Shake off your linguistic shackles, save Hindi

Hindi, our mother tongue and our national language, is dying a slow death. It is losing its importance in fast-changing modern India. It is getting limited to speaking and verbal communication. Today, people prefer reading English newspapers, watching news in English and reading more of English literature than Hindi.

Hindi can be made more popular and given its due importance, but the initiative has to be taken by us. We, perhaps, have forgotten that India is the land that has produced great Hindi novelists and poets like Munshi Premchand, Mahadevi Verma, Harivansh Rai Bachchan, and many more, but today’s generation has forgotten these names and is deviating towards Western authors like Stephanie Meyer, PG Wodehouse, Eric Segal, etc.

Students should be encouraged in schools to read Hindi literature. Hindi should be made a compulsory subject up to class XII. Students can be provided with Hindi newspapers about once a week. To make Hindi popular, novels read by the youth – such as those by Chetan Bhagat – can be translated in Hindi to make the language more popular.

Full report here Indian Express

The common man’s month

Delhi maybe getting ready for Commonwealth Games, but it is not forgetting its common men. This month, the aam aadmi finds a voice in various theatre performances. The Common Man theatre festival is a week-long affair that will stage works of well-known Indian and international playwrights, such as Bertolt Brecht, Dario Fo, Mahesh Dattani and Hindi’s great author Munshi Premchand, among many others.

“The festival is about the unanswered questions of the common man in our day-to-day life. Each play talks about issues like social structure, corruption and caste system,” says Arvind Gaur, the director of the festival.

Besides well-known plays like Court Martial, Ramkali and Final Solution, the festival includes street plays, too. “The productions in the festival, as the name suggests, deal with the issues related to people like us,” says Shiv Chauhan, actor and member of Asmita Theatre Group. “ We are performing around 10-12 street plays and 8 eight plays,” he adds. On Sep 11, the festival will showcase Ramkali, directed by Arvind Gaur.

Full report here Hindustan Times

'Peepli Live is my tribute to Premchand: Rizvi

When director Anusha Rizvi started developing the characters in her debut film 'Peepli Live', her thoughts kept going back to Premchand and the hero of his 1936 novel Godaan.

Rizvi says she could not resist the temptation of using the novel as a metaphor in her film and decided to include Hori Mehto's character to convey the helplessness of a farmer.

"Hori kept coming to my mind when I was developing this character, so I decided to keep the character. Also, I wanted to show the sense of continuity from the time of Godaan to the present day. We used Hori Mehto's name as a symbol to convey that there has been no change in farmers' situation in all these years," Rizvi said.

Considered one of the greatest novel of modern Indian literature, Premchand's last novel depicts the socio- economic deprivation as well as the exploitation of the village poor through Hori.

'Godaan' was also made into a Hindi film in 1963, starring Rajkumar, Mehmood and Shashikala.

Full report here Economic Times

The game of life, translated

Wiping away tears, I’m thinking in amazement: “This really shouldn’t work.” But it does. I’ve just finished reading the death of the hero in Premchand’s novel Rangbhumi. The blind beggar Surdas dies like a saint, with forgiveness for those who once beset him and with humility. Almost his last words are “Ram-Ram”. His village mourns him, and when his body is mounted on its funeral pyre every man, woman and child is there. His estranged son comes weeping to light the fire. It’s significant that just a few days earlier the entire village had burned to the ground, after a terrible conflict that had very humble origins, as a struggle over a piece of land.

This is surely too heavy-handed. It sounds like Gandhi and the independence movement, even perhaps Partition. There are other familiar characters: Kunwar Bharat Singh and his son Vinay surely approximate Motilal Nehru and his son Jawaharlal. But Premchand died in 1936, aged just 56, and Rangbhumi was written in the early 1920s, the time of non-cooperation and Chauri Chaura. Call it prescience, or call it pattern-recognition; even the lives of saints and rich men of conscience follow a set of rules.

 Whatever it is, the emotional force of this piece of narrative is surprising — especially for a reader who is, like me, so little acquainted with Hindi-Urdu literature. Somewhere within the Indian reader must be buried the necessary raw material, the understanding of Indian archetypes of character and motivation, and Premchand is able to mine that seam more effectively than Western or Western-inspired contemporary Indian writers. In Western literature this subject would make a tragedy. In India, opposed imperatives never grow monstrous — think of Oedipus confronting his irreconcilable duties as son, king and husband, or Macbeth’s terrible crisis of loyalty and ambition — and altogether consume the individual. Somehow, dharma provides the answer and the solution. From anger comes peace. The universe is what it is. And so on.

Full report here Business Standard

All for the love of Premchand

Every week for the past five years, city playwright Mujeeb Khan has sat down religiously with a Munshi Premchand story, and adapted it into a play. Actors at his Ideal Drama and Entertainment Academy (IDEA) spend five days rehearsing the play, stage it on a Friday, and by Saturday, they move on to the next play in the series.

Khan takes a break from this weekly cycle just once a year, to organise a Premchand theatre festival involving a series of plays around the Hindi author’s birthday on July 31.

This year’s Prem Utsav is a 10-day celebration from August 1 to 10 at Vile Parle’s Sathaye College auditorium, where IDEA has staged all its Premchand plays for free.

The festival will include 53 plays, most of them written in the last year and some popular favourites such as Eid Gaha and Gareeb ki Haaye.

“I see myself as an archaeological department in theatre, responsible for preserving the literature of fading greats,” said Khan (50), who describes Premchand as the most original and pious of Hindi writers. He has already adapted 238 of Premchand’s 283 stories, and hopes to complete the entire collection before next year’s festival.

Full report here Hindustan Times

Reliving extraordinary tales of ordinary lives

On March 19, 1935, Munshi Premchand, from his temporary home at Hindu Colony in Dadar, wrote to his friend Hashamuddin: " Mumbai is a very commercial city and the climate here doesn't suit me. I am leaving it soon.'' After spending just nine months in the city where he wrote a film called Mazdoor, Premchand returned to his hometown Varanasi, dejected and disappointed. He died there the very next year.

Ironically, the city which failed to fascinate the legendary writer is outperforming even his hometown Varanasi and his nearby ancestral village, Lamahi, to commemorate his 130th birth anniversary, which fell on July 31. Director Mujeeb Khan is set to stage ‘Prem Utsav' from August 1 to August 10, which features 54 shows based on as many stories from Premchand's rich oeuvre-304 short stories, 14 novels and three plays.

The father of modern Hindi-Urdu literature, Premchand became the common man's writer simply because he had his finger on his pulse. "Before Premchand, Hindi-Urdu writers either depicted escapist fantasies or wrote about the elite. Premchand talked about the poor peasantry, the exploitative, decadent feudal system of early 20th-century India,'' says the 50-year-old, bearded Khan who, for the last five years, has virtually lived with Premchand's stories.

Full report here Times of India 

Premchand remembered, his 105-yr-old muse ignored

Maiku Prajapati (105) is a character straight out of a story, that too of renowned Hindi litterateur Munshi Premchand. The great writer adroitly turned a real life incident of Maiku's life in a short story, wherein the protagonist beats up a person trying to stop him from entering a liquor shop but ends up attacking the shopkeeper and destroying his vend.

What is more, 74 years ago, it was Maiku Prajapati who served the last drink of water to the writer on his deathbed.  Ironically, while the three-day 130th birth anniversary celebrations of Munshi Premchand are underway, Maiku, the only living character of one of his popular stories still awaits an invitation.

Even at the ripe old age of 105, Maiku's memory has not failed him, nor has he lost the zest for life.

"Dono ankhon se andha ho chuka hoon aur sharir mein takat bhi nahi hai magar phir bhi agar mujhe Premchandji ke karyakram mein bulaya jata to main zaroor jata kyon ki unse meri bahut sei yadein judi hain" (Though, I have lost my vision completely, I would have visited the function of Premchandji's birth anniversary if I had been invited), he told Hindustan Times on Friday.

Maiku met Munshi Premchand at Lamhi (native village of the litterateur) in 1934, two years before his death on October 8, 1936.

Full report here Hindustan Times

Master novelist's ancestral house lies in neglect

A number of villagers including women and children thronged a ground located close to the ancestral house of master novelist Munshi Premchand to watch dramas based on his short-stories on Saturday in Varanasi. The dramas were organised by local social and cultural organisations to mark the 130th birth anniversary of the legendary writer.

However, the Premchand Sarovar, a pond in the village named after the writer, and his ancestral house that has been turned into a memorial, wore deserted look on the occasion.

Even, the ceremonies like garlanding the bust of Premchand seemed to be a mere formality.

The two-storey ancestral house sported the growth of wild grass on its terrace.

Full report here Times of India 

Sweetness of Indian pulp

A few days after my first translation, The 65 Lakh Heist by Surender Mohan Pathak, was released, I walked into a large chain bookstore to see if it was stocked there. I found it in the 'Indian Fiction' bookshelf. Its two closest neighbours were an anthology of love stories edited by Ruskin Bond, and the newest book by Salman Rushdie.

I've been browsing through bookstores all my life, but it wasn't until then that it struck me just how unfair the categorisation was for all of the books displayed in the Indian Fiction category. The Ruskin Bond book should have been under Romance, or maybe under Anthologies. Rushdie's book should have been Literary Fiction. Many of the other books felt wrong, too — Tagore's and Premchand's translations should have been under Classics.

There should've been some sort of category created for Indian campus-lit and chick-lit by now, but those books sit next to historical thrillers and post-modern fiction on the same Indian Fiction bookshelf. The reader will, no doubt, point out that the volume of Indian books in all these genres is so low, that the books would be lost if mixed in with the other, non-Indian, books. And starting from that point, the reader — and several writers and reporters — have come to the conclusion that Indian writing is very limited and that readers here read much less than their counterparts in other countries. Although this makes for great copy, it's far from the truth.

Full report here DNA

The Sixty-Year Journey: Bhasha Literature

Increased literacy levels and technology have ensured the democratisation of contemporary Indian literature…

It is possible to think of Indian literature during the first half of the 20th century as literature inspired by Romanticism and Nationalism. The essential features of the literature during the last sixty years cannot be similarly captured in terms of a few major trends or influences. It would be more appropriate to think of it in terms of several contextual processes.

The most significant factor forming the context of Indian literature during the last six decades has been the growth in literacy from a mere 18 percent in 1951 to 68 percent in 2001. Similarly, there has been a phenomenal widening of the ‘middle classes', the class of society that provided literary readership during the first half of the century. Consequently, the neo-literate sections have given rise to new kinds of literary genres and reflecting the life experience and concerns of these classes.

Spread of technology
Print technology was restricted to the major towns during the first half of the century. During the last six decades, the rural areas have acquired access to print technology, and more recently to IT. Though one does not notice easily how much these technologies have impacted the production of imaginative expression, the number of occasional publications, little magazines, small-circulation weekly and theme-based pamphlets, have been actively shaping the literary taste and the linguistic creativity in the vast hinterlands of India.
On the eve of Independence, there were hardly any publishing houses available to authors interested in writing in English. Not more than half a dozen Indians had by then managed to publish creative writing in English. This was not the situation for Indian languages. They had well-established publishing venues available for them. The scene has changed. Indian authors can now easily publish in English all genres of literature and para-literature. The publication houses in Indian languages have continued to bring out Bhasha literature. The distribution networks are more professionally organised.

As expected of a newly formed nation, institutions providing state patronage to literature have been created. In addition to the Sahitya Akademi and the National Book Trust, other foundations such as Jnanpith have taken upon themselves the task of identifying outstanding literary works, giving awards to authors and publishing translations. Every major language has numerous literary awards offered by literary associations, publishing houses and charity organisations. Besides, literary festivals, mushairas, seminars and various literary association conferences provide relatively young and new writers spaces for claiming recognition.

If one can think of names of literary giants such as Rabindranath Tagore and Premchand as the literary centres, for the last 60 years, it would be more appropriate to think of forms and forums of literature that stand out. Perhaps, the most outstanding literary expression during these decades has been in the field of poetry, a fact that one generally overlooks since poetry has been a diminishing genre in the western world. The ‘literary magazine', as distinct from a literary periodical, has contributed significantly in all Indian languages. These are magazines that bring to the readers the new writing in Bangla through their ‘pooja issues', or in Marathi through their ‘deepavali issues'. This is a phenomenon not experienced by any western country and, therefore, needs mention in describing Indian literature. The writing by women or depicting gender concerns has been quite outstanding. Similarly, in recent years tribal languages that had remained in oral traditions have started expressing themselves through the medium of writing.

Full report here The Hindu