Nirmala: The Widower's Bride
From the author of Godan and Gaban - Premchand's quietly devastating short novel of marriage, money, and a young wife's life inside someone else's household.
Nirmala is fifteen when the novel begins. Her father has set aside a dowry sufficient for an ordinary marriage of her caste and circle. When that dowry is unexpectedly lost, the kind of marriage available to her changes - and the household she enters is not the one she or her family would have chosen.
Around her the novel arranges a small-town world of sas and bahu, neighbours and priests, husband and stepsons. The marriage's quiet asymmetries - of age, of position, of expectation - accumulate without melodrama. Premchand refuses the easy villains: every figure in the household is given a voice, and the moral pressure of the book builds from the way these voices relate to one another.
Serialised in 1925-26 in the women's monthly Chand, Nirmala is one of the earliest novels in any Indian language to take the dowry system as its single subject. Compact, plain in style, and unsparing in its judgements, it remains Premchand's most direct examination of a marriage market still recognisable today.
Praise for Premchand"The greatest writer of Hindi-Urdu prose."
"He gave Indian fiction its modern voice."
"To read Premchand is to understand twentieth-century India." About this edition
This Forgotten Classics of India edition presents Premchand's complete novel in a careful, readable English translation by Romesh Sarkar, with a translator's note, glossary of Hindi terms, and brief biographical sketch.
About the authorPremchand (1880-1936), born Dhanpat Rai Srivastava, was the foremost Hindi-Urdu writer of the early twentieth century - a pioneer of social realism whose novels and stories gave Indian prose its modern voice. Nirmala, Gaban, and Godan are his most read works.
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