A century later, Premchand’s women are both ‘timeless’ and stereotyped

I had just finished reading a translation of O. Chandu Menon’s Indulekhaand, I couldn’t find my copy of Ismat Chughtai’s Masooma. It was the 13th day of lockdown and I was itching to read something that would take me away from the horror of the pandemic looming over us.

I stood in front of my bookshelf and resigned to yet another reading of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince—until my eyes fell on Munshi Premchand’s Sevasadan. Sorry, Harry dear, you’d have to wait. I reached for the book and brushed the dust from its cover. I curled up on my couch and turned to the first chapter.

A bottle of iced tea and a large bowl of namkeen sat on the coffee table, ready to complement my leisure reading. Four cups of iced tea and two bowls of namkeen later, I reached the end of the last chapter. My father asked me to join the family on the dinner table. But I didn’t need dal and rice. I needed a Saridon pill and a night of long, uninterrupted sleep. You see, I had last read Sevasadan back in my third year of college.

As a young political science student who had recently learned about feminism and its various strands, this Premchand novel had come across as a mixed bag of goodies, very much a product of its times. Through the course of the story, its protagonist Suman, goes through a complex journey in which she wears many hats.

Married to a poor, uncouth sourpuss, she starts out as a young, joyless wife, constantly in need of outside attention and approv- al for her good looks, high birth, and ladylike manners. Her world comes crashing down when she realises that the so-called fallen women of society, the prostitutes and courtesans, are treated with regard, while she, a poor housewife is an object of ridicule and scorn.

Her husband Gajadhar dislikes her outgoing ways and things between them flare up when she becomes too friendly with a neighborhood courtesan. Eventually, he throws her out when he suspects her of having a thing for an affluent married lawyer. Disgraced, Suman finds herself homeless and penniless, which leads her straight to daalmandi, the infamous district of the kothewalis.

The rest of the story is about Suman bai’s rise to fame and her fall to shame, aided and abetted by respectable men of the society, like social reformer Babu Vitthaldaas, who clearly tells her that while lower caste “kultas” are expected to be loose, “Brahmin devis” like Suman need to sacrifice their “indriyas” in order to uphold dharma. To Premchand’s credit, the character of Vitthaldas is under- scored by a heavy dose of condemnation.

But he is still seen as a voice of morality and reason. The blame of engaging in a social evil is still largely placed on Suman, for not having con- trol over her desire to eat well, dress well, and look nice. Premchand tapers her flaws with an almost fatherly reproach, empathising with her superficial nature but not supportive or understanding in the least. With that said, Suman remains the undisputed heroine of the story, but that’s about all that redeems it for a 2020 reader.

Sevasadan was first published 101 years ago. But removed from its time and place, it doesn’t pass the ideological purity test of third-wave intersectional feminism. But it makes several per- tinent points that seem so set in stone that even the merciless deluge of a century’s worth of history has not made a dent. Prostitutes, or sex-workers, are still a class of women seen as fundamentally unclean, amoral, and incapable of social assimilation.

While the current mainstream thesis on prostitution acknowledges the socio-economic factors that drive it, the most articulate of tongues stop short of address- ing the elephant in the room—that most organised (and unor- ganised) prostitution is less about free will and more about money troubles, and that the first cycle of victimisation almost always begins with human trafficking and the gross abuse of women’s and girls’ human rights.

Premchand, a man from 100 years ago, could not fully com- prehend this. He was an astute man, a sensitive man, but a man, nonetheless. That is what stopped him from being a bit kinder to the women he pitied and trashed in the same paragraph.

Furthermore, economic coercion, did not factor in his per- ceptions as a legitimate reason to engage in sex work. As one character in the novel clearly states, “0ur revered matriarchs from history would choose to kill themselves than allow a stranger to cast an eye upon them.”

This unsavory and disturbing line of thought does dull the sheen on Premchand’s near stellar record of progressivism. He was, after all, spot on when it came to questions of caste and class inequality, colonialism, feudalism, and poverty. That he missed the mark on the plight of women in several cases, is disappointing, but not entirely shocking.

What then, is the takeaway from a novel like Sevasadan that is partially frozen in time and partially hot off the press? Mine is that society has always been harsh to women and placed its own burdens of failure upon their shoulders. Premchand’s stories try to share the burden. But like always, it is upon women to take the fight a step further and get rid of the burden for good.

(Ankur Dang is a freelance screenwriter and storyteller)