entirely corresponds to chronological order.1

  Sympathy with the underdog is perhaps Premchand’s most characteristic quality. Because of his association with the Progressive Writers’ Association, this sympathy is often assumed to arise from left-wing politics, but in the stories the sentiment emerges as more Romantic, Victorian and Gandhian than communist.2 The stories are also imaginatively in tune with the tendency of many religious traditions to envision God as siding with the weak or powerless (in the Hindu tradition, for example, Krishna backs the Pandavas against the Kauravas, protects Draupadi, embraces Sudama, and always comes to the aid of his devotees).

  The best-known are stories that expose the horrors of poverty, especially in conjunction with those of untouchability, and sharply critique the wealthy, especially upper-caste landlords, moneylenders and politicians. These include farcical satires which resort to caricaturing Brahmans as fat and greedy (with names like Mote Ram, the Pandit in ‘Invitation’ [‘Nimantran’] who disguises his wife and children as scholars so that they can all feast at his patron’s expense), Banias as fat, miserly and superstitious (like the Sethji in ‘Demanding Payment’ [‘Thagada’] who flings away his purse in his precipitate flight from a Muslim woman who is trying to feed as well as rob him), and sadhus as exploitative rogues (as in ‘Babaji’s Feast’ [‘Babaji ka Bhog’]). More often, these stories function with the tools of social realism, delineating the psychological and material effects of oppression on both oppressor and oppressed.

  Ironically, in recent years, some Dalits have denounced Premchand as casteist, largely because he depicts two Dalit men in ‘The Shroud’ as wastrels who oppress women.3 These critics make the mistake of viewing only men as Dalits, thus rendering Dalit women invisible. This, of course, repeats the underlying assumption in male oppression of women, namely, that men are human and women a less important subgroup of humanity. The woman in ‘The Shroud’ is a hardworking victim, oppressed by the men of her family, and she too is a Dalit.

  This is one of the very few stories in which Premchand depicts this aspect of Dalit reality. Because he routinely attacks male oppression in every class and caste, it cannot be argued that his depiction of this Dalit woman as mistreated and devalued by her husband and father-in-law betrays casteist prejudice. He much more frequently and harshly depicts upper-caste male oppression of women. For example, in ‘The Funeral Feast’ (‘Mritak Bhoj’), the Brahman men who drive a Brahman widow to destitution and her young daughter to suicide are far less sympathetic characters than the two Dalit men in ‘The Shroud’. In ‘Banishment’ (‘Nirvasan’), a heartless upper-caste husband throws out his wife who got lost at a religious fair, because he considers h
er impure for having stayed a night outside the house.

  It is a short-sighted radicalism that wants the oppressed to be portrayed as impossibly virtuous victims. Premchand, unfortunately, often succumbs to this pressure. In most of his stories about Dalits, Premchand depicts them as hardworking, good-hearted, oppressed victims, with no faults at all—famous examples include ‘A Blessed State’ (‘Sadgati’) and ‘The Thakur’s Well’ (‘Thakur ka Kuan’). ‘The Shroud’ is justly more celebrated than these stories, because of its nuanced portrait of the two male characters, who are much more than mere victims or mere villains. They embody an acute analysis of how middle-class virtues like thrift and industry are used as weapons against the poor. The narrator points out that those who live off others are dubbed wastrels if they are poor, whereas if they are rich, they become politicians and bureaucrats. ‘The Price of Milk’ (Doodh ka Daam) is remarkable for the dynamic it portrays—its unflinching critique of the heartless upper-caste family, who adjust their notions of purity to their changing needs, coexists with a wonderful portrait of the intelligent Dalit child who stands up for himself when he has a chance, and of his relationship with his dog.4

  In his profound sensitivity to animals, Premchand is heir to a long tradition, but stands out among his contemporaries. The peasant and his dog in ‘A Winter Night’, the deserted wife and her bullocks in ‘The Co-wife’ (‘Saut’), the lonely old man and his parrot in ‘Atmaram’—each presents a study of a highly individuated relationship between human and non-human. ‘The Story of Two Bullocks’ (‘Do Bailon ki Katha’) develops a deep empathy with draught animals, who are among the most mistreated creatures in India. It has an allegorical dimension where the bullocks stand in for all oppressed beings, and perhaps even specifically for colonized Indians, yet Premchand never loses sight of the specificity of a bullock’s existence. ‘The Anxiety of Authority’ (‘Adhikar-Chinta’) is not really an animal story because it is a transparent and not very successful allegory, but I include it because it shows Premchand experimenting in a genre outside his usual range.

  Old people are another group whose oppression has not figured in Indian left-wing politics. But, in part due to Premchand’s influence, Hindi fiction writers have been particularly empathetic to the predicament of old people. Although Premchand is a proponent of the joint family, and celebrates its virtues in stories such as ‘A Well-Bred Girl’ (‘Barey Ghar ki Beti’), he is also aware of the cruelty and neglect it can foster. ‘A Widow with Sons’ (‘Betonwali Vidhwa’) and the little vignette of the old aunt in ‘The Voice of God’ embody his clear-eyed vision of how the elderly are treated in a culture that prides itself on respecting age. ‘The Old Aunt’ (‘Boodhi Kaki’), which I reluctantly had to omit, is famous for its description of the senile old woman scrounging jootha leftovers after a family feast. In this story, the niece-in-law’s repentance redeems the ideal of the family.

  Premchand’s ubiquitous sensitivity to women and children cannot be overstated, and gives the lie to the fallacy of identity politics that would claim that only members of an oppressed group can adequately portray its suffering. He accurately portrays male victimization of women as universal and endemic, and his radical critique is often tinged with bitterness, as in the remark by the narrator in ‘The Co-wife’ about the abandoned woman’s bullocks’ empathy with her pain: ‘They are not men, after all; they are bullocks.’

  Some of his stories powerfully make the case for changing a particular law or practice. For example, ‘A Widow with Sons’ depicts the iniquitous way Hindu property law was implemented to enslave a widow to her sons and a fatherless woman to her brothers. In a similar vein, ‘Despair’ (‘Nairashya’) targets the absurdities of the preference for sons by showing the way a harassed mother of many daughters tricks her husband and in-laws into treating her well during her pregnancies by making them believe each time that she is going to have a son.

  In other stories he eschews a simple social reformist line in order to explore the complexities of regional and community practices. While a social reformer would uphold heterosexual monogamy to the detriment of all other familial arrangements, Premchand explores the way women may use institutions such as the levirate and polygamy to their own advantage. Simply to label all families patriarchal tells one nothing, but a detailed depiction of the family demonstrates the vast difference between patriarchy in, say, the middle-class family in ‘A Widow with Sons’ and the rural peasant family in ‘Family Break-up’ (‘Algyojha’).

  Premchand has an eye for alliances between women in the family—the daughter, who is sensitive to her widowed mother’s plight in ‘A Widow with Sons’, the sisters-in-law who team up in ‘Family Break-up’, and the woman who proves a better ‘husband’ to her co-wife than their husband did to either of them (‘The Co-wife’). He is also keenly aware of the way marriage may stifle a woman’s creativity while autonomy can free up her potential. Both in ‘Subhagi’ and in ‘The Co-wife’, single women outdo men on their own turf, thereby winning universal respect.

  The theme of women’s autonomy recurs in a very rare comic vein in ‘Stigma’ (‘Laanchhan’). This exceptional story provides a refreshing contrast to Premchand’s frequent depiction of highly educated, liberated women as frustrated. Unlike the eponymous Miss Padma, who regrets her decision not to marry, and Sophia, the Christian heroine of Rangbhumi who commits suicide in imitation of her lover, Miss Khurshed thoroughly enjoys her single life and takes serious risks to worst her slanderers. This story also runs counter to Premchand’s usual depiction of westernized Indians. Miss Khurshed wears an overcoat and takes her little dog for walks; not only is she highly educated in English but she has even acted on the stage in London. More often than not, such women and men in Premchand’s stories come to a bad end (like Manhar in ‘Passion’ [‘Unmad’] or Keshav in ‘The Corpse of a Marriage’ [‘Suhag ka Shav’], whose sojourn in England results in their replacing their virtuous wives with westernized beloveds) or undergo reform, like the couple in ‘Peace’ (‘Shanti’), who signal their abandonment of a westernized lifestyle by burning their English books, especially the books of Oscar Wilde!

  Speaking of Wilde, it is interesting that we are never told what the real relationship is between Dr Leela and Miss Khurshed, two single women who are neighbours and intimate friends, and who amorously kiss and embrace, with the aim of playing a trick on the credulous Jugnu. Premchand is very far from taking a Gandhian view of sexual relations. His subtle depiction of sexual tension between bhabhi and devar in ‘Family Break-up’ and his surprisingly non-judgemental portrayal of the adulterous liaison between a cook and the young wife of an old man in ‘Newly-weds’ (‘Naya Vivah’) suggest his imaginative flexibility in this regard. In ‘Family Break-up’, the first inkling we get of Kedar’s feelings for Muliya is his anxious comment after his brother’s death, reported by his mother: ‘I hope Bhabhi is not crying too much?’ The last lines of the story zoom in on Muliya’s body, ‘withered and yellowed by widowhood’ that now ‘glowed red like a lotus’.

  In the magnificent ‘The Child’ (‘Baalak’), Premchand casts a cold eye on self-righteous liberals who are blind to the narrowness of their sexual morality. It has been pointed out that Ismat Chughtai modelled her story ‘Two Hands’ (‘Do Haath’), without acknowledgement, on this story.5 It has not so far been noticed, though, that she also lifted the plot of Premchand’s story ‘Fortunate Whiplashes’ (‘Saubhagya ke Kodey’) in which a poor, low-caste boy who works as a domestic servant becomes a wealthy man and returns to marry the daughter of his one-time employers. In her story ‘Kallu’, Chughtai transposed the plot to a Muslim family, and changed a few other details.

  Little read today are Premchand’s nationalist stories that advocate the boycott of foreign commodities, Western lifestyles and ways of thinking, the eschewing of alcohol, and the giving up of government jobs and wealth in favour of voluntary poverty as a Congress activist. These stories typically end with government loyalists undergoing a
sudden and inexplicable change of heart. Thus, in ‘Liquor Shop’ (‘Sharaab ki Dukaan’), a whole series of men from different backgrounds, who angrily resist attempts by Gandhian picketers to prevent them from drinking, suddenly smash their bottles and take vows of lifelong temperance. In ‘Maiku’, somewhat more interestingly, the protagonist not only undergoes a dramatic conversion but also threatens to bash up anyone who continues to drink!

  A recurrent and rather unconvincing pattern in this type of story is the way gender works, with women, in Gandhian fashion, acting as the vanguard of nationalism. Gandhian wives persuade recalcitrant husbands into giving up jobs, money and reputation. ‘Wife to Husband’ (‘Patni se Pati’) concludes with the wife, who has succeeded in compelling her husband to resign his job, telling him that henceforth she will be the husband and he the wife, as she will take responsibility for their livelihood if he joins the Congress as a full-time worker. ‘The Farce of Brahm’ (‘Brahm ka Swang’), translated here, is a subtler variation on this theme, incorporating both gender politics and an ironic, self-critical view of the limits of egalitarian ideologies. This story is also one of several that interrogate husband–wife relations in a humorous vein.

  Another set of stories that may not please the postmodern palate are melodramatic tales about social and familial conflict that often end in suicide or its equivalent. Such is ‘Reproach’ (‘Dhikkaar’) in which a child-widow, on the verge of remarrying, commits suicide because she is humiliated by her uncle in public. In ‘Coward’ (‘Kayar’), a liberal-minded Brahman youth backs out of his engagement to his Bania girlfriend, who then commits suicide. A subset of this type of story concerns courtesans, prostitutes and actresses. In ‘Vacillation’ (‘Aaga-Pichha’), a young man who falls in love with the educated daughter of a one-time courtesan and manages to persuade his parents to arrange their marriage, nevertheless succumbs to his own internal prejudices and pines away to death. In ‘Actress’ (the title is in English in the original), it is the woman who falls prey to internalized prejudice, but this is portrayed as a sacrifice, since she deserts her wealthy lover on the eve of their wedding because she does not want to damage his family honour.