When writing wears down the sole: A tale of Premchand’s torn shoes

In the essay, Parsai asks Premchand, “Did you know your shoe was torn? Didn’t you feel embarrassed or ashamed getting your photo taken in these torn shoes? You could have pushed your dhoti down and hidden that protruding toe. But instead you look confident in the photograph, as if you couldn’t care less. There’s a mocking smile on your face. What kind of a man is this, who gets his photograph taken with torn shoes, but looks like he’s actually laughing at someone?” Then he adds, “Maybe Premchand tore his shoes because he kicked at a mound or small hillock that came in his way. He could have skirted it, but he didn’t.” Towards the end of the essay, Parsai says, “Look at me, my shoes aren’t in great condition either. But I make sure they look fine on top, though the soles may be in shreds.”

He finally understands what lies behind Premchand’s smile. The writer is laughing at Parsai, and at everyone else who hides their toes, who avoids the mounds and hills that they encounter. Because Premchand never did.

Right from his childhood until his death in 1936, he was short of money, sometimes desperately so, but he never faltered or compromised in his writing. In 1908, an early collection of five stories, Soz-e-Watan (Dirge of the Nation), was declared seditious by the British government, and copies of the book were seized. In later years, Saraswati Press (which Premchand started in Banaras in 1923) and Hans (the literary journal he founded in 1930) were fined punitively by the British, and asked to furnish securities. But he never stopped writing the novels and short stories he wanted to, about social justice, the oppression of the peasantry, British excesses (if this gives the impression he only wrote sorrowful stories, nothing could be further from the truth; he also wrote captivating, optimistic stories, and tales full of sly humour.)

He was also a passionate journalist who wrote unflinchingly on politics and social issues.

And torn shoes, or sometimes no shoes at all, were very much part of this life. Premchand had just cleared Class 8 when his father, a postal clerk, was transferred to a place that had no educational opportunities. So Premchand was sent to Banaras to study and given five rupees a month, which was far too little to get by on. He had no proper clothes, and no shoes. To supplement his income, he began tutoring another child. It was winter. He would finish these sessions by 6 pm and walk home, barefoot, a distance of five miles. There was no question of his tight-fisted stepmother giving him extra money. His own mother, who died when was not yet eight, had doted on him. The lack of love from his stepmother scarred him; many of his fictional characters lose their mothers at a young age and are treated badly by their stepmothers.

Years later, in 1915, when he had begun his career as a schoolmaster, he was posted to Basti at a salary of 50 rupees a month. The money was better but his responsibilities had also increased (he was married by then, and also supporting his stepmother). The one-way horse-cart fare to his school was one anna, so he often walked home. Who knows what the state of his shoes was like then.

Yet in 1921, with a family to look after (a wife and two children, with a third on the way), he resigned from his government job as a schoolteacher in Gorakhpur, because Mahatma Gandhi had given the call for the non-cooperation movement. As his grandson Alok Rai writes in the introduction to Premchand: His Life and Times (written by Premchand’s son Amrit Rai; translated into English by Harish Trivedi): “… he threw himself into the national movement, leaned once into the wind and simply let go, this no-longer-young man on the flying trapeze. It seems scarcely credible now.”

It’s something worth remembering, on his 142nd birth anniversary, just gone by on July 31.