- Lived:
- 31 July 1880, Lamahi village near Banaras (Varanasi) → the small towns of the United Provinces (Uttar Pradesh) — Kanpur, Hamirpur, Gorakhpur, Lucknow, one unhappy Bombay (Mumbai) year — and always back to Banaras, where he died on 8 October 1936
- Field:
- fiction — founder of modern realism in Hindi and Urdu alike; fourteen novels, some three hundred short stories, and two decades of loss-making magazines
- The Big Idea:
- A story’s job is the truth about ordinary life. He took Indian fiction out of the fairy palace and set it down in the debt-ridden village field — writing in both scripts of what was still one shared language.
- In their words:
- “The most precious jewel in the world? The last drop of blood shed for the freedom of the motherland.” (from his first published story, 1907 — the sentence that got his book burned)
- If you remember one thing:
- When the British burned his first book, Dhanpat Rai shed the name on its cover and became Premchand — and the new name put the Indian peasant, the widow and the moneylender’s ledger at the centre of two literatures, wrote Godaan, and died at fifty-six in the kind of debt he had spent his life describing.