Stories on Caste by Premchand

M. Asaduddin is an author, critic and translator in several languages. His books include Premchand in World Languages: Translation, Reception and Cinematic Representations; Filming Fiction: Tagore, Premchand and Ray; A Life in Words; The Penguin Book of Classic Urdu Stories; Lifting the Veil: Selected Writings of Ismat Chughtai; For Freedom's Sake: Manto; and (with Mushirul Hasan) Image and Representation: Stories of Muslim Lives in India. He has been a Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence at Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA, and a Charles Wallace Trust Fellow at the British Centre for Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. He is a regular speaker at literary festivals, and his translations have been recognized with the Sahitya Akademi Award, and the Katha and A.K. Ramanujan awards for translation, as well as the Crossword Book Award.Premchand (1880-1936), considered one of the greatest fiction writers in Hindi, was born Dhanpat Rai in Lamahi, a small village near Benares. He wrote in Urdu under the name Nawab Rai and changed it to Premchand when his collection of short stories, Soz-e Watan, was seized for sedition in 1909. In a prolific career spanning three decades, Premchand wrote fourteen novels, two plays, almost 300 short stories and several articles, reviews and editorials. He edited four journals, and also set up his own printing press. Though best known for his stories exposing the horrors of poverty and social injustice, he wrote on a variety of themes with equal felicity-romance, satire, social dramas, nationalist tales, and yarns steeped in folklore.