Visitors to my parents' home in Allahabad were disconcerted to discover that the familiar appellation used by all of us for referring to the sainted Munshi P was, simply, Premchand. Occasionally, in family circles, my father would refer to his "Babuji", but for the most part he was just "Premchand", a writer and a cultural phenomenon on whom no special claims could be made, but to whom, by the same token, no special honour was owed. This was much harder for my father than for myself. I grew up feeling cheated by the famous ancestor who died a full 10 years before I was born. So it is Premchand that is my theme, and not my thoughtless grandfather.

Writing about Rudyard Kipling, Orwell struggled to reconcile his obvious distaste for the brash poet of imperialism with his recognition of Kipling's creative vitality, both as a story-teller and as a poet many of whose lines had acquired the ultimate accolade of popular, unattributed currency, like folksongs: "It takes great vitality even to become a by-word; but to remain one, that is genius."

Munshi Premchand, a hoary icon, a sometime sentimentalist from a bygone age, firmly established in the dubious immortality of a curricular classic, poses a similar challenge. For he, too, has become a byword, the familiar and rubbed down currency of our social imagination.

Embalmed in textbooks, routinely rehearsed in classrooms Premchand is obviously dead. Here he is the author of a few stories that are universally known, even though they have been rendered innocuous by being made part of the hypocritical tedium of the education system. One may just feel a pang of affiliation for the little boy who buys a chimta for his grandmother; for Gangi who dies, thirsty, turned away from the Thakurs' well; for the farmer who is almost grateful that with his harvest reduced to ashes, he will no longer have to struggle to keep awake guarding it in the cold winter night -- but little survives outside the lethal parentheses of school.

The idealistic tales in which, after a clear-eyed depiction of the horrors of his (and alas, our) society, assent is sought for improbable and "Gandhian" changes of heart cannot speak any more to our cynical selves. The icon "Premchand" seems almost complicit with the establishment that honours him, like a distant ancestor who is both remembered and, in the very act of remembering, forgotten.

And yet, as an old song has it -- he's dead, but he won't lie down! His books continue to be printed. When the copyright fell into public domain, dozens of publishers in the depressed and depressing, literate and semi-literate Hindi world, got into the business of doing reprints. Clearly, he still speaks to a large number of readers. My subject is precisely this curious, this amazing, this alarming persistence.

Partly, of course, this has to do with the persistence of certain shameful realities -- this voice from the past can still sound vibrant with a relevant anger. The brutalised landless labourers of Kafan are still with us, in ever greater numbers; traditional caste oppression against the Dalits is still rife, albeit now sometimes in an updated OBC version; the middle class still struggles to reconcile its vaunted ideals with the shabby compromises of its everyday existence; the contempt for politicians finds an echo in contemporary vigilante fantasies

... But I suspect there is more to it than just that. When Stephen Dedalus sallies forth into the future in James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, he intends, famously, "to forge, in the smithy of my soul, the uncreated conscience of my race". Similar young men dominate the modern traditions of many of India's languages -- encyclopaedic Renaissance men (not many women, alas, for all the well-known reasons), towering and formative individuals whose cultural influence goes far beyond their considerable achievements and competencies. What unites these masters of conscience is the fact that they enlarged the range and reach of the social imagination by making a greater proportion of the marginalised life of their times available to the imagination for being given narrative shape, and so form the basis for a moral order.

It is arguable whether it is the sluggishness of our contemporary reality that cripples poets and writers, singers and artists, whose social function it is to reinvent and reconfigure our experience; or whether it is our imaginations that have failed to rise to the challenge, so that we remain trapped in the narrative constructions of these powerful, old men? On both counts, the persistence of Munshi Premchand is alarming.

But there is one final respect in which he still lives -- this writer who died too young ever to become an old man. In Gorakhpur in 1921, Premchand was a school-teacher; he had two little children, and the third, my father, wasn't born until later that year. His wife was literate, even articulate, in her rough rustic fashion, but no more. He had no private wealth to fall back upon. Because a passing Mahatma gave a call for non-cooperation, 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.

Alok Rai is a professor in the department of humanities, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

S.Chattopadhyay
(1876-1938): The staunch realist of Bengali literature, his bohemian adventures represented a change from the idealistic writings of his time. The petty clerk at a zamindari estate, the recluse who travelled incognito in real life made no pretensions in his works as well. Women, the lowly and the downtrodden were at the core of his study. Like Srikanta, most of his other works raised vital questions about the Bengali joint family and Bengali society. He was also an intensely patriotic writer, his liberal ideas best reflected in works like Pather Daabi and Swadesh O Sahitya.