Introduction
Writing about Leo Tolstoy, in one of his famous essays, Georg Lukacs commented that although the great writer did not write much about peasantry, ‘he regards society from the viewpoint of the exploited peasantry’.Footnote 2 In the writings of Tolstoy, ‘the exploited peasant is visibly or invisibly present’.Footnote 3 He is thus ‘the poet of the Russian peasantry’.Footnote 4 Although the same cannot be said about Premchand'sFootnote 5 entire oeuvre where the quest for nationhood is the most dominant idea, the peasantry did occupy a large space in his thinking and writing. From 1918 to the time of his death in 1936, his literary involvement with the peasantry was second only to that with nation. What is even more significant is that although at times he bitterly criticised the idea of exclusive nationalism and espoused internationalism, his sympathy for peasantry did not waver. In a certain sense, particularly in his fictional literature, he often viewed other developments from a peasant's perspective. In fact, nationalism and peasantry can be said to be two central ideas on which his magnificent literary edifice stood, and his reputation as a literary giant was made.
It was a unique feat because both the literary traditions—Urdu and Hindi—from which he derived were not much concerned with peasantry. In fact, the Urdu tradition prided itself on being an urban and sophisticated tradition which considered any such involvement beneath them. Urdu literature, during Premchand's time, was mired either in romances or in the sense of defeat and loss of Muslim power, not only in India but the world over.Footnote 6 Hindi tradition was just a little better in this respect. In the period before the ‘Premchand era’ (1918–1936), in only three novels—Bhuneshwar Mishra's Gharau Ghatna (Household Event, 1893), and Balwant Bhumihaar (1901), and Mannan Dwivedi Gajpuri's Ramlaal (1917)—there was description of village life.Footnote 7 But even though the setting may be rural or semi-rural, the depiction of the problems of the peasants was difficult to encounter. In his presidential speech at the first conference of the Progressive Writers’ Association in 1936, Premchand criticized this tendency among the nineteenth-century writers:
Our artist wanted to hold on to rich people. . . and it was the aim of art to give expression to their joys and sorrows. . . . Mud huts and ruins were not worthy of his attention. He considered them beyond the pale of humanity. And if he ever mentioned them, it was to deride them. It was to laugh at the villagers’ rustic clothes and behaviour; their uncorrect [sic] pronunciation of Urdu words and their misuse of verbal expressions were the butt of his unremitting sarcasm. That they too are human beings and have hearts and aspirations, this was beyond the imagination of art.Footnote 8
So far as Premchand himself was concerned, he felt that he owed it to his ‘rural brethren’ that they should form part of his own literature.Footnote 9 He stated that his major literary effort was directed towards depiction of the ‘peasant society’.Footnote 10 He also felt that the ‘new literature’ took ordinary people as its characters. However, Premchand's gaze is not consistently that of a peasant. Particularly in his journalistic writings he tends to see peasants and their problems from a middle-class reformist perspective, and there is a certain continuity in this regard. In an essay written in 1905 where he speaks about the need to promote ‘Swadeshi’ among rural folk, he talks about a peasant's simplicity, gullibility and his exploitation by the traders pedalling foreign clothes. Here he uses the term ‘Dehaati’ which may literally mean ‘rural folk’ or ‘country people’. However, in an Indian context, particularly in Urdu literary tradition, the term ‘Dehaati’ is deprecatory and connotes lack of culture and even normal intelligence. It is nearer to ‘rustic’. Premchand's use of it, though in a sympathetic vein, is not without such connotations. Moreover, his discussion of the exploitation of the peasant reflects his middle-class point of view in which such exploitation is sometimes considered to be the outcome of a peasant's own idiocy.Footnote 11 Similarly, in 1918–1919, he spoke the language of a middle-class reformer who was away from, and above, the rural folk in sensibility, culture and education, when he talked about the need to ‘awaken and embrace the villagers’.Footnote 12 He still thought in 1933 that the basic nature of literature and its fundamental location is in what is beautiful, respectable and pleasant in humans, although it should provide shelter to those who are fallen, disrespected and without support: ‘A mother's love is greater for the child who is weak, dumb, and simple. She is proud of the able son, but her heart grieves only for the disabled one’.Footnote 13 Thus, although Premchand strongly favours the inclusion of the ‘dis’-privileged in the national mainstream, they, in a way, remain outsiders. They are to be reformed, beautified, and treated lovingly. His creative literature, to a significant extent however, transcends this condescending attitude.
Premchand was born and brought up in the rural areas. His early life was spent in interaction with country people. His personal experiences of the rural world were fresher in his early writing career than later when he visited the villages much less frequently.Footnote 14 But in the initial 15 years of his literary career (1903–1918) he did not write directly about the lives of peasants, even though the village was occasionally present in his writings. In his early novels, the village and the villagers were mostly a passive presence. Similarly in the early stories, the presence of the village and its inhabitants was mostly as outsiders, remembered and episodic rather than consistent and involved. It is only after the First World War that his involvement with the peasantry became more marked and consistent. Thus, the experience did not have much to do with presence. Writing about the peasantry was a conscious decision and was informed by a different ‘structure of feeling’.Footnote 15 This decision was arrived at due to several factors. It is possible that Premchand's later engagement with peasantry came when he began to associate with the Hindi literature which did have a certain involvement with peasants or rural characters.Footnote 16 Besides, his reading of Tolstoy (with whose works he was familiar and some of whose stories he had translated),Footnote 17 and the slowly rising influence of Gandhi and his involvement with peasant movements in Champaran and Kheda and, finally, the Russian Revolution in 1917, which he considered to be a peasant revolution, drastically changed his literary paradigm. Besides these, he himself could feel the stirrings among the peasantry during the War-years. After this, the Non-cooperation (1920–1922) and Civil Disobedience (1930–1934) movements, Gandhi's strategy of involving peasants in the Congress and the national movement, Gandhi's anti-modernity stance and various peasants’ movements, shaped Premchand's literary orientation. Peasants now appeared in a major way in his literature. According to a recent compilation, Premchand wrote 15 novels, 3 plays, 302 stories, 86 journalistic essays, around 700 editorial comments, and around 150 book reviews.Footnote 18 In his writings during 1918–1936, the world of the North Indian peasantry finds significant representation.
Premchand was the first writer to comprehensively take up the theme of a peasant's life and struggle in the Hindi-Urdu streams of Indian literature. It may be said that, as Gandhi brought the peasantry into the vortex of national movement which strengthened the latter, Premchand brought the peasantry into Hindi-Urdu literatures thereby expanding and enriching them. Premchand achieved this Gandhian feat in literature by the twin strategies of bringing the peasants into literature and, at the same time, placing their stories in relation to the broader political and social situation. He did not deal with the peasantry in isolation but in its relation to the landlords, the urban middle classes, and the national movement. This strategy helped enlarge the world of the peasantry while at the same time putting the non-peasant society through a moral critique. His work contained a mostly implicit critique of the peasant world also, but it was basically at the social and political level.
We may broadly discern four phases in Premchand's depiction of the peasantry. Before Sevaasadan (The House of Service)Footnote 19, there was relatively much less engagement with the villages and the peasants, and very little or no agency was given to them. In his Urdu novel Jalwa-e-Isar (A Spectacle of Sacrifice, 1912, Vardaan in Hindi) there was a relatively detailed depiction of peasantry. But even here the peasants are mostly objects of pity and sympathy, and the point-of-view is that of a middle class woman.
The second phase starts with Sevaasadan and culminates with Premashram (The Abode of Love)Footnote 20. Here is an important break: there is detailed engagement with peasantry, and the peasants are seen as active agents. He also wrote two stories related to the oppression of the peasantry: ‘Balidaan’ (Sacrifice), 1918 and ‘Vidhwans’ (A Catastrophe), 1921, and one play, Sangraam (The Battle), in 1923 on a similar theme.Footnote 21 In Sevaasadan, there is only a brief description of conflict between a Mahant (priest-landlord) and one of his tenants over the collection of enhanced rent and illegal cess. When the tenant is unable to pay, he is tied and beaten up so severely that he dies. What is now remarkable is that the peasant is unbending. Even when the blows are raining on him, he retaliates by verbally abusing his tormentors until he faints.Footnote 22 In both the peasant stories of this period the protagonists perish due to oppression by the landlords. But, in both the stories, there is poetic justice as the landlords also suffer in the process. In his writings of this phase, the novel Premashram is truly monumental. For the first time in Hindi (and in Urdu) literature the peasantry occupies so much of and so central a space. As is quite common in Premchand's larger narratives, the peasantry is situated in its relationship with the landlords and the city-dwellers whose lives are also depicted, as if to provide a contrast to the peasants’ own conditions. In the landlord's family we find three generations: Prabhashankar, the uncle, represents the past when the relationship between the peasants and the landlord was relatively more reciprocal, the landlords were caring and less harsh; Gyanshankar, a rapacious and ruthless landlord, represents the present; and Mayashankar, son of Gyanshankar, who, under the tutelage of his uncle Premshankar, the ideal intellectual and brother of Gyanshankar, abdicates his lands and rights in favour of the tenants, represents the future. This Utopian vision of the future derives from the present whose bright side is represented by Premshankar who has stayed in America for a long time and has acquired a degree in scientific agriculture. It is his vision of reform and improved agriculture that, through his nephew and protégé, finally changes the life of the peasantry. A strong reform orientation is thus characteristic of this phase. There is a faith in the leadership of the enlightened, middle-class intellectuals. The ideal world is defined mainly in terms of material happiness, as is clear in the end, when the peasants have to pay less or no rent, and they save money and purchase goods. Economic betterment is the core of this ideal which is brought about by technological innovations in seeds, irrigation and land use. Thus Premashram, despite its focus on the peasants’ life and struggle, was basically a continuation of Premchand's reform imperative which now moved away from the social to the economic. It was basically modernist in inspiration. After Premashram, the standpoint begins to change, even though the critique is still largely derived from Premchand's humanist, equalitarian and socialist ideas.
The third phase was heralded with Rangabhoomi (The Stage),Footnote 23 when the agency is clearly located in the peasant's own life and struggles, and the reformist impulse, though present, is less assertive. Here, right from the beginning the city was posed as not only the centre of exploitation and a resource-puller from the countryside but also as the cultural ‘other’. The land becomes the repository of identity and the fulcrum of struggle for the village. The modern technology is seen as the destroyer of rural ethos and its very existence. In all, despite the fact that the villagers are not peasants per se, a moral economy of the village is posed against the technological drive of the modernity. In Gaban (The Embezzlement, 1930), the superiority of the rural life is reasserted at the end when some of the city folk return to the village in search of a better life. This phase continues till Karmabhoomi (The Arena)Footnote 24. In this phase, although the middle classes mingle with the common people, they do not provide a moral leadership. They are quite often vacillating and immersed in their own problems. However, we generally witness changes of heart among those who may contribute to the wellbeing of the peasantry.
With Godaan (The Gift of a Cow)Footnote 25 we have the last phase when the links between the middle classes and the peasants are completely broken. It is Premchand's final finished novel, relating the story of a small peasant family, which remains perpetually in debt and underfed. Despite this, the two peasant protagonists, Hori and his wife Dhaniya, struggle relentlessly for survival by upholding what they believe is a peasant's dharma.
Four ideological currents may be traced in Premchand's peasant narratives: reformist, pastoralist, radical, and moral economist. All the trends are present in most of his peasant-oriented narratives but the reformist and what we may call the ‘moral economist view’, in its connotation of dharma, dominated in his later works. In this paper, I will attempt to trace the elements of moral economy in the works of Premchand.
The Concept of Moral Economy
The concept of moral economy can be traced to an immensely influential essay by E.P. Thompson.Footnote 26 In another article, he traces its pedigree to an earlier periodFootnote 27 but, in its present form, this concept derives primarily from his application of it for an analysis of the eighteenth-century popular actions in England against the rising price of food. According to him, the moral economy of the poor was ‘a consistent traditional view of social norms and obligations, of the proper economic functions of several parties within the community’, of what was legitimate and what was illegitimate.Footnote 28 He linked moral economy with the insistence on customs—whether traditional or newly invented. Moreover, moral economy, for Thompson, was mostly used as a tool of resistance. The crowds used the largely patrician ideology of patronage and basic security to attack the hoarders and to control the market in times of rising prices. Moral economy consisted of notions about the roles of individuals and groups in society derived from past and legitimized by tradition. Violations of these traditional obligatory economic roles, more than actual deprivation, resulted in direct action by the masses. Although the moral economy of the people derived from the theoretical model of the paternalists, it differed from it in two important respects: i) it was less general and more specific with regard to offenders, and ii), it sanctioned direct action (i.e., violence) by the crowd, which the paternalist model did not allow.
Faced with criticism from certain quarters,Footnote 29 Thompson sharply delineated the contours of his concept of moral economy. He stated that his earlier essay was concerned with a particular kind of crowd (i.e., food rioters) in a particular context and should not be generalized,Footnote 30 and that his use of the term had been ‘confined to confrontations in the market-place over access (or entitlement) to “necessities”—essential food’.Footnote 31 This concept was in opposition to that of ‘political economy’ which demanded an unregulated market, while the moral economy demanded a regulated market. Thus, in Thompson's conceptualization, the market is the site for exercising moral economy. This is where the regulation was sought to be applied, and so did the conventional notions of rights and wrongs. Moreover, in certain senses, moral economy underscores the ‘conservative nature of this plebeian culture’.Footnote 32
James C. Scott enormously widened the scope of this concept. He took it out of the market-place and defined it in the life-situations of peasantry woven around subsistence. It focused on peasant access to land, customary usages of life resources and entitlements to the produce, rather than confining it to the market-place. In the context of the Asian peasant values, he deployed the concept to delineate the ideology of survival and reciprocity in peasant societies, particularly in times of adversity, and to explain the peasants’ revolts in Southeast Asia. According to him, the food scarcity in pre-capitalist societies gave ‘rise to what might appropriately be termed as “subsistence ethic”’.Footnote 33 In situations of periodic scarcity, the peasant households opted for security of subsistence rather than profit maximization. The economic logic of their existence was thus based on traditional rationality rather than on classical economics. The peasant's need for subsistence provided the basis for an arrangement of reciprocity with the landlords and the state where what was left with the peasants in crisis times was more important than what was taken in times of good harvest. These arrangements of reciprocity and guarantee of subsistence were not based on idealistic principles but were products of necessity even on the part of the landlords. The abundance of land, scarcity of labour and limited means of coercion either by the state or by dominant groups were the reasons behind such arrangements.Footnote 34 The colonial intervention changed the situation drastically. There was a new land settlement in which the villagers lost land rights and ‘usufruct rights’ becoming tenants or agrarian wage labourers, and the agricultural produce was brought within the ambit of international market. Thus, colonial rule in Southeast Asia introduced western-style capitalism in agriculture which redefined the nature of land relationship and gave rise to a large class of tenants whose livelihood was dependent on the landlords.Footnote 35 It also weakened the village-protective mechanism by, a) removing the resources from the village, b) enacting laws which reduced or eliminated the common village lands/pastures, c) creating absentee landlords, and d) creating a class of moneylenders whose interests lay outside the village.Footnote 36 Thus, according to Scott, the real implication of colonial rule may be seen not in the lower or higher income levels of the peasantry but in the ‘relative instability of welfare levels’.Footnote 37 This crisis of moral economy was responsible for periodic peasant rebellions during the colonial period.
Scott's comprehensive usage of the term has found both followers and critics.Footnote 38 The criticism covered a very wide spectrum, from political economy to culture. Whereas some found it misrepresented the peasants as too traditional and irrationalFootnote 39, others considered it still to be rooted in economic rationality.Footnote 40 In the Indian context, it found more critics than followers.Footnote 41 The criticism derived mostly on political and economic grounds. While the Subaltern School emphasized the primacy of the political, many others argued from within the political economic framework.Footnote 42 However, an important historian of the Bengal famine of 1943, Paul Greenough, found the concept useful, although in its Scottian form he considered it very restrictive, paying much less attention to cultural factors. He argues that ‘all over India there is a pattern of patron-client relationships’.Footnote 43 He further emphasizes that ‘there is something like a “moral economy” in most of Asia’,Footnote 44 and stresses the very significant role of the cultural factors in shaping the peasants’ action or inaction in times of crisis. He defines it as ‘the cluster of relations of exchange between social groups, and between persons, in which the welfare and the merit of both parties to the exchange takes precedence over other considerations such as the profit of the one or the other’.Footnote 45 Thus, Greenough, in opposition to the general trend, does not seek to explain rebellious action through this concept, but the apathetic and submissive behaviour in a severely critical situation. He points out that a critical situation may, in fact, lead to inaction and apathy. In Greenough's view, the reciprocity completely broke down at the time of acute crisis during famine in Bengal. But it did not lead to riots against landlords and officials, as would have happened in Europe or even in some other parts of India. According to him, ‘in Bengal the tradition was to turn violence “inward” and “downward” against clients and dependents. This was the cold violence of abandonment, of ceasing to nourish, rather than the hot violence of bloodshed and tumult’.Footnote 46
Thompson is quite critical of Greenough's account and thinks that he ‘hangs his interpretive apparatus upon slender evidence’.Footnote 47 But he feels that Greenough has made an important contribution by emphasizing the culturally specific factors and that he has radically expanded the meaning of the concept. It is by taking such liberties with the concept that I will also try to understand Premchand's representation of peasantry in his works.
Reciprocity and Exploitation
In its basic thrust Premchand's literature focuses on an almost total collapse of reciprocity and the intense exploitation of peasantry by various forces. The landlords and their agents, the colonial state and its officials, the moneylenders, and the priests all suck the peasants dry and force them to lead a sub-human existence. The predominant network of relationship, in which the peasant is embroiled, is that of exploitation and oppression. This is a network in which the landlord is not the sole exploiter of peasant resources. The triumvirate has long been recognized as deriving from Zamindari (landlord), Sarkari (Governmental) and Sahukari (moneylending) interests. Premchand adds another interest to it—that of Pujari (priests). The latter, owing to their respectable position in Hindu society, take advantage of the gullibility and faith of the tradition-bound peasants and show no mercy in exploiting them. The exploitative pyramid, starting with the petty village officials and moneylenders, going through the (mostly absentee) landlords and ending with colonial government, is so brilliantly portrayed in Godaan.Footnote 48
Premchand visualizes a period, not so distant in time, when there existed a certain relationship of reciprocity between landlord and peasant, and between the big landholder in the village and the landless worker, even though this reciprocity did not signify a harmonious and just society but existed within a framework of exploitation relationship. However, it did work according to certain norms which were accepted over generations. This reciprocal relationship between peasants and landlords (zamindars) in the pre-colonial period was not a system of welfare but a system of locally negotiated mutual understanding in a universe of land abundance, labour scarcity and comparatively unstable polity. The peasants and the patrons both benefited from it and took a common stand against the non-resident, shifting and extracting overlord. Colonialism tended to destabilize the customary system of rights and entitlements which existed within an overall exploitative system. The introduction of private property in land, initially high revenue demands, and often forcible promotion of cash crops made the peasants vulnerable. Thus the earlier relationship was broken by economic innovation, political force, ideological stratagems, and administrative fiats, particularly after the failed Revolt of 1857. The result was that the peasants and the zamindars, who had together fought against the British, were now comprehensively set against each other.Footnote 49 The colonial state tried to act as above them, while basically protecting the landlords.
Thus even though it was an exploitative order in the pre-colonial period, the intensity of oppression felt by the peasant was much lower. And Premchand does occasionally portray some benign landlords. Moreover, there are repeated references about better days in his writings. In Premashram, for example, the peasant protagonist, Manohar says:
Brother, those were different times. Even if there were arrears for a year or two, the master never resorted to distraint or eviction. Whenever there was a ceremony we were invited. For our daughters’ marriage we received wood, fodder and twenty-five rupees from them. Don't you remember? When they used to look after us as their children, the tenants also did begaar (unpaid labour) for them willingly.Footnote 50
In an essay written in 1912, ‘Hindu Sabhyata Aur Lokhit’ (Hindu Civilization and People's Welfare), Premchand praised the ancient kings and lords for adequately taking care of their subjects.Footnote 51 Again in ‘Purana Zamana, Naya Zamana’ (Old Age and the New Age, 1919), he spoke highly about ‘(g)olden times’, while deprecating the present.Footnote 52 And as late as in 1932 he talked about landlords in the past who protected the interests of their tenants, constructed wells and provided relief in times of famine.Footnote 53
However, the present in his literature is inhabited by landlords whose sole interest is in the extraction of a peasant's surplus by ingenious as well as heavy-handed methods. Some among them are refined, religious, and soft-spoken; some are crooked, abusive and villainous. However, the end result in either case is similar for the peasant. As Mehta, a philosophy professor, says sarcastically in Godaan, that show of benevolence is a better method of smooth extraction from the peasants: ‘Maybe it's because food cooks better over a slow fire. Killing with sugar can be deadlier than killing with poison’.Footnote 54 Rai Saheb, the big landlord in the novel, himself believes in such methods: ‘Of course a lion has to hunt; but if he can talk sweetly instead of growling and roaring, he can just stay home and catch what he wants instead of having to roam the jungle in search of it’.Footnote 55 But even this façade does not continue for long. Thus, Rai Saheb flares up when told that ‘the men on forced labour have refused to work’ and are demanding food:
The Rai Sahib glowered at him. ‘Come with me,’ he declared, eyes bulging. ‘I'll put those troublemakers in their place. . . . The Rai Sahib went off fuming. Hori was puzzled—all this talk about right and goodness, and then such a sudden outburst of anger.Footnote 56
Similarly, when Gayatri, the gentle and religious lady in Premashram, is told that the tenants have refused to pay for some useless celebration organized by her, she bursts out in anger: ‘Tell the agents to burn the houses of those rascals and whip them’.Footnote 57 Vidya, Gayatri's sister, relates an incident which shows the cruelty of the apparently spiritual elderly landlord, their father: ‘That year there was famine and plague. . . . Our father's cruelty made me shiver. When the tenants couldn't pay the rent. . . . He whipped hundreds of them by standing them in a row’.Footnote 58 In one story, ‘Riyasat ka Diwan’ (1934), Premchand relates how one ruler of a princely estate gets angry when criticized that he is oppressing his subjects: ‘his hair became blue, eyes yellow, face red, and body green. It appeared as if he was some demon from the hell’.Footnote 59 Similar descriptions about the landlords and princes can be found elsewhere in his literature.
Premchand's depiction of the exploitative machinery of the landlords in the Awadh countryside creatively documents almost all forms of extractions we find in more recent historical texts. Besides rents, there were innumerable taxes and cesses imposed on the peasants. In case of non-compliance they were threatened with eviction which was particularly common in Awadh because any permanent tenure was rare. Premchand provides a vivid description of the comprehensive control over the village exercised by landlords and government through their agents. As the cruel landlord in Premashram, Gyanshankar, angrily declares: ‘The landlord has fifty-two arms. I'll crush the Lakhanpur's inhabitants so much that their bones will also disappear’.Footnote 60
In ‘Balidaan’,Footnote 61 after the death of the tenant, the landlord enhances the rent on the land and demands extra payment of one hundred rupees. The tenant's son is unable to pay and the land is transferred to another person. Heartbroken, due to the dishonour this will bring, the peasant dies. But the attempt of the landlord to transfer the land to others is unsuccessful because the ghost of the dead man roams around and guards his field.
In ‘Vidhwans’, Premchand narrates the story of an old Gond woman, Bhungi, who runs a parching oven in a village for her livelihood. The village landlord not only sends intermittently loads of grains to be parched without any payment, but also obliges her to fetch water for his home. One day, due to some delay in parching his huge baskets of grain, her oven is dug up, and she is forbidden to rebuild it. After silently suffering for a long time, she begins to build the oven again. The landlord is furious and orders his flunkeys to set fire to her house. Bhungi, after watching helplessly and hopelessly for some time, jumps into the fire and dies. As the fate would have it, this conflagration engulfs, besides some peasants’ huts, the landlord's entire barn and his splendid mansion, and ‘while he watched, it tossed like a ship amid wild waves and disappeared in the sea of fire. The sound of lamentation that broke out amidst the ashes was even more pitiful than Bhungi's grievous cries’.Footnote 62
The landlord's agents make the situation much worse as they take their own generous cuts. As Premchand ironically describes the privileges and power associated with this position in Gaban:
He was not a farmer, but he acted like one, nor was he a landlord, but he acted like one. He was not a sub-inspector of police either, but he acted like one. He was the agent of a landlord, and it was he who held sway in the village.Footnote 63
Premchand thinks that although landlords would have been the natural leaders of the people, they have lost all influence due to their selfish and exploitative ways. He feels that ‘if the landlords were given a free hand, the condition of their tenants would have been worse’.Footnote 64 He is quite sure that present-day landlords do not command the respect of their tenants and are incapable of resisting the government. In fact, ‘their entire existence depends on the oppression of the poor and the weak, and sycophancy of the strong’.Footnote 65 He charges the landlords with ‘authoritarianism, heartlessness, inhumanity, extreme selfishness and ignorance of the modern ideas’,Footnote 66 and dubs landlordism as a parasitic institution ‘which cannot survive for long’.Footnote 67 The existence of landlords are, therefore, quite useless and ‘the people have no expectations’ from them.Footnote 68 In Premashram, Premchand thinks through the forward-looking protagonist, Premshankar, that the development of landlordism has shackled the peasantry and it is an ‘institution whose existence is dependent on peasant's blood’.Footnote 69
Premchand believed that the relationship between landlord and tenant is basically antagonistic. It made no difference whether the landlord is personally nice, gentle, religious or spiritual. It is possible that Premshankar, in Premashram, expresses Premchand's own sentiments, when asked whether he is against landlordism:
The land belongs to the cultivator. The ruler (i.e., the government) has the right to share the produce because he establishes peace and order, without which no agriculture is possible. No other class has any role to play in the society.Footnote 70
Premchand thought that the British were party to this exploitative machinery, but they also provided occasional relief and were the only court of appeal. He felt that had it not been for the British government and its political agents, the situation would have been much worse and the native rulers would have run amuck. The theme that the government and its officials were somewhat better than the Indian landlords and princes keeps recurring in his writings. Right at the beginning of Premchand's first peasant novel, Premashram, a group of peasants are discussing how British officials are better, less corrupt and more hard-working compared with Indian officials.Footnote 71 But Premchand also thought that it was colonial rule that sustained the landlords:
Since the beginning of the British rule. . .the foreign government has always neglected the interests of the peasants and supported those of the landlords. . . . Perhaps in no other province the peasants are so troubled and unhappy. Possibly in no other province the peasants are in such distress. In no other province the landlords can act so arbitrarily. And this situation has remained the same for the entire 150 years of British rule. These unfortunate people regularly face the tyranny of the police, the landlord, the moneylender, in brief, of every official.Footnote 72
In Premashram, Premchand gives a graphic description of the visit of government officials to villages:
Following the sunset a special type of creatures who are neither animals nor birds set out in search of food, covering the sky with their long rows. Similarly, in the beginning of the month of Kartik (September–October), another type of creatures invade the rural areas, and cover the villages with their tents. In the beginning of the rainy season, regal [Rajasi] insects and moths originate; in the end of it is the time for malevolent [Tamasi] insects and moths. With their emergence, there occurs a quake in the rural areas and people start hiding for their lives due to fear.Footnote 73
Premchand believed that it was ultimately colonial government which was responsible for the bad condition of the peasants: ‘If the government taxes remain so high, then the peasant will surely be burdened with debt’.Footnote 74 He also criticized the inadequate efforts of government towards increasing agricultural productivity. According to him, the agricultural exhibitions were to no avail because those ‘who are not sure about their next meal, who are submerged into debt up to their noses, cannot be expected to buy new varieties of seeds and implements. They cannot afford to move even an inch from the beaten track’.Footnote 75
The usurers are the next level of exploiters. The problems of usury are depicted in great detail in many of Premchand's works, particularly in Godaan. He was acutely aware that indebtedness was causing havoc with the lives of the peasants. Stressing the need for Agricultural Cooperative Banks, he says that ‘the most necessary aspect of liberating the peasants is to release them from the clutches of the moneylenders’.Footnote 76 In a story, ‘Sava Ser Gehun’ (One kilogram of Wheat, 1924), there is a stark portrayal of exploitation of a poor peasant by a moneylender. Shankar, a small peasant, borrows a kilogram of wheat from a Brahman landholder-cum-moneylender to feed a wandering mendicant. In his own way, he returns it with the annual gift given to the priests at harvest time without mentioning it. The moneylender keeps quiet for seven years, and then suddenly comes up with a demand of around 150 kilograms. Despite all his efforts, the poor peasant cannot pay it and is forced to work as a bonded worker on the farm of the Brahman moneylender. After his death twenty years later, his son takes up the job to pay the unpaid debt. The author comments in the end: ‘Please don't consider it as a figment of imagination. It is a true story’.Footnote 77
This problem is epitomized in Premchand's last novel, Godaan. It opens with a terrible irony which ultimately leads to tragedy in the end. Hori, the peasant protagonist, is on his way to meet the landlord, who is the apex exploiter in the local context. Here, Hori encounters the greatest wish of his life in the form of a healthy cow. The cow is ingrained in Hindu peasant culture and economy. It is both an object of veneration and economic fulfilment. It gives birth to bullocks who plough the fields and cows who give more milk. It is also a medium whose service will ensure entry to heaven. It is an integral part of the peasant cultural economy. The apex exploiter, who sets out the chain which binds the peasant in a web of exploitation, is also notionally present in this scene where the triangle—exploiter- peasant- peasant's supreme wish—is laid out. The wish is pre-colonial and has been a part of the peasant cultural universe for a long time. The exploiter is a creation of colonial dispensation. What is new, moreover, is the total lack of a sense of responsibility which the landlord might feel towards the peasant. This loss of mutuality leads to the tragedy. Dhaniya, Hori's wife, reacts against his flattery of the landlord because:
these twenty years of married life had taught her that however much she cut corners, skimped on food and clothes, and clung to every cowrie, it was still hard to pay the rent. . . .
Only three of their six children were still alive. . . . Three sons had died in infancy. Dhaniya still believed that medicines would have saved them, but she'd been unable to afford even a pice worth. She was not very old herself—just thirty-six—but her hair was completely grey and her face wrinkled. Her body had grown weak, the wheat complexion of her youth had turned dark brown, and her eyes had become dim—all because of the struggle for survival. Life had brought no joy—only a constant weariness which had worn away all concern for self-respect. Why bother with all this flattery for land that couldn't even provide food for their stomachs?Footnote 78
Dhaniya is right because the family is already indebted, as Hori relates his condition to Bhola, the cowherd:
My grain was all weighed out at the village barn. The master took his share and the moneylender his, leaving me just ten pounds. I carried off the straw and hid it during the night, or not a blade would have been left me. There's only one zamindar of course, but there are three different moneylenders. . . . I've not yet paid off the interest to any of them, and there's still half the rent for the zamindar also. . . . I've tried every way of cutting expenses, brother, but nothing helps. We people are born just to pour out our blood and make the rich still richer. I've paid double the amount of loan in interest, but it hangs over my head just the same as before.Footnote 79
Here all the exploiters are present. Also present is the somewhat limited native intelligence of the peasant when he hides the straw, although in certain ways it also expresses the irony—grain for the non-producers and straw for the peasants/producers. Burdened with rent arrears and mounting debts for all conceivable reasons, the family loses its small plot of land and Hori becomes a day labourer. His situation is not exceptional. ‘Almost all the farmers were in the same predicament. In fact most of them were even worse off’.Footnote 80
In Godaan, the most evident feature which strikes any reader is the near total breakdown of moral economy at every level. The reciprocity between the landlord and the peasant was absent anyway, what we witness now is the demise of the moral community at village level. Tension was there even in earlier accounts of the village, but what was new was a deep chasm within the village between ‘local controllers’ such as the village accountant, landlord's agent or headman, and the peasants. These village leaders double up as moneylenders and grab the peasant's land and other resources through fraudulent means. Now the village heads are no longer patrons in a reciprocal relationship with their clients, there is no harmonious ‘village republic’, and there is no change of heart so far as these oppressors and exploiters are concerned. The unity is so irrevocably broken that it could not be retrieved even in a utopia. Here, the earlier ideal of the ‘Panch Parmeshwar’Footnote 81 has disintegrated. The Panches (village leaders) are out to fleece and oppress peasants such as Hori.
Premchand is conscious of the changes in the rural economy which, in his interpretation, was reducing the peasant to labourer. The situation sometimes becomes so bad that, despite all his attachment to the land and honour, the peasant is happy when his crop is destroyed by wild animals and he has to work as a labourer for survival, as in ‘Poos ki Raat’.Footnote 82 It is such an ironic twist that brings out starkly the adversities, natural and human, faced by the peasantry in colonial North India, particularly in the United Provinces.
Thompson emphasizes the concept of moral economy with reference to ‘confrontations in the market-place’. Up to the middle of the nineteenth century, this market was a concrete place. But later it assumed ‘the metaphorical and deterritorialized qualities’Footnote 83. In Premchand's works also, the market, particularly the big ones where the exchange values of peasant's products are realized, are remote things. It is represented by the sugar factory's agents, moneylenders, traders, and other middlemen at the village level. The market is not something where the peasant ever goes to sell his produce. In fact, the situation is often so bad that there is not enough left for his family's subsistence. But this market, both in land and commodities, has a large role to play in peasant life. So much so that when it assumes the concrete shape of trade in person, either as a bonded worker or day labourer or, as Hori starkly realizes, in marriage of his younger daughter to an elderly man, it really threatens the whole moral and material existence of the peasant.
Peasant's Moral Economy
The ubiquitous presence of exploitation does not, however, mean that all moral regimes are lost and have given way to naked forces of exploitation and economic interests. The peasantry, according to Premchand, is still governed by a pervasive sense of moral economy or dharma. What makes Premchand different from the majority of Hindi litterateurs in the pre-independence period was his largely non-romantic portrayal of agrarian relations, depiction of an oppressive landlordism and multiple strands of exploitation. But what raises his oeuvre from becoming a simple, straightforward documentary account of exploitation and oppression is the location of a deep-rooted morality in peasant existence which transcends the mundane concerns. Thus, his greatness lies not only in giving a comprehensive account of agrarian exploitation, oppression and misery, but also in his depiction of the ensemble of relationships and beliefs and ideas which constituted the moral economy of the peasantry.
Premchand does believe that there should be reciprocity between landlord and peasant, and that the peasant should be granted the right to subsist—the two crucial concepts for the functioning of a moral economy, according to Scott. However, he goes beyond this to the traditional Indian concept of dharma where reciprocity, though desirable, is not necessary. One should go on practicing one's dharma, as an individual, as part of the community, irrespective of the existence of reciprocity or the promise of return. This is reflected in Hori's upholding of dharma against all odds in Godaan, in Surdas's struggle against the onslaught of modern industry which threatens to uproot his village and its culture in Rangabhoomi, in the return of the central characters of Gaban to rural areas and to a peasant life, in the congenial acceptance of the outside rejects like Saloni and Amarkant into the community fold in Karmabhoomi, in feeding the mendicants even when the peasant households themselves do not have much to eat (in stories like ‘Babaji ka Bhog’ and ‘Sava Ser Gehun’), in reassertion by Sujaan Bhagat (in the eponymous story, MS 5) when a mendicant was denied gift at harvest time, and in numerous other instances where certain traditional and customary values are upheld against all odds. For Premchand's peasant protagonists, the community is more important than even decent survival. This view decisively places morality before economy, sometimes even replacing it. It is a whole philosophy of life, a different cultural universe which is emphasized. The emphasis is now on the distinctiveness of peasant values. There is also a utopian vision which imagines a self-sufficient, non-exploitative village society as the best solution for human misery.
Premchand has been criticized for not professing a revolutionary solution to the sordid conditions of the peasants he himself so splendidly depicted.Footnote 84 There is a feeling among various critics that a revolutionary solution is somehow more realistic than a Gandhian or Tolstoyan solution which is supposed to be utopian.
Premchand largely rejects the ingredients of the pastoral, mostly unconsciously. In his narratives, the peasant community is fragmented, not in the sense of stratification, but of individual rivalry and jealousy. However, he does portray a certain and definite value-orientation in peasant life. This, in his conscious explanation, is due to their relationship with nature, which is taking a pastoralist stand. For example, in Godaan, Hori, on learning that Bhola, the cowherd, is also hard-pressed to feed his cattle, forgets his own interest in his cow and offers to give him straw free of cost. Premchand comments:
Now it is true that a peasant is mercenary. It's hard to squeeze a bribe out of his purse. A shrewd bargainer, he'll haggle for hours with the moneylender to get the interest reduced one pice. And as long as he has a single doubt, he can't be inveigled into anything. But he also spends his whole life co-operating with nature. Trees produce fruit for men to eat. Fields produce grain which feeds the world. Cows produce milk—not for themselves, but for others to drink. Clouds produce rain which quenches the earth. In such a system there's no room for petty selfishness. As a farmer, Hori had been taught that one doesn't warm his hands on the flames of another man's burning house.Footnote 85
But, at deeper levels in Premchand's works, this comes out as the peasant culture which derives its sustenance from tradition and provides stability to the society. This is where one can locate the moral economy of the peasant. Foundational to this moral economy are the land and the patriarchal family, in which the women are given a substantial role, on which the superstructure of a peasant's dharma is situated. By the late nineteenth century, the village with clearly demarcated boundaries had become a recognizable idea in almost the whole of the country. In Premashram, a peasant character does at one point briefly talk about migration. But it appears to be more of a desperate talk than an actual possibility. At several places in his writings, Premchand depicts the peasant's strong attachment to land. In the United Provinces during the early twentieth century, settling in the frontier lands was no longer possible. Even the inter-estate collective migration was not a frequent possibility. In Premchand's literature we seldom come across any such instance. Most peasants in this province were land-deficient by the early twentieth century, and this deficiency increased over the years. It resulted in a strong attachment to land tilled by a (joint or nuclear) family.
The spiritual ingredients of this moral economy are the social code of conduct associated with custom and tradition. This is reflected at various levels. Rangabhoomi is the turning point. Surdas, a blind beggar from a Dalit caste, owns a plot of land which an industrialist wants to acquire for opening a cigarette factory. Surdas refuses to part with the land on the ground that it will morally destroy the village. Therefore, when the argument is given that the factory will provide employment and bring prosperity to the village, Surdas reacts:
You're right, my lord, that some prosperity may come to the village and some people may earn extra income. But, while, on the one hand, prosperity will come, on the other hand, toddy and liquor will be sold on a larger scale, prostitutes will start settling here, outsiders will ogle at our women; this will be a great sin. Tempted by the prospects of earning wages, the peasants will leave their work, they'll learn bad behaviour and spread it in their villages. The rural women will come here to become labourers and will be spoiled by the lure of money. . . . May God never bring such prosperity here.Footnote 86
He fights a prolonged battle against the factory and its supporters, and perishes in the end.Footnote 87
In a study of the novels of Tarashankar Bannerjee, Rajat RayFootnote 88 shows that the novelist's rural world consists of high-caste gentry, middle-caste peasantry, and lower-caste agricultural workers. In Premchand's work we would look in vain for the size of the landholding for different levels of tenants, or even for the fact that there may have been differentiation among the peasantry. It never seems to be his purpose to provide minute social and economic details. The internal relationship within the peasantry (apart from interesting and dramatic characterization and episodic narration), socio-economic differentiation on the basis of caste and landholding, and the details of agricultural processes can be deduced only by inference, mostly indirectly from his writings. Before Godaan, Premchand more or less stuck to the idea of an integrated, largely equalitarian, village community. The village in itself harbours no antagonistic contradictions; only simple contradictions related to the daily life are there. The exploiters live outside the village, mostly in the cities. However, in Godaan, probably the only time in his novels, some of the exploiters, who are decisive in shaping the peasant's life, live inside the village. In all of his novels and in most of the stories, the landlords are not part of the rural world. Similarly, the untouchables are also on the margins and, except in Karmabhoomi, where they comprise the village, they mostly remain outside the village. Or even when they are inside, their presence remains marginal. The peasantry generally consists of middle-caste cultivating tenants with some rights in land. His peasantry, in this sense, represents an economically and culturally uniform group.
Thus, Premchand's peasantry is generally middle caste, almost universally poor with a tendency towards further decline, with a mortal dread of depeasantization and yet moving in that direction, homogeneous in character without differentiation, and holding on to traditional moral economy in the face of extreme pressure. This moral economy sometimes supports small acts of resistance, but in most cases desists from open expressions of revolt.
This creation of a relatively homogeneous peasantry served two purposes: to show that all peasants were equally oppressed which creates a sense of unity transcending the consciousness of caste and community; and to provide the possibility of imbuing them with a moral economy with strong traditional cultural connotations. In ultimate analysis, both these moves were political and concerned with the literary construction of a uniform peasantry which was exploited and oppressed, but which had traditional cultural resources to stand against and resist the imperialist and feudal onslaught. In his literature, the peasants do talk about the right to subsistence and the injustice of illegal exactions, and they resist it also in their own ways, but they do not rebel because of it all the time. In Karmabhoomi, the situation gets so desperate that the peasants have to rebel.
In Premchand's view, peasantry and its modes of existence are inherently based on a moral economy or dharma which makes the peasant's existence meaningful. He explores this phenomenon in various ways. It is the peasantry which essentially holds the centre of Indian civilization in its positive value-orientation and moral ethos. Thus the moral economy which lies shattered in peasantry's relation with the outside world is restored in its inner life. It lies in the rural social economy which embodies the moral values that can provide an ideal sustenance to human life and social organization. This theme is taken up elaborately in Rangabhoomi, continues through several of his stories, is reinforced at the end of his largely urban novel, Gaban, and is epitomized in Godaan, where the main protagonist, Hori, in the process of his extinction, and his reduction from a peasant to an agricultural worker, holds it in his soul. In his defeat, his extinction, Hori desperately tries to hold the threads of this fast collapsing moral order encompassing the family, village and the rural society. He does not meet his devaluation and death because of this. That is the fate of many others whether they follow their dharma or not. It is his upholding of dharma, despite all adversities, despite his being crushed under the wheels of this exploitative juggernaut, and despite the fragile alternative of migration to the city (as adopted by his son, Gobar), that makes him the hero in this novel. In Godaan, there is no collective solution, no restoration of a moral economic order, and no hope of poetic justice. In this stark portrayal, everything lies shattered.Footnote 89 And yet, the hope is not irretrievably lost. It is there, in the soul of Hori, like the invaluable and diligently-protected seeds in times of drought. Where everything lies scattered, and dried up, Hori carries, however tenuously, within himself the seeds of hope, of dharma which alone can rejuvenate his society and sustain it. His extinction and death only represent the physical withering away of an individual faced with exploitative Behemoth. But even in devaluation and death, he keeps the seeds, though not so healthy, of a moral order which the village society symbolizes in Premchand's imagination. The last act of the ‘gift of cow’ also assumes significance in this context. It is an important part of the dharma which must be fulfilled. That's why when Hori's brother mentions it to Hori's widow, ‘Dhaniya's eyes glowed resentfully. How much stronger could she make her heart? And did she have to be reminded of her duty to her husband? She'd been his partner in life—obviously her duty was not just to mourn over him’.Footnote 90 The duty is supreme, the personal grief may take a back seat.Footnote 91
Hori, by his silent suffering and patient struggle, upholds the heroism of the small people. There is a heroism in the character of most of Premchand's peasant protagonists. Manohar in Premashram, Surdas in Rangabhoomi, Chaudhary in Karmabhoomi, and Hori and Dhaniya in Godaan, are all heroic characters. They all struggle against oppression in their own ways, without sacrificing their dharma. In earlier novels, the villagers resist more openly and defiantly. In Godaan, this struggle is silent, persevering and painstaking. It does not have the flourish of rebellion, but it is no less heroic. Greenough rightly asks, why would people necessarily rebel in the face of deprivation? His answer, however, is that in Bengal, during the worst famine days of 1943, the people responded with the ‘cold violence’ of abandonment. In Godaan, Hori does not rebel, he does not even protest, yet he does not abandon anyone. In fact, he tries hard and successfully to reunite his family. Even though he sometimes has the chance to save himself and his nuclear family from extreme deprivation, he never does so. He thinks in terms of the joint family and a broader dharma, and does all he can to protect all members of this broader unit. In the process, he is sapped and dies, but he is not entirely unsuccessful. Although one part of his moral economy, the land, is lost, the other part, the family, is regained. The broader family is united, his son is restored to the family, his brother also returns and is repentant, the cow which is the fulcrum of his desire is on its way to his home, even though he does not know about it, and he dies with the satisfaction of successfully carrying out his duties. Just before his death,
Hori was exuberant. All life's misfortunes and disappointments seemed to roll away. Could anyone still say he's lost the battle of life? Was this pride, this joy, this bliss a sign of defeat? Those defeats had been his victory, and his dilapidated weapons had been banners of triumph. His chest swelled and his face grew bright. Hira's gratitude symbolized the success of his life. Even if he'd had a barn overflowing with ten tons of grain, or a thousand rupees buried in a pot, nothing could have brought him more ecstasy than this moment.Footnote 92
The situation is not hopeless; Godaan is not an unmitigated tragedy. The exploitation and oppression are real, but Hori's response is no less ideal than any other depicted elsewhere in Premchand's writings.
And yet, the Godaan is different from his earlier novels. Not because it is a narrative of complete disillusionment, more realistic, and moving away from Gandhian solutions. There are too many continuities to warrant such a reading. It was basically the Gandhian hegemony on Indian politics which stimulated Premchand to focus on villages and the lives of peasants with a different consciousness. It is now that the peasants emerged as agents, as conscious human beings, and villages as the quintessential India. The emergence of a peasantry which was exploited and oppressed to the extreme, but which held its own against the immorality of the world, became the central literary construct. This view of the peasant was quite common in the literature of the Gandhian period. Premchand was the earliest and the most consistent to take this view. Even though his initial idealistic solution to the problems of peasants gave way to a grim portrayal of rural decline in a later phase, his view of the peasant as an exploited and yet a moral being remained constant. From Premashram to Godaan, this view of the peasant held sway in which the peasant, despite the inhuman condition forced upon him, remains bound to his dharma of truthfulness, honest labour and mutual help. Even in ‘Kafan’, where Ghisu and Madhav abandon the peasant's dharma, the peasantry is ever ready to help them cremate Budhia's body. In fact, it was peasantry's conservative morality that allows Ghisu and Madhav to flout the moral code of society and make merry.Footnote 93
The point where Godaan departs from all Premchand's earlier novels is where he depicts antagonistic contradictions within the village and the loss of faith in the reforming zeal of the middle classes. The dominant presence of the exploiters inside the village and their links with the big ones outside is sharply brought into focus. Most of the usurer-landholders in the village are linked to government, the big landlord, or capitalist-usurers in the city. The landlord's exactions are there, but now the usury becomes the central focus, and there occurs an irretrievable fracture in the moral economy of the village. Hori's death is not the real tragedy; the loss of land and the marrying of his younger daughter to an elderly man in lieu of money were more tragic from Hori's point of view. These involved loss of peasant honour.
Secondly, although it is true that there were certain changes from Premashram to Godaan, if we look carefully and closely, it did not involve so much the portrayal of peasantry as that of the middle classes. Premchand's gradual disenchantment with the middle classes, and the Congress, was revealed in this change. His loss of faith in the leadership of intellectuals, his condemnation of the insensitivity of and corruption among middle-class professionals, and his disillusionment with the Congress for its power politics and corruption, led him to believe that there was no relief for oppressed peasants. In Premashram, Premchand creates an ideal character in Premshankar who is a Western-educated reformer. After this, such ideal middle-class protagonists are gone. Such persons now may possess idealism but they themselves are no longer the ideal. They are generally wavering, vacillating weaklings. In contrast, the villagers are more firm, and someone like Surdas is like a mountain. From then on, Premchand emphasizes on a peasant's own resources, traditional or otherwise. But, as his trust in the selflessness and ability of middle-class leaders disappeared, Premchand saw an inevitable decline in peasant's condition without any redress.
The Country and the City
One crucial aspect of Premchand's literature, from Premashram onwards, is a disjunction between the country and the city. This derives from his perception of the (colonial) modernity as evil. Cities are depicted as the homes of self-seekers, pursuers of power and office, and worshippers of Mammon. Villages, on the other hand, are portrayed as poor, oppressed and yet the upholders of morality, truth and justice, and humanness. In the cities, selfish and shameless pursuit of money and power go apace. There are no community bonds and community pressure to restrict it. People there act to grab things for themselves without any feelings for their fellow beings. The demonic individualism, created by colonial economy, education and law, reigns supreme. The villages are still inhabited by generally innocent, guileless villagers who believe in and do honest labour, and where community pressure controls the naturally selfish impulse of the people. Thus, the city represents colonial modernity, the village, traditional morality. Premchand views the village as the embodiment of national spirit as against colonial culture whose naked expression are the cities.
To take an example, in one story, ‘Mantra’,Footnote 94 a villager's son is very ill and he rushes to a doctor in the city. The doctor, on his way to play golf, refuses to attend to his son who dies. In another scene, the doctor's son is bitten by a snake which only this particular villager can cure. On hearing this, he, bound by the traditional vow, leaves his meal and rushes to the doctor's house, cures his son, and slips away silently. The doctor, much relieved and happy, looks for him, but in vain. Through this quite artificial situation, Premchand contrasts the different moral worlds of not only a village and a city dweller, but also the different values imparted by modern science and the traditional medicine system. The modern system which trains the doctor is so inhuman that for the pleasure-seeking, money-making doctor human life has no value. On the other hand, the morality of the traditional system ensures that the patient is attended without any promise of return. The pull of money and modern values have corrupted the doctor, whereas the selflessness and a sense of service have kept humanity alive in the villager who goes to attend the son of the very doctor whose cruel neglect cost his own son's life.
The otherness which Premchand creates for the city is not a simple cultural otherness, and here he departs from the common pastoralist and romantic trend. For him, the country and the city are also interrelated through an economic process: the cities are siphoning off resources from the villages to create a lavish, extravagant and morally degenerate life for its inhabitants. This exploitative network enmeshes both these entities creating a comprehensive antagonism between them. The biggest exploiters and oppressors—big landlords, capitalist usurers, colonial officials, lawyers—all reside in the cities, and from there, they operate the huge exploitative machinery which drains the lifeblood of the peasant-producers. As he states right in the beginning of his novel, Rangabhoomi:
The city is the place for living and commercial transactions of the rich. The space outside it is for their entertainment and pleasure. In the centre of it are their children's schools and the place for their legal wrangles where the necks of the poor are twisted in the name of justice.Footnote 95
In his earlier novel, Premashram, Premchand displays the hope that there may occur a change of heart among city-dwellers and that they will show solidarity with their village brethren. They may also start liking village life when, through the enlightened policies of landlords and improved scientific techniques of farming, the village would become a reasonably comfortable and happy place to live in. The contact with nature and unselfish interaction among people would create an ideal society. This scenario is evident in Premashram. But, in Rangabhoomi, this dream is not present, and in Godaan, the city and village lives run along parallel lines with few meeting points. Thus it was a dream unfulfilled, a hope unrealized, and a desire gone awry.
Modern education, which was shaping the culture of the middle and upper classes in the cities, invites severe criticism from Premchand. In Premashram, one villager, while praising Premshankar, comments on modern education:
So much of my life is past, I've seen hundreds of educated persons, but not found anyone besides you who has not cheated us. The whole world speaks so highly about education. But it appears to us that after being educated a man becomes even more deceitful. He learns how to defraud the poor.Footnote 96
At another place he writes:
It has become a fashion to condemn the illiteracy of the peasant. But the peasant, despite his illiteracy, is cleverer than most literates. Literacy is good and solves some problems of life, but to say that the peasant is an idiot is to be unjust to him. He is beneficent, generous, hard-working, thrifty, farsighted, courageous, honest, kind, truthful, moralistic, and teetotaller. How many educated can claim such qualities? Our experience is that after becoming educated a person becomes cunning, dishonest, litigious, and lazy. . . .
We'll say that the illiteracy of the country people is protecting them, otherwise they will also be infected with the same hypocrisy, sensuality and selfishness which are the characteristics of today's educated.Footnote 97
Thus it is through the practice of their dharma that peasants regain the power so utterly snatched from them by the machinations of all kinds of authority through centuries. The rich and the powerful, on the other hand, enjoy all the authority—of money, education, law and the state—but they lack the moral authority which consists of being fair, helpful, honest and, above all, not rich.
Conclusion
In this paper I have attempted to argue that the concept of moral economy can be used to understand the peasant narratives of Premchand. In his works related to peasantry we find several ideological currents. However, the idea of peasantry's own cultural resources in opposition to other social groups appears to be predominant in his later works. There is a sense of centrality of peasant culture which Premchand and some others among the Hindi literary intelligentsia came to acquire, and deployed for various purposes—against colonial regime, against the products of colonial modernity (e.g., factories, English schools, courts, medical profession), against the new urban middle classes and their culture, against urbanism as a whole and sometimes even against the Congress, the representative of organized nationalism. Distinct from both the everyday forms of resistance and open rebellion, Premchand visualizes a comprehensive peasant paradigm in opposition to colonialism, and the urban middle-class perspectives.
