"The Child" by Munshi Premchand

     On 14^th September India celebrates Hindi diwas, because on that day India has accepted “Hindi” as the official language of country.

     

      I have celebrated Hindi Diwas but in a different way, I have issued one book from our department’ library, named “Contemporary Indian Short Stories” and in that book I have found a short story “The Child” by Munshi Premchand (famous figure for his Hindi-Urdu literature) which was translated in English by Madan Gupta. This book contains English translation of fifteen short stories of different fifteen languages and writers like Gujarati, Urdu, Tamil, Sindhi, Kannada, Malayalam and many more.

  

     Here I would like to share my views and observations of a short story.

“The Child”

      

      The story contains various issues of Indian society and psychological aspects of Indian mindset. The story starts with an introduction of an illiterate Brahmin servant “Gangu” who thinks he is the superior among all the servants because he is “Brahmin”. The owner of house is the narrator of the story and he could be Premchand himself. The rigid mentality of Gangu irritates his master again and again but he is not much affected with this kind of behaviour. One day Gangu confesses his love towards a widow named Gomti Devi, and he also marries Gomti, who has betrayed three husbands before her marriage with Gangu. Gomti gave birth to a child, a baby boy just after six months of her marriage with Gangu and Gangu accepted that child as if that was his own child.

      

     Premchand has used Indian-English words like syce – coachman, bhang – an herbal narcotic and intoxicant and mohalla – neighbourhood. The language is very simple which reflects emotions of innocence of Gangu and his relation with his master, here we can read the master - slave relationship, but Gangu was not slave anymore, there was a relationship of respect and honour on each side. Gangu has left the job because he did not want to spoil his master’s reputation because of his marriage with a widow. The another important observation is reference of Shakespeare in this short  story, when master tells Gangu that Gomti will betray you too by saying,

“Have you ever heard the old saying, ‘Frailty, thy name is woman’.”

         

     The interesting part of this story is change in the psychology of characters, first Gangu was a rigid Brahmin and was not allowing anyone to disrespect him but when he falls in love with Gomti, he forget everything and marry her. On the other side, the master who was not interested in caste system, he was against that marriage and he was happy when Gomti run away and left Gangu, even when Gangu has shown his child to him, he was taunting Gangu about his child’s birth just in six months. At the end, master has realized that what he was doing was not appropriate because he was an educated man and a writer but he learned a lot from an illiterate Gangu, and then he apologize Gangu and went to meet Gomti.

     This story contains Indian society and culture very minutely. We can read and observe that Gangu is an illiterate Brahmin but though he has proud upon his cast as Brahmin. Gomti is a widow and remarriage of widows was a general practice, and the afterlife of widow and exploitation is also mentioned in the story. Issue of poverty in Gangu’s life and his social life is also important in story. The Child is a symbol of love between Gomti and Gangu as well as a symbol of awareness on the part of a narrator.