商品簡介
Premchand is one of the most outstanding figures in twentieth-century Hindi literature. His novels and short stories dealing with the lives of everyday heroes have attained the status of classics. His works continue to be rediscovered and to captivate new generations of readers in India and abroad. The inhumanity of caste hierarchies and the plight of women stirred his indignation and remained constant themes through his works. Of his many novels, Rangbhumi (Battleground, 1924-5) depicts most graphically the devastation of peasant society and agriculture under colonial rule. Premchand treads the very tricky ground of tensions between the rulers and the ruled in this novel. Here, the ruled are the Indians and the rulers are an amalgam of the whites, the Indian landowners, and the Indian Christians. Rangbhumi spans the time between the 1920s and 1930s in pre-Independence India. It captures and celebrates the unassailable spirit of the common man, especially the farming community, whic h knows no defeat or submission, as its spirit is always on the mend, even as it is perceived to be finally crushed.
作者簡介
- Considered one of the greatest fiction writers in Hindi, Premchand (1880 1936) was born Dhanpat Rai in Lamahi, a small village near Banaras. He wrote in Urdu under the name of Nawab Rai and changed his name to Premchand when his collection of short stories, Soz-e-vatan, was seized for sedition in 1908. In a prolific career spanning three decades, Premchand wrote about a dozen novels, two plays, almost three hundred short stories and several articles, reviews and editorials. He edited three magazines, and also set up his own printing press. Though best known for his stories exposing the horrors of poverty and social injustice, he wrote on a variety of themes with equal facility romance, satire, social dramas, nationalist tales, and yarns steeped in folklore. - Manju Jain retired as Professor from the Department of English, University of Delhi. She is the author of T.S. Eliot and American Philosophy: The Harvard Years and A Critical Reading of the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot. She has also edited the collection Narratives of Indian Cinema.
