Premchand

 As far I can remember, it was in the middle school,that  I developed my interest in reading in Hindi. Till that time,my interest in reading in had remained confined to the textbooks. But all of a sudden I took off to general reading in Hindi. One person who created this in interest in me was Shri Omprakash ( we used to refer to him as Omi massab), who was a railway employee, was commissioned by my parents to be our  home tutor basically to teach Hindi and arithmetic to me and my sister .We were a non Hindi speaking family thrown into Hindi speaking town Bareilly in Uttar Pradesh. My mother,who had only a sprinkling knowledge of Hindi, took to studying Hindi in right earnest to be able to teach me. In the course of it she became well versed in it herself. 

  Shri Omprakash made us read Children’s section of the Hindi Newspaper “Navabharat Times”. He even made us send small entries for publication. We were thrilled the day we found that one of our entries got published with our names appearing in PRINT.We were also avid listeners of Radio programmes for children broadcast from Delhi and Lucknow Radio stations of Akashvani.

Once,when I got highest marks in half yearly exams in Hindi in I think,7^th or 8^th class , the teacher  showed my answer book  to all the students and declared (translated from Hindi" Look here, even though he is a  Madrasi boy , he has scored the highest marks.” I was happy for being highest scorer and at the same time furious for being called as Madrasi. Those days, for people in North , anyone below Vindhyas was a Madrasi ! Have the things changed now?

 Anyway, to continue, I was fully charged up to devour whatever I could lay my hands upon, in Hindi.Starting with Chandamama, Manmohan, Bal Bharati, Nandan, Chunnoo-Munno (all children’s magazines)  to Sarita, Manohar Kahaniyan, Manorama  whatever came in my way. My parents were very supportive and encouraging.

         Then it was the turn of the novels. Tarzan(Hindi Translations),Chandrakanta(fantasy),translated versions of the novels of BankimChandra, Sharatchandra, Rabindranath Tagore , Historical novels of Gupta Period (Chandragupt and Chanakya were my heroes),Panchatantra, Hithopadesha, Akbar and Birbal’s  tales, stories from Mahabharata and Ramayana (I read up the full volume of Tulsidas’s Ramacharitmanas and marveled at the capacity of the author to describe the beauty/grandeur/valour/strength of the main characters running into pages). Also made a futile attempt to write a detective story and acted in a full length social Hindi drama.

               Summer afternoons during school holidays were spent in such pursuits. There was an old easy chair of victorian times which had long arms where I could place my two legs ( one on either side)and spend hours and hours in reading them, returning  them to a book lending shop and get another issued for the next day (rate one anna i.e. 6 paise per day).

And sometime during this period, I came across this wonderful architect of short stories Munshi Premchand and got properly hooked. As luck would have it, a collection of short stories by him was prescribed as a text book (non-detailed). Four stories were covered in our syllabus. And what a master story teller he turned out to be,covering a range of topics, emotions, human relations and so on.

  Whereas one of the story talked about a child and his tender concern for his old grandmother, the other narrates the tale of a city bred boy who scoffed at the subservience inflicted upon the menial worker in rich households, gets slowly and unwittingly gets accustomed to the milieu. Next, how a young boy gets lured to a lottery by his elder pal and how the greed casts a shadow on their friendship and one of greatest stories 'Bade Bhai Saheb' which depicted as to how the elder brother ( who is himself not yet an adult) curbs all his natural juvenile instincts in order to be a role model to his younger brother .

There are large number of stories which depict the sad state of villagers especially farmers  in the northern belt oppressed due to indebtedness, caste-ism and so on.

   Well, I can go on and on. But it would suffice to conclude that Premchand has been a personality who has deeply influenced me. Later, I got a chance to know about many more master story tellers like Maupassant, Chekhov,O Henry, Somerset Maugham and Roald Dahl et al. But in my mind, Premchand will continue to occupy a special place.