Deconstructing Psychological Makeup of Premchand free essay sample

Deconstructing Psychological Makeup of Premchand Manoj Kr. Nanda Asstt. Professor Deptt. of English Communication Studies The Technological Institute of Textile Sciences Bhiwani, Haryana-127021 manoj. [emailprotected] ac. in Unlike the intellectuals of his time Premchand shared neither a deep allegiance to ‘glorious Arayan past’ nor a consequent alienation from the history of the ‘Grand Moghuls’. He wrote with an excellent psychological subtlety. By the time his works started appearing in print, Psychological Novel had been established as a genre and Hindi and Urdu as two languages were no exceptions to entry. Extraordinarily active, he produced countless letters and editorials, fourteen novels and over three hundred stories which bear a testimony to his genius. He drew inspiration from village world which became the richest subject of his best work. The terror at the possibility of disgrace, loss of face and ostracism, the shame of widowhood, the proverbial conservatism are the recurring strands in the fabric of Premchand’s portrayal of the folk life and his psychological understanding of the villagers is apparent in his works. Maupassant’s influence may be seen in Premchand’s preoccupation with the structure of his plots and trick endings but his ‘Power of A Curse’ moves past such limitations and achieves a high degree of success when measured by Western standards of that era. Influenced by Dickens, Tolstoy and Marx, Premchand seems to have directed his fiction towards psycho-social reform. In modern literature the tendency towards depicting literature has grown so much that narratives now-a-days try not to encroach the boundaries of direct experiences and we are not content to conceive that the characters, in their psychological makeup, resemble real bipeds. A writer tries to ensure the characters are real human beings and that one has succeeded in portraying real life situations. An event or situation doesn’t leave all of us with the same impression as we have different mentalities and standpoints to judge and reflect upon incidents that come by. â€Å"The success of a writer lies in having the reader agree with his own way of looking at things. †1 Premchand had an altogether different story. He surveyed the human nature of the contemporary world with sharp eyes, studied human psychology and built on characters to behave in every situation as though they were made of flesh and blood. In order to understand and appreciate the novelty and originality of Premchand’s fiction it is essential to grasp its point of departure. At the time when he started reading and writing in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth century, fiction in Hindi and Urdu depended mainly and largely on kissas and fasaanas of adventure, romance and magic what they termed as tilism, and finally on detective and historical narratives (translations from Bengali and even original compositions). It was none but Premchand who changed the reader-writer psychology by introducing characters in fiction from the rustic life like Halku, Amina, Heera-Moti and so on. It was Premchand who introduced portraiture of the atrocities of the so-called zamindaars who represented the flourishing section of the society. And all this was not entailed by a sound knowledge of psychology. It was rather compounded by his preference for simple living which, in return, furthered the cause of Premchand being established as a â€Å"quintessentially poor Hindi writer. †2 The first instance of his new formula appears in a story in 1910, ‘Rich Daughter-in-Law’, purportedly one of his own favourites. With a few, sure strokes the narrator presents the socio-economic context and the psycho-social characteristics of each character. Premchand takes a common occurrence or a familiar social practice and shows its critical consequences while, at the same time, takes in turn the points of view of all involved by setting things on a conciliatory course. It was a formula that brought together realistic descriptions of setting, character and the psycho-social relations with melodramatic features such as virtue misrecognised, the use of chance, intense emotional and ethical dilemmas and strong scenes. 3 Premchand took it as a task to convince the critics that fiction was a serious enterprise of psychology and it could contribute to the project of social and cultural reform. Though Premchand, like his contemporary writers, read and enjoyed Sarshar and Reynolds, he was quite clear about the different premise he was to write on. In the words of Premchand, â€Å"A navil draws a clear picture of the period it narrates, it throws light on its customs, habits and behaviour and it gives no place to supernatural events, or even if it does, it is with such skill that ordinary readers will consider them to be true. 4 For instance, in Premashram the range of social characters and relations is introduced through the well known device of the family plot and through two parallel plotlines, one follwing the course of events related to the family of zamindar in Banaras and its connections to the police service, the bureaucracy and the law, and the other related to some villagers who are also the te nants of the zamindar in a village a few miles outside the city. The village plotline charts a gradual path towards united action as the ruthless zamindar embroils them in one court suit after another, involving mass arrests, false witnesses and other forms of intimidation. â€Å"This structure is greatly complicated by the psychological presentation of the villagers who include a variety of psycho-social types and attitudes. †5 Nirmala is exemplary in this respect. Premchands Godan produces the rustic, simplistic and heart-rending lives of the peasants. Far, from exaggeration,Godan is a novel of stark reality. It deals with the dreams, despairs and day-to day events of Hori, the protagonist of the novel, and his family. Through the peasants, Premchand has portrayed the pathetic life of the rural arena. Hori is an embodiment of peasant-virtue, simplicity and truth. He leads an inconsistent life with his wife Dhania, and his three children. Their unstable financial situation always tends to lend them frustration and despair. A tension-free life is not theirs. If they spend a quarter of their lives in starvation, they spend the rest paying unwarranted loans. The money-lenders take full advantage of their poverty ad therefore take unreasonable interest from them. Premchand writes: A loan was an unwelcome guest, once in the house, dug himself into permanent fixture. The money-lenders also exploit the ignorance and gullibility of the peasants. The village-folk in the higher strata of society, who are financially sounder, take advantage of the village-peasants. In the novel, we find, we find how Dulari mounts a small amount of money into a hundred rupees within a small fraction of time. Thus Premchand presents a vivid picture of the psycho-social tendencies and as â€Å"a keen observer of social life, comes down heavily upon intricacies of Indian society and raises relevant questions related to the lives of the downtrodden folk. A deft handler of irony, he is able to distance himself from the actual scene and attains rare artistic detachment. †6 References: 1. Rubin, David. The World of Premchand. OUP, New Delhi, 2004. 2. Premchand, Munshi. Sahitya Ka Uddeshya-Presidential Speech given at the First Progressive Writers’ Conference, Lucknow, April 09, 1936. Saraswati Press, Allahabad, 1982 p5 3. Talwar, V. B. Kisan, rashtriya Andolan aur Premchand-1918-22. Northern Book Centre. New Delhi, 1990 4. Premchand, Munshi. ‘Sharar aur Sarshar-Vividh Prasang’. Hans Prakashan. Allahabad, 1962. Vol-1, p. 60, originally published in Urdu-e-Moalla, 1909. 5. Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination. New Haven. Yale Univ. Press, 1976. 6. Verma, Ashok Singh, Gulab. ‘Deconstructing Power Structure in Premchand’s Thakur’s Well’. www. languageinindia. com-July 07, 2011. Retrived Aug 17, 2011