A banned Urdu collection forced a new pen name
Dhanpat Rai Srivastava (31 July 1880–8 October 1936) became Munshi Premchand after British officials burned some five hundred copies of his patriotic story collection Soz-e-Watan. Hindi–Urdu fiction’s great social realist went on to Godaan, roughly three hundred stories, and a resignation for Gandhi’s non-cooperation.
Born in Lamhi near Banaras as the fourth child of post-office clerk Ajaib Lal and Anandi Devi, he lost his mother at eight and soon his grandmother, finding little warmth from a stepmother—a wound that recurs in his fiction. A Lalpur madrasa taught him Urdu and Persian; book-selling and Reynolds’s Mysteries of the Court of London fed a reading hunger. Married at fifteen to a match he disliked, he lost his father in 1897, scraped through matriculation without the first-division fee waiver, and coached and taught for tiny salaries—₹18 then ₹20 a month—before Kanpur years (1905–1909) under editor Munshi Daya Narain Nigam’s Zamana.
Early novels probed temple corruption (Asrar-e-Ma’abid, serialised 1903–1905) and widow remarriage (Hamkhurma-o-Hamsavab, 1907). Soz-e-Watan (1907) inspired freedom struggle readers until a Hamirpur raid ordered by collector James Samuel Stevenson destroyed the stock; Nigam then urged the pen name Premchand. From 1914 he wrote more in Hindi as Urdu publishers proved scarce; “Saut” appeared in Saraswati in December 1915. Seva Sadan (1919)—first issued in Hindi from a Calcutta house for ₹450, Urdu later for ₹250—followed an unhappy housewife into courtesanship and orphanage work and widened his fame.
Promoted to deputy inspector of schools after a 1919 Allahabad BA, he heard Gandhi at Gorakhpur on 8 February 1921 urge quitting government posts. Ill, with two children and a pregnant wife—Shivarani Devi, a child widow he had married in 1906 against social fury—he resigned within days. From Banaras until his 1936 death he wrote through debt and sickness, leaving more than a dozen novels and a Hindustani social canon.
Source: Premchand
