Munshi Premchand

Life1880–1936

Premchand was born Dhanpat Rai Srivastava on 31 July 1880 in Lamhi, a village near Varanasi. His father was a post-office clerk; his mother died when he was a child. He studied Urdu and Persian with a maulvi before going to school, and the Urdu dastan tradition, especially Tilism-e-Hoshruba, was among his first loves as a reader.

He worked for years as a schoolteacher and school inspector. His first writings were in Urdu under the name Nawab Rai. His first collection of patriotic stories, Soz-e-Watan (1907), was seized by the British authorities and copies were burned; after that he wrote as Premchand. In 1921, answering Gandhi's call for non-cooperation, he left government service to write, edit and publish.

In April 1936 he presided over the first conference of the Progressive Writers' Association in Lucknow, where he said that literature must stir its readers to change the world. He died in Varanasi on 8 October 1936.