Premchand’s shifting portrayals of womanhood in colonial North India: Between conformity and resistance

Abstract

This article examines the nuanced and open-ended representations of women in the fictional works of Premchand, one of the most versatile and popular Urdu-Hindi writers of the 1920s and 1930s. By looking into a wide range of his writings, it argues that Premchand’s literary engagement with the women’s question cannot be summarily understood through such binaries as ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal/radical’. While the virtuous and compliant woman is valorised as an ideal within the domestic sphere in certain stories, Premchand’s narratives in the nationalist mode foreground an alternative set of ideals for the urban, educated and middle-class Hindu woman. Far from being formulaic, Premchand’s portrayals of womanhood seem to be shifting, tentative and thematically contingent.