See what I wrote on Feburary 19 after seminar, when I made up my mind on how I felt about this.
Going from reading Premchand’s pithy depictions of village life to reading “The Prostitute” made me look at those village depictions with fresh eyes. In “The Prostitute,” Premchand’s characters are clearly cosmopolitan. Dayakrishna is coming back from a business-related trip to Kolkata; Singar Singh has inherited enough wealth to live lavishly “without the least idea that there was such a thing as hard work” (66); Madhuri has enough mobility to be able to disappear. In that environment, Premchand’s work gives great color to each characters’ emotional reality in a way that deeply embeds them in the cultural constructions of the time. His dialogues reflect the subtleties of each characters’ conception of the ideal woman, of how a woman should be treated, of how one ought to relate to their wealth, of how one ought to love. They feel and act their way through this field of desires. But his village stories do not feel this way: their emotional realities are simpler; the language he uses to describe them is, too. The form of his village stories, I think, brings out his reading of India in his moment. In “The Prostitute,” he represents a part of Indian society that, in their cosmopolitanism, is dynamic in their emotional engagement with social life. His village stories, though, represent a part of India that is so deeply embedded in (1) the monotony of social relations and (2) the daily struggle to sustain themselves, that emotional life happens on a much more simple register. His prose depicting this mirrors that simplicity. In “January Night,” all Halku wants is a warm night’s sleep. But what is it that motivates Dayakrishna? I could see someone problematizing this dynamic in his writing: his portrayal of the village creates a simpler sort of subjectivity for his rural characters than his urban ones. This could be interpreted as belittling and denying rural people the full breadth of emotional experience. In doing so, it limits their autonomy. But I’m also sympathetic to the other perspective, which I think Premchand himself would certainly take: the toil and rigidity of village life is what in reality creates this simpler form of subjectivity. It belittles rural people and denies them the possibility of an autonomous life. In this reading, his attempt to portray that would be emancipatory. Whether he succeeds is an open question.