Indian · 1880–1936
Premchand was born Dhanpat Rai Srivastava in a village near Varanasi and worked as a schoolteacher and school inspector while writing the fiction that created the modern Hindi and Urdu novel. His first collection, Soz-e-Watan, was burned by the British authorities in 1909 and he took the pen name Premchand to keep writing. He resigned from government service in 1921 after hearing Gandhi speak. Over three decades he produced fourteen novels and roughly three hundred short stories, moving Hindi fiction away from romance and fantasy toward peasants, moneylenders, widows, and the machinery of rural debt. Godaan, his last novel, follows a farmer whose entire life is organised around the wish to own a cow. He also ran a press, edited journals, and briefly wrote for Bombay cinema, which he hated. He died at fifty-six, in debt. Hindi and Urdu literature both claim him, and he is read across South Asia as the writer who made ordinary village life a serious literary subject.