There’s something to be said for the flexibility of Premchand’s prose, the way it molds itself stylistically to the register of his chosen setting. But still, I feel Premchand’s portrayal of people in rural settings (at least in this selection) attempts to be critical but comes out paternalistic. He writes for rural people's good but denies them autonomy in his portrayal of them. He is critical of social conditions, but presents those living under them only as victims of them. His characters are reduced to such an incomplete register of life: Premchand’s stories end up reproducing the dehumanization that the social systems he critiques impose on people. Halku, for example, is incapable of caring about his debts because he is so concerned with his sensory suffering from the cold. His wife tells him to quit tenant farming, but he continues. He sleeps outside with a dog. (And remember, we are in South Asia!) All he cares about is the cold. Whatever happened to destroy his field is intentionally written to be unintelligble to the reader to reflect Halku’s stupor. He is reduced to an animal state of being: human concerns are outside of the frame of what he can verbalize (and therefore not included in Premchand’s prose.) A truly emancipatory project would not simply reduce its protagonist to an animal. It would portray rural society as enforcing animal-like living, but it would let the characters find breaks in that structure, assert their humanity, and live emotional lives on a register of their choice.
Still, I appreciate his work. I didn’t write on this, but I appreciate his way of writing endings that demand a re-reading, that invert and stir. And I appreciate the way his prose shifts to mirror the societies and experiences he represents — the simple fogginess of the prose in “January Night” is such a striking rendition of the muddy, disoriented, yet ultimately simple experience of desperation and hunger. It reflects a creative empathy at the core of Premchand’s writing: the fact that his prose adapts so much to the nature of his characters’ life experience (compare “January Night” to “The Prostitute”) reflects his care to his uniqueness of different subjectivities. Still, I think there is a fundamental issue with the lack of autonomy he affords to his rural characters.