A Winter’s Night and other stories by Munshi Premchand – A book review

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There’s short yet useful information provided at the end of the book about the author’s life and an introduction by one of India’s greatest poets Gulzar. Stories from Premchand have been part of textbooks; he was known as the ‘Upanyas Samrat’ – the emperor of novels though mostly in North India. It was surprising and a revelation to read that his early education was in a Madrasa, under a maulvi and his initial stories were written in Urdu.

This book is a collection of short stories and it is from a bygone era, an era from which India has evolved. More specifically it is from the villages of India, it is from a time India was engulfed by the caste system, the British rule, and hence poverty. It transports you to the villages in India, with wells accessible only to the elite, women drawing water from it, people in their traditional clothing, cattle working in the fields, lands and mortgages; no tractors, no high rises, no smart phones, no televisions – yes, a world still existed then. Though the settings have changed and life and India have moved on, the characters and their plight is believable. The forms have changed - the forms of oppression, the forms of sacrifice, the forms of love and belonging; replace a zamindar with one of today’s politicians, replace the moneylender with the big loan sharks of today and you have a new revised version of these stories.

The brilliance of these stories lies in their simple narrative. A story writer needs to be a good observer and Munshi Premchand was brilliant. In each story, he captures the innate capacity of individuals and the brazen thoughtless acceptance of a divided society at large. The lives in these stories are clearly divided between the oppressor and the oppressed. Stories like ‘The salt inspector’, ‘Kaki’, ‘A quarter and one ser of wheat’ and ‘The price of milk’ clearly portray this divide. Readers will relate with the laziness and shamelessness of drunkards in ‘The Shroud’ even today.

I believe these stories are pieces of history that children of today must be made to read if they are to know where their grandfathers and their grandfathers came from; they are as important as stories of Shivaji and of mutinies and of independence; they are stories of behavior, stories to ponder upon.

This is real history; unbiased, secular.  

Image courtesy:

Munshi Premchand - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premchand

Book cover - https://www.amazon.in/Winters-Night-Other-Stories-Premchand/dp/0143330381