Premchand: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn
1880 to 1936
Quick answer: Premchand craft file: how "Idgah", "Kafan" and "Shatranj ke Khiladi" are built, what the village stories teach about character, and where to start.
Quick facts
- Born: 1880, Lamhi, near Benares (Varanasi), as Dhanpat Rai Srivastava
- Died: 1936, Varanasi, aged 56
- Wrote in: Urdu, then Hindi
- Known for: "Idgah", "Kafan" (The Shroud), "Shatranj ke Khiladi" (The Chess Players)
- Signature move: The poor man's calculation shown from the inside, without a verdict
- Start with: "Idgah" (1933), then "Kafan" (1936)
Premchand wrote about three hundred stories and a dozen novels, first in Urdu and then in Hindi, and made the village of the United Provinces the centre of Indian fiction. His people are peasants, low-caste labourers, small-town clerks, children with three paise to spend, and he gave each of them a full interior life at a time when literature in both his languages was still mostly romance and reform.
What he actually does on the page
He shows a poor character's reasoning from inside and lets the reader do the moral arithmetic. In "Kafan" (1936) the labourers Ghisu and Madhav collect money from the village for the shroud of Madhav's wife, who has died in childbirth while they sat outside eating potatoes, and then spend it on liquor and puris. Premchand gives their justification in full (she never ate well alive, so why should she be dressed well dead) and adds nothing. The horror and the logic arrive together.
He builds a story on one purchase. "Idgah" (1933) follows four-year-old Hamid to the fair with three paise while other boys buy sweets and clay toys; he buys a pair of iron tongs for his grandmother, who burns her fingers making rotis. The argument he makes to the other boys for why tongs beat toys is comic; the grandmother's tears at the end are not. The whole story is the distance between those two moments.
He uses history as a backdrop and never as a lecture. In "Shatranj ke Khiladi" (1924) two Lucknow nobles play chess through the days in which the British take Awadh in 1856; the army marches past their game and they do not look up. They kill each other over a move. The fall of a kingdom is told through two men's refusal to notice it.
The signature move
"Idgah" is the clearest example of a Premchand ending: the object comes home. The tongs have been argued about, ridiculed, defended and finally admired by the other children as a kind of weapon and a kind of lion. Then Hamid hands them to Ameena and explains that she will not burn her fingers now. Premchand lets the grandmother, who has been counting paise all morning, understand what the child has done, and lets the reader watch her understand it. He gives her one gesture and no speech. Impact & Resonance is only 10 of Writory's 100 marks, but this is how a story earns all ten: by making the smallest object in it carry the whole household.
Stories to read first
Seven stories across twenty years, from the Urdu period to the last months.
What to steal for your own stories
Exercises drawn from the stories.
What not to copy
The early reformist stories can be tracts, with the moral delivered in the last paragraph, and Premchand himself moved away from them; "Kafan" is the proof that he had. Some stories carry the assumptions of their moment about women's duty and about caste as fate even while attacking both. Read the late work for method.
Life at a glance
- 1880: Born in the village of Lamhi outside Benares
- 1907: First collection, Soz-e-Watan, in Urdu; the British ban it in 1909 and he takes the name Premchand
- 1916: "Panch Parameshwar" (The Holy Panchayat)
- 1924: "Shatranj ke Khiladi"
- 1930: Founds the literary magazine Hans
- 1933: "Idgah"
- 1936: "Kafan", the novel Godaan, and the presidential address to the first Progressive Writers' Association meeting in Lucknow; dies in October
What writers can take from this
- Give your poorest character the most careful reasoning in the story.
- Let one purchase, one object or one task hold the plot.
- Put history in the background and keep the characters' eyes on their own game.
- Never end on a moral sentence; end on a gesture.
- Write the antagonist's caste or class as a habit of mind, not a label.
Try it yourself
A child is given a very small sum on a festival day and one hour at a market. Write the hour in under 900 words, mostly in the child's reasoning. The purchase must be for someone else, the other children must mock it, and the story must end on the recipient's single gesture, with no dialogue after it.
Questions
What is Premchand's best short story?
"Kafan" (1936) is the one critics most often call his finest, and "Idgah" (1933) is the most loved. "Shatranj ke Khiladi" (1924) is the most widely known outside Hindi and Urdu because of Satyajit Ray's 1977 film.
How did Premchand influence the short story?
He made realism the main road for Hindi and Urdu fiction and put peasants, labourers and low-caste characters at its centre as full people. Almost every later writer in both languages, from Manto to Renu, begins from him.
Is Premchand hard to read?
No. His Hindi and Urdu are plain and conversational, and the stories are short. Translations vary in quality, so read two if the first one feels stiff.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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