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By Arshia Sattar Premchand has always used his women characters as the lens through which society is critiqued. A reading his 'Sevasadan' in English translation almost 90 years after it was written brings home the fact that little has changed: women are still striving to control their own destinies
Sevasadan by Munshi Premchand.
Translated by Snehal Shingavi and with an Introduction by Vasudha Dalmia.
Oxford University Press: Delhi, 2005.
Hardback, pp 275, price not stated.  Premchand has been known to generations of Indian school children as a writer of short stories, but our Hindi-as-a-second-language education in urban schools did little to situate Premchand in the context of the Progressive Writers’ Movement or nationalism and the debates on social reform that continued well into the 20th century. His short stories have been translated into English and have been in circulation world-wide for more than 20 years, but only recently have Indian translators taken on his novels that cover the same wide swathes of history and society, albeit on a larger canvas.
Snehal Shingavi’s new translation of Premchand’s classic Sevasadan is lucid and passionate at the same time. The main story centres around the trials and tribulations of a young Brahmin woman named Suman who is unfortunately married off to an inappropriate man from her own caste. Suman’s genuine curiosity, her desire for more out of life and her newly acquired city aspirations lead her to walk out of her loveless marriage and into the kothas of Benaras as a courtesan. She achieves fame and fortune in her new profession, though she remains “chaste” for she decides that she will not sleep with the men she entertains. This tiny detail allows Premchand’s contemporaries to remain sympathetic towards Suman and receive his radical position on women in high-caste society without having to contend with the fact that the heroine is, in fact, a “fallen woman”. This impulsive young woman is surrounded by a cast of characters that are germane to the city of Benaras: wealthy landowners and shopkeepers, both Hindu and Muslim, social reformers and earnest lawyers, lovers of music and art, libertine men and domesticated housewives, sadhus and charlatans. And it is this society -- both decadent and striving for change -- that takes control of Suman’s life. The local municipal council decides that courtesans must be removed from the centre of the city because they represent depravity as well as highlight the social evils prevalent in Indian society. Within this scenario, Suman herself has a change of heart -– she learns that her sister’s marriage has been called off because of her. In an almost guessable twist, the young man who was to marry her sister had been someone who had frequented Suman’s kotha and with whom she had a special bond. Suman is persuaded by her conscience and by the zealous reformers around her to live in a home for widows and teach them religion, which she does with the same dedication that she had applied to her previous life. Suman’s remorse and mortification does not end there as the home’s reputation is sullied by her presence. She leaves and through a complicated set of circumstances, finds herself living with and taking care of her sister and her former admirer. That situation, too, is untenable and the novel ends with Suman running Seva Sadan (Home of Service), a shelter for the children of former prostitutes. Suman’s penance for her impetuosity, her unconventional desire for more, is complete, as it were, but the context for the victimisation of women in general has merely shifted. The courtesans were moved out of the city centre, robbing them of their professions as well as their exalted, if complex, social status. Moreover, their children (daughters, really) learn to cook and sew, knowing that there will be few offers of marriage for them. The same men who were responsible for the first phase of ‘reform’ are the very ones who cannot take the next step towards bringing these women back from the margins to which they have been consigned. Premchand is at his best in this novel, weaving deeply personal narratives into a complex backdrop of social history and caste politics in conservative northern India. Even as he places the issues that fuelled social debates in the mouths of his characters, Premchand’s own authorial voice is as audible as ever, his sympathy evident and his dislikes unmasked. Premchand has always used his women characters as the lenses through which society is not simply seen but critiqued as well. Suman is like many of his other heroines (for example, Jalpa in Gaban and Nirmala in Nirmala) -– seemingly childish and spoilt but with amazing inner reserves that manifest themselves as life turns from a bed of roses into a thicket of thorns. At the same time, these heroines suffer less from the flaws in their own impulses than they do from the way society treats them in terms of expectations as well as restrictions. Typically, the men they love and/or live with are weak-willed, unwilling to take on social censure or break rules, more likely to run and hide than stand and fight. Suman’s abandoned husband becomes a sadhu, choosing to live outside society rather than within it even though he acts as the catalyst for change in the hearts and minds of others. Sevasadan is a more coherent novel than the others mentioned above –- there is a determined set of characters that are all connected with each other in some way and the plot has a fairly straightforward linear thrust. The realism of the novel is its anchor, locating it firmly in time and place, but it is also the reason for its status as a literary classic. It is here that Dalmia’s strong and purposeful Introduction enhances this translation by filling out its contexts. She speaks of Benaras as a city and the place of the Benarasi courtesan in the literary imagination as well as the social and political history that mapped the lives of the city and its citizens at the height of the colonial period. For all that the novel was written nearly a hundred years ago (1917 in Urdu and then 1924 in Hindi are the publication dates), it is impossible not to think about last year’s ban on Bombay’s dance bar girls while you read it. The same set of false premises couched in terms of reform, the same anxiety about decadent elites versus a moral, abstemious and self-righteous middle class, the same victimisation of women who work for a living and the same stigmatisation of a women’s profession ring loud and clear in Maharashtra minister R R Patil’s clarion call to clean up the city. Even the idea that most of the bar girls came from outside the state finds an echo in the novel’s communally divided council that votes on the resolution to remove the courtesans who were predominantly Muslim. The home where Suman ends up recalls the ‘rehabilitation’ programmes for devadasis that could do nothing about changing attitudes and prejudices. Whether it is the courtesans of Benaras as representations of decadence or the current anxiety about western values corrupting the nation’s youth, it is women that become the target for ‘reformers’ and harbingers of social change. Despite 58 years of independence and at least 150 years of recognised reform movements and all our self-conscious post-coloniality, women and their behaviour, their professions and the spaces they inhabit, remain the default location for social debate. Premchand’s Sevasadan and Shingavi’s timely translation of it remind us that little has changed as women still strive for the right to control their own destinies. And the right to change the circumstances of their lives for themselves and by themselves InfoChange News and Features, February 2006
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