Pratigya: The Vow (Forgotten Classics of India - Premchand Collection)
From the author of Godan and Nirmala - a quietly devastating study of the widow-remarriage movement and the households it moved through.
In the reformist drawing rooms of 1920s Kashi, Amritray makes a public vow: he will not marry the woman betrothed to him, but will marry a widow instead, and give his life to the cause of widow remarriage. His pledge is applauded. Its first casualty is Prema - the girl who has waited three years for him, and who now makes a vow of her own.
Around this pair Premchand arranges a second household, in which a young widow, Purna, is taken in "for shelter" - and in which shelter turns out to mean something else entirely. Idle appetite, wounded pride, orthodoxy, and defencelessness grind against one another until the novel's quiet calamity arrives.
Reworked from an earlier Urdu novel and published in Hindi in 1929, Pratigya is one of Premchand's most direct reform novels - and one of his most searching, refusing to mistake the reformer's public virtue for a simple good, or the renouncing woman's grace for a simple tragedy.
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 editionThis 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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