The Making of a Genius

Premchand had gained national and international recognition as a great short story writer long before he died in 1936. The translations of his works, apart from being published in almost all the regional languages of India had also come out in Russian and Japanese. That Penguin has included a collection of Premchand’s short stories in its first batch of books to be published in India is a fitting tribute to a literary genius whose works revolutionized fiction-writing both in Hindi and Urdu.

Premchand appeared on the literary scene around the turn of the century which was a time of turmoil and turbulence. It was a period of transition when the old order was being challenged all over the world while the new one had yet to take any tangible shape. The tension and terror born out of the break with the past and the consequent unrest and insecurity generated immense intellectual ferment and produced a crop of great writers like Dickens in England and Tolstoy, Chekov and Gorky in Russia.