129
Article
Premchand:
As a Moralist
Embody-ing
an Indian
Literary
Tradition
●
Akira Takahashi
1
Modern Indian literature, to our regret, seems to have hardly been read or enjoyed by common lovers of literature in our country, whereas some Western writers are sometimes said to have no fewer readers in Japan than in their own countries. Mainly because of a language barrier, until quite recently, its reading and study had almost been limited to a narrow circle of scholars of Indian languages and not open to the wide public loving literature. Nowadays, however, not a few works of Indian literature have been translated into Japanese from several Indian languages. Through these translations, I hope Indian literature will be more accessible to com-mon Japanese readers and at the same time, will be judged from a fairer point of view. In other words, a wider and more adequate appreciation of Indian literature is now required of us. It is quite natural that students of any foreign literature should have a tendency to overestimate its literary value because of their love for it. Yet, a person who happens to be in-terested in Indian literature but knows little about its socio-cultural back-ground is, in a sense, best qualified to give a fair opinion on its qualities. His judgement is not distorted by a knowledge of India which would be easily changed into prejudice without a constant reflection. We students
高橋 明 Akira TAKAHASHI, Osaka University of Foreign Studies, Hindi Literature.
Other publications include :
" R. K. Narayana's Novels-from The English Teacher to A Tiger for Malgudi " in Journal of Osaka University of Foreign Studies 1, 1989.
"A New Village, A New Writer: Mithileshvar's Short Stories " (in Hindi), Jva-lamukhi 2, 1983.
130 Journal of the Japanese Association for South Asian Studies, No. 2
of Indian literature will have to assume the heavy responsibility of provid-ing Japanese readers good translations of good works.
Needless to say, a knowledge of a foreign language, however broad and deep it may be or after years of assiduous effort and study acquired, does not always give us a proper aesthetic sense. A good linguist is not always a good reader or a good critic. There may exist a large number of people in Japan who do not have a reading knowledge of Indian languages but can form much better literary judgement on works of Indian literature even through translation than many of us.
As far as modern Hindi fiction is concerned , we have to admit that it has not come up to the standard of world literature yet. How many Japa-nese readers are there who are able to enjoy reading, say, a novel of Prem-chand's as a solace to their own souls or for entertainment? Only those can who are studying or teaching Hindi at the university , I dare say. Modern Hindi literature is a part of the contemporary literary scene of the world and it should be judged by the standards of our day. If we face it without any prejudice, it is quite easy to understand it. The only thing to be borne in mind is that our judgement should be distorted neither by our love or hatred towards India nor by an ideology of any kind. All ideologies and emotions blind us and prevent us from seeing things as they are.
In the present paper, in order to recognize the true value of modern Hindi literature, an effort has been made to shed some light on this kind of distortion seen in both Hindi writers and world wide critics. For this purpose, Premchand (1880-1936) would be one of the best writers to provide us with suggestive materials for study. Through a brief analysis of two representative short stories: I will try to show that Premchand was a writer obsessed by a set of moral values, which prevented him from see-ing the world as it was. The general tendency to regard him as besee-ing an ideal man even in his real life has something to do with this obsession which, in my opinion, is one of the striking characters of an Indian literary tradition.
2
So much has been said both favorably and unfavorably about Premchand and his literature that there seems nothing new left to add . Indranath Madan, one of the most reliable critics of modern Hindi fiction , says:
Premchand: As A Moralist Embodying An Indian Literary Tradition 131
Premchand did not write novels and short stories merely for the entertainment of the readers, or to satisfy the curiosity of men and women for stories with problems of sex and love. He had a high idea of art. It was a medium of experience for his ideas on some of the social, political, and economic problems of our life. His novels embody, therefore, social purpose and social criticism; and they are based on fundamental social problems [Madan 1946: 145].
In our country, too, quite the same view of his literature was presented by Takeshi Suzuki, the leading scholar and translator of Urdu literature in Japan. He says:
We cannot look upon him [Premchand] as a mere novelist, because some of the problems of his time are most keenly reflected in his literature and he utilizes it as a means of expressing his thoughts ardently on some social problems [T. Suzuki 1967: 16]. (The translation into English is by the present writer.)
Dealing with this same feature of his literature, however, some Indian critics have tried to underrate him. Amrit Rai, Premchand's younger son and an eminent scholar of Hindi literature, referred to this group in one of his articles [Rai 1986: 82]. Although, as pointed out by Rai, there exists a small group of writers and critics who have tried to question the literary value of his writing, they are basically all devotees of the anachronistic motto, "Art for art's sake ". At the same time, they criticize the whole group of writers, including Premchand, who are more or less committed to the cause of Socialism. We cannot put much confidence in their criticism of Premchand, because they seem to criticize his " ism "
rather than his literature itself. Thus, he has been either overestimated or underestimated because of his commitment to the social problems of his days. To a certain extent, of course, this approach is inevitable. He was so deeply concerned about the predicament of people and the future of India that it seems to be almost impossible for us to value his literature without commenting on his attitude towards those social problems.
Yet, I believe, it will not be meaningless to try to shed light on his literature from a different point of view. In my opinion, he is a great moralist and can be called more exactly a man of Dharma in the Indian perspective. For him both Socialism and Gandhism are only a
super-132 Journal of the Japanese Association for South Asian Studies, No. 2
structure of his mind and in order to understand the essence of his litera-ture we have to distinguish this superficial phenomenon from his more deep-rooted Indian sensibility which, for convenience' sake, is to be called a sense of Dharma. This point of view, however, is not quite a new one. Kyuya Doi, who was a fervent admirer of Premchand's literature in Japan, concluded in one of his articles that such motifs as humanity, Dharma, an ideal village, and dedication are more clearly reflected in his short stories than the Arya Samaj movement or Gandhism [Doi 1967: 15]. Takeshi Suzuki, too, attached greater importance to the writer's boundless con-fidence in human nature than to his acceptance of Socialism as an ideology [T. Suzuki 1967: 24]. The difference is that they both treated these characters of his literature as coming from his individual personality.
In my opinion, however, his inner mentality is none other than a reflec-tion of an Indian literary tradireflec-tion. Traditionally, the duty of a man of letters, in other words, a writer's Dharma, is to embody some moral values in his writing and guide the public along the right path. Classical writers were expected to give the reader some moral lessons. With regard to the Sanskrit drama, for example, Monier-Williams pointed out this phenome-non [Monier-Williams 1973 : 469]. Although Premchand gave a new di-rection to Hindi fiction and, in fact, inaugurated a new age of Hindi literature, we should not forget that he had been under the influence of this tradition all through his writing career, and that he could not be free from its merits and demerits.
Ignoring the possible indignation of some Indian classicists who seem to pay homage to Kalidasa only because some Germans are said to have been moved by his dramas about two centuries ago, we can try to find some similarities, from this point of view, even between Kalidasa and Premchand. Premchand has supplied for both later writers and critics a model of an ideal literary man dedicating everything to literature and the welfare of people. His influence on later generations has been so great that without a proper reevaluation of his literature we would fail to understand the whole character of modern Hindi literature after him.
3
First, to what extent the realities of his time had been correctly reflected or described in his works? Second, whether he was able to grasp the
socio-Premchand: As A Moralist Embodying An Indian Literary Tradition 133 economic system under which he has to live? The latter regulates a per-son's actual behavior to a considerably degree, if not totally, irrespective of his individual moral values. By making clear these two points, we can examine the validity of the statement that Premchand is the father of modern realistic Hidni fiction. Considering his prolificalness, the analysis of only two short stories will not be sufficient but, I believe, suggestive enough, because both of them have been highly esteemed as his repre-sentative realistic works by almost all the critics.
Kafan (The Shroud, 1936) has been unanimously acknowledged by critics to be one of his best realistic short stories. We can guess how highly it has been valued in our country from the fact that it has already been translated into Japanese four times. In fact, the high evaluation it has been enjoying here is only an echo of Indian critics' view of it. It is not too much to say that even our evaluation of one short story has not been possible without looking to them for judgement.
This is a story of two poor villagers, a father and his son, who are noted idlers and shunned by the other villagers because of their petty theft and slipshod way of working. After the son's wife dies in a difficult childbirth, they begin going around the village to collect necessary money for her fu-neral. But they waste all the money by drinking and eating at a tavern in the market where they go to get a shroud to cover the dead woman's body. At the end of the story both of them sing and dance merrily and fall, at last, dead drunk by the roadside. They, father and son, belong to the community of Chamars whose traditional work is leather-goods making. But men of this caste now usually comprise one of the lowest classes among landless field workers and engage themselves in various manual labours in Indian villages [Lewis 1955: 157]. Kafan, however, tells us almost noth-ing in detail about their life and the reader would begin to doubt whether the author had known the realities of their situation or not. A short story, entitled Qazaki (1926), tells us, if we admit that some realities of the author's boyhood days are reflected in it, that Premchand had an " un-touchable " friend, a Pasi by caste. But his friend Qazaki was not able to be on equal terms with young Premchand because he was a postal runner of the post office to which Premchand's father had been transferred as postmaster. Premchand's childlike but rather arrogant attitude towards his older friend can be explained from this fact. Thus, the story tells us nothing about how far the difference between the castes had influenced
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young Premchand's behavior. As far as I know, none of the researches and biographical works on Premchand and his literature has told us that he had an adult friend from the so-called " untouchable " castes through whom he tried to know their pitiful plights firsthand . Judging from the cursory and arbitrary descriptions seen in his works, we cannot escape the conclusion that he knew about their realities only superficially and concep-tually.
Women of Chamar communities usually act as midwives in the villages where modern hospitalization and nursing facilities are not available. So it is quite a strange scene that a young Chamar wife is dying in the throes of child-birth and nobody comes to help her from the neighborhood as if the family was living in a solitary but in a desert. Premchand writes: " [After finding that his wife had t
urned cold the next morning,] Madhav ran to get Ghisu [his father]. Then they both began to moan wildly and beat their chests. When they heard the wailing the neighbours came running and according to the old tradition began to console the bereaved " [Rubin 1988: 236]. Further he writes: "The tender-hearted women of the village came and looked at the dead woman, shed a few tears over her forlorn state and went away " [Rubin 1988: 237]. What had these " tender -hearted women " been doing, while she was crying in violent pain.
In order to collect the money for her funeral, they first go to the village zamindar. He gives them two rupees reluctantly. Referring to this epi-sode, Teiji Sakata tried to explain the description of a benevolent zamindar, a landlord, by the author [Sakata 1977: 132-3] and quoted a passage from Cohn's paper, " The Thakur is considered to be responsible for the welfare of his tenants, and responsible for their care in need and ill health " [Cohn 1955, 55]. But in the present story it is not only the zamindar but also the shopkeepers and moneylenders of the village that give the loafers money. A more reasonable explanation as to the description of such a zamindar is that the author simply wanted to tell us a soft-hearted zamindar sometimes would give money to charity for the poor. Cohn points out after the above-mentioned passage, " Each tenant in turn owes allegiance and support to his Thakur " [Cohn 1955 : 55]. However soft-hearted a zamindar may be, he would never have pity on those tenants who acknowl-edge no allegiance to him, because it is a matter of the fundamental prin-ciple and not a matter of individual moral character. It would be difficult
Premchand: As A Moralist Embodying An Indian Literary Tradition 135 for us to admit that Premchand had intended to depict the role of village landlords as protectors of their tenants as pointed out by Sakata. Prem-chand never overcame his weakness to confuse individual moral values with a socio-political system in his creative writing.
About The Thakur's Well (The original title: Thakur Ka Kua, 1932), Rubin says, " This is ... a fine example of Premchand's later simplicity and his rejection of the editorial comment that sometimes mars earlier stories " [Rubin 1988: 259]. When Jokhu, a member of some
low-caste, (probably an " untouchable ", for example a Chamar), and sick for several days, tries to drink water from the lota pot, he finds the water smells foul. Although his wife, Gangi, understands that the water of the well, from which she draws water every evening, has been polluted by some dead animal, she doesn't know where else the water will be available. In the village, there are two more wells. One belongs to a Thakur family and the other to a village merchant. The use of both wells is strictly forbidden to the people of the low-castes. A violation of this caste-rule in an Indian village means, after a kangaroo court decision, brutal punish-ment including death. After a brief hesitation, she decides to fetch water from the Thakur's well under cover of darkness. Following her bold but desperate effort, she came home empty-handed and found her husband, parched with a deadly thirst, drinking that polluted water.
Although, as commented by Rubin, this is a short but well-formed story which is free from such defects as are usually found in his other short stories, we can point out some artificial descriptions in the story. For example, the author says, " she [Gangi] didn't know that by boiling the water it would be made safe " [Rubin 1988: 83]. It is clear that Jokhu doesn't know this either. We cannot help asking whether it is possible or not for two adults to be ignorant of such a simple fact. Maybe the author had wanted to emphasize a gross hygienic ignorance prevailing among the poor peasants those days, which was itself a result of social abuses they had to endure. Yet there is a considerable doubt whether or not the author had distorted the reality so as to suit his own convenience. In The Thakur's Well no mention is made of the couple's neighbors either. Before deciding to go to the Thakur's well, the idea doesn't occur to Gangi that she should ask her neighbors if they have fresh water at hand or not. This may reveal the author's ignorance or carelessness at the very best.
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While waiting by the well for the right moment, anger builds up in Gangi's mind against the unjust custom:
Everybody in the village drank the water from this well. It was closed to nobody, only those unlucky ones like herself could not fill their buckets here.
Gangi's resentful heart cried out against the restraints and bars of the custom. Why was she so low and those others so high? Because they wore a thread around their necks? There wasn't one of them in the village who wasn't rotten. They stole, they cheated, they lied in court. That very day the Thakur had stolen a sheep from the poor shepherd, then killed and eaten it. They gambled in the priest's house all twelve months of the year. The shopkeeper mixed oil with the ghee before he sold it. They'd get you to do their work but they wouldn't pay wages for it to save their lives. Just how were they so high and mighty? It was only a matter of words. No, Gangi thought, we don't go around shouting that we're better. Whenever she came into the village they looked at her with eyes full ofzlust, they were better than people like her [Rubin 1988: 84].
Evaluating this famous short story very highly, Sakata concluded: This short story, consisting of only about 120 lines, is denouncing how the ruling classes exploit the lower classes with injustice and violence. It makes the heroine raise a question on the very funda-mentals of Indian society, " How are they so high and we are so low? " Thus it has succeeded in making the reader sympathize with her predicament [Sakata 1977: 132]. (The translation into English is by the present writer.)
Although her resentment is justifiable enough, as pointed out by Sakata, to get the reader's sympathies, one simple question arises here whether it is possible or not for a poor woman of no education like her to have such a clear image of the world consisting of the exploited and the exploiting. It may be that she is a devotee of some Sant, a saint, and is familiar with a dogma attacking the caste-system; otherwise how could she afford such a clear-cut understanding of her own world? We may safely say that it is impossible for ordinary people to know exactly how they are being treated unfairly as a class, if they are not taught the truth by someone who can tell the fair from the unfair. When men of high castes do not regard
Premchand : As A Moralist Embodying An Indian Literary Tradition 137 their own behavior as discriminatory, then how can men of low standing realize that it is discrimination against themselves.
In other words, in order to know wickedness of some evil-deed, we have to be told by someone of better understanding that it is none other than an evil-deed. If Gangi had been a real untouchable woman in 1930s, she would have gone to the Thakur's well, in all probability, feeling not re-sentment against high caste men but guilty about her own deed which was a clear violation of the caste-rule. This is the true tragedy of every kind of discrimination. In fact, her anger was the author's anger. Premchand, as an intellectual, knew, to a certain degree at least, how far the caste-system could be brutal and inhuman. To let the other Indian intellec-tuals know this truth, he created Gangi and imposed his view on her. She is nothing but the author's puppet. Despite the author's good-will, we have to say that this short story has a fatal defect as a piece of creative writing.
Next, let's examine how the Thakur and the priest are criticized by the author. They are blameworthy for being liars, gamblers and misers viz, they are all degenerate and men of loose morals. The Thakur and his company are all the more hateful and degenerate because they look at a woman " with eyes full of lust ". On the other hand, Gangi's attempted theft is deserving of no criticism because she is chaste enough not to look back at them with the same lust. Gangi is a chaste woman and chasty is the most highly esteemed Dharma for married women in India. Premchand says that she has a right to steal water from a well belonging to others because she is chaste and not so degenerate as they. But if she had not been such a chaste woman, couldn't she have tried to get water for her sick husband? If the Thakur and the priest had not been men of such ill deeds, would they have let her use their well? For us Japanese readers whether she is chaste or not has nothing to do with her right to get water from where she wants. Here, too, the problem of social injustice has been confused with that of individual moral character. This peculiar confusion cannot be explained only from the author's " confidence in human nature ". Something different seems to have prevented him from seeing the world as it is.
Our experience tells us that the real world does not always go in ac-cordance with certain moral values. It seems, however, impossible for Premchand and some other Indian writers to imagine the world which is
138 Journal of the Japanese Association for South Asian Studies, No. 2
completely free from any sense of moral values and is in total disorder and confusion. He cannot help justifying a woman's theft, for example, by showing that she is chaste. This sense of order, in other words the fear for the world without any order, is another evidence of his being a moralist. As a moralist he doesn't want to depict those elements of the real life of India which may exert an undesirable influence on the public. He doesn't present the reality to the common readers in his writing for fear that it should damage their belief in the world order. The figure of a woman who is violating a caste-rule only to fulfill her selfishness, is neither ac-ceptable to the writer nor to the Indian readers. Thus, the hidden but im-portant point of this story is that she goes to the Thakur's well, at the risk of her life, to fetch water not for herself but for her sick husband, to whom she is expected to devote herself absolutely as an obedient Hindu wife.
4
With regard to his "confidence in human nature ", it also depends on his ignorance or neglect of the dark side of human nature, which can be said to be a common feature of almost all Indian writers irrespective of their time and languages. It is in this respect, too, that I would like to consider him as embodying an Indian literary tradition. Indian writers have never fixed their sights on this abyss of human nature. It is a well-known fact that there is no tradition of tragedy in the true sense of the word in the Sanskrit drama. Apart from the reasons given by scholars as to this absence of a tragedy, we cannot deny that this peculiar phenomenon has something to do with Indian writers' general unawareness of the above-mentioned dark side of human nature. Premchand maintained this tradi-tion, too. He had an immovable confidence in human nature and after all failed to recognize its abysses. Thus, he was able to believe optimisti-cally that with the improvement of socio-economic conditions, the time would come when people could enjoy a paradise living on the earth. As we have already said, for him literature was a powerful means to attain this object. But while attacking many social evils and abuses, he missed the true reason of all those human miseries, that is the human existence itself. He had failed to understand the relation between social injustice and human tragedy and had tried to solve social problems without paying a due attention to human nature itself.
Premchand: As A Moralist Embodying An Indian Literary Tradition 139 necessary to search their own souls about the wickedness which they hap-pen to find in others. Gangi, as we have seen, criticizes men of
high-castes for looking at her with lust, but is she certain of her own spotlessness with regard to this matter? Premchand has attacked every kind of social evil and human wickedness around him, but it seems to have never
oc-curred to him that as a human being he himself might have committed the same errors or crimes if placed in the same environment. It is true that the literature's mission in society is to criticize something deserving of criticism. Certainly Premchand has done this duty of his
, but he has never criticized himself to the same extent that he has criticized others and social abuses. While presenting the figures of ideal men and women in his writing, he has taken little heed of himself who cannot be such an ideal human being either.
In other words his so-called confidence in human nature led inevitably to a confidence in himself and in his infallibility. We can find a kind of perverted mind here that the more harshly one criticizes others the more elevated he would be. In this connection we may add that no other literature in the world seems to be as utterly ridiculous as modern Hindi satire. Some representative satirical writers in Hindi once declared that the aim of satire was to bring about socio-cultural reforms [Y. Suzuki 1984: 109]. Yet their satire has never been directed at themselves who seem to think arrogantly the privilege of criticism should be reserved only for themselves. Satire depending on self-righteousness is sheer nonsense. All these things suggest that some of the Indian writers are not accustomed to looking at themselves as common human beings who are not free from
common weaknesses. As serious writers, they seem to have constructed one of the most cultured, if not the richest, classes in Indian society . In other words, they all belong to a new noble caste of lekhak, writers , and they think it their supreme duty to provide a proper popular guidance . It goes without saying that this sense of duty, which is itself an admirable one to a certain extent, is apt to degenerate into elitism . Some critics may quote the following statement from his famous essay titled " Sahitya Ka
Uddesya" (The Aim of Literature) to point out that he has not cherished in his mind such a simplistic image of a human being:
In order to make a character appear exemplary and ideal it need not be flawless•\even the greatest of great men have some weakness
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or other. In order to put life into a character it will do no harm to point out its weakness. On the contrary, these weaknesses turn that character into a human being. A flawless character will become a god and we shall not even be able to comprehend it. Such a character cannot make any impression on us [Lutze 1981: 147].
This passage, however, reveals simply his shallow understanding of hu-man beings. It is quite clear that he regards someone's weakness or flaw only as his superficial quality, whereas the fact is that the greatness of a person sometimes lies in his great weakness. The exact meaning this passage conveys to us is that everyone has his own little weaknesses, and nothing more than that. Looking at this shallow understanding of human nature, we hesitate to call him a writer after all.
Throughout his life, Premchand has tried to embody in his works the moral values which are, in his opinion, essential to the realization of an ideal world. Even those critics who have pointed out numerous weak-nesses in his writing are seen to admire his good will in this respect. Al-though it would be difficult to overestimate his sincere efforts, we cannot deny the fact that some myths have crystallized around him, one of which is that he was an ideal man even in his real life. Madan writes:
Premchand is great as a writer, but he was greater as a man .. . He was by no means impressive in his appearance. His pale and sunken cheeks were lined with wrinkles, a mark of suffering and toil. Fortune seldom smiled on him. He always displayed the simplicity and innocence of a child . . . [Madan 1946: 19].
And furthermore, this myth has been fortified by some " legends ". According to the same critic, for example:
His father was an ill-paid clerk who rose to the position of a petty master of a petty post office, getting forty rupees a month. Mrs. Premchand has recorded a number of incidents which reveal the ex-treme poverty of his family [Madan 1946: 21].
Considering relatively low prices of those days and the existense of the populace living at the verge of starvation around him, we cannot say that forty rupees a month was a small sum of money and we cannot help feeling surprise at the expression, " the extreme poverty of his family ". His
Premchand: As A Moralist Embodying An Indian Literary Tradition 141 poverty seems to have been always exaggerated both by himself and his sympathizers. For example, it may be that his father used to get an extra income by writing letters for illiterate villagers as many village postmasters do today. However poor he may have been, we should not forget that he could afford both the time and money at least for reading and writing throughout his life. The story of hardships he had to go through is, it seems to me, a kind of retrospection of a successful person who likes to exaggerate them in order to stress the importance of his achievements. His admirers are happy to accelerate this idolization and some Hindi stu-dents in our country are seen to obey this tendency without question.
Madan Gopal has referred to Premchand's " love affair " in Munshi Premchand which is by far the fullest biography in existence.
During this time [while he was leading a single life after the sepa-ration from his first wife—annotated by the present writer] he seemed to have found refuge in the arms of a woman whom he kept and about whom nothing was known except from his own confession from the sick bed shortly before his death. But, " I have had no love affairs. Life was so engrossing and bread-winning was such a tough job that it left no scope for romances. There were some petty affairs of a very universal type, and I cannot call them love affairs " [Gopal
1964: 58].
Premchand had never written, as Gopal pointed out, anything about his own " some petty affairs of a very universal type " in his works. Did he believe that there could be something else between a man and a woman except " petty affairs of a very universal type "? What a noble image of " love affairs " was in his mind
, I wonder? But this is not an isolated exception. Even after him we have few Hindi writers who have referred to their own " petty affairs " in their works with pride, as if they were afraid of lowering themselves by taking up those affairs for the theme. Be that as it may, however great and sincere Premchand was as a man, we have to admit much to our regret that his literature has little to move us. From a pure literary point of view he was a minor writer who couldn't reach the standard of world literature of the 20th century.
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unless some problems confronting it can be solved by combined efforts of both writers and critics. First, traditional " utilitarianism " of litera-ture, according to which the sole aim of creative writing is to bring about changes or reforms in socio-cultural life, should be criticized thoroughly. Second, there is no point in making a distinction between " revolutionary " and " counterrevolutionary " or " progressive " and " conservative " in literature. Indian writers should understand this simple fact that human beings cannot be classified into such rough categories, so is the case with literature.
They all seem to overestimate what literature can do for us and society. If it could afford excellent entertainment for a few idle hours, what more would we care for? Not only Indian critics but also Japanese students in Hindi literature tend to despise such literature as aiming merely for a wholesome entertainment. This is one of those evil effects coming from the fact that it has been a monopoly of a small group of scholars and has hardly been exposed to a wider and fairer judgement of the public. It has been only " studied " so far and never enjoyed. But whether it is worthy of entertainment or not will be made clear soon.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Professor Katsuro Koga of the Hindi Department of Osaka University of Foreign Studies, who gave me a lot of valuable sug-gestions regarding modern Hindi literature including Premchand. While bringing my attention to the fact that men and women of the same caste usually live in the same area making their own exclusive settlement in Indian villages, he pointed out some artificialities seen in Kafan.So the remarks made in the present paper on this matter are not original with me.
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144 Journal of the Japanese Association for South Asian Studies, No. 2 論文要 旨 プ レ ー ム チ ャ ン ド:イ ン ドの 文 学 伝 統 を 体 現 す る モ ラ リス ト と し て 高 橋 明 近 年,翻 訳 に よ る現 代 イ ン ド文 学 の紹 介 が盛 ん で あ る こ とは喜 ば しい こ と と言 わ ね ば な らな い 。 一握 りの研 究 者 だ け で は な く,一 般 の文 学 愛 好 家 に広 く読 まれ る こ とに よ って,イ ン ド文 学 に対 して片 寄 り,偏 見 の よ り少 な い判 断 が下 され る よ うに な るで あ ろ う二 翻 訳 を通 じて多 くの読 者 の審 美 眼 に さ ら され るか ら に は,研 究 者 に よ るあ ま りに独 り善 が りの持 ち上 げ方 は却 って イ ン ド文 学 全 体 に対 す る信頼 を失 わ せ る こ と に も な る で あ ろ う.語 学 者,研 究 者 必 ず し も文 学 の優 れ た 読者 な らず,と い う単純 な事 実 をわ れ わ れ は常 に肝 に銘 じて お くべ きで あ る. 本 稿 で は イ ン ドに お い て 今 な お 高 く評 価 され てい る 作 家 プ レー ム チ ャ ン ド(1880-1936)を 取 り上 げ,そ の批 判 を試 み た.後 世 の作 家,批 評 家 に与 え た影 響 の大 き さ を考 え る と,ま ず彼 の文 学 へ の正 当 な批 判 な く して,現 代 ヒ ンデ ィ ー文 学 に対 す る公 平 な 評 価 も将 来 へ の展 望 もで き ない と考 え る た め で あ る.結 論 か ら言 え ば,以 下 の2点 か ら,筆 者 は彼 の作 品 が文 学 と して一 定 の 水 準 に達 して い る もの とは 考 え な い.(1)彼 の文 学 は リア リズ ム を標 榜 しな が ら 細 部 にお い て極 めて恣 意 的 な 描 写 に終 始 して お り イ ン ドの現 実 を伝 え る も の とは 言 い難 い.(2)さ ら に 社 会 制 度 と個 人 の モ ラ ル の問 題 につ い て 区 別 して 見 る こ とが で きな か った。 こ う した批 判 は これ ま で もな され な か っ た わ け で は な い が,小 論 で は彼 個 人 の問 題 で は な く,そ もそ も独 特 な世 界 観 ・人 間 観 を持 つ イ ン ドの文 学 伝 統 の一 面 が表 れ た も の と して,す な わ ち伝 統 的 な規 範 意 識 に と らわれ た 一 人 の モ ラ リス トと して 考 え よ う と した. そ の た め に一 般 に世 評 も高 く,彼 の代 表 的 な 短 編 小 説 と して しば しば 名 前 を挙 げ ら れ な が ら,上 に述 べ た二 つ の欠 点 を免 れ る こ との で き な か った作 品 を2編 取 り上 げ て 分 析 した. 彼 の 文 学 に見 られ るモ ラル の 偏 重 は,作 家 自身 を実 生 活 にお い て もモ ラル を体 現 し た 理 想 的 人 物 と見 な す一 般 的 な傾 向 と も無 縁 で は な い.人 間 性 の本 質 に つ い て の 深 い 省 察 に 基 づ か な い文 学 は,人 間 と社 会 に対 す る真 の批 判 力 を欠 き,さ らに一 種 の エ リ ー ト主 義 に堕 す る恐 れ の あ る こ と も論 じた.
