Premchand’s Short Story Reader

This publication is a critical edition of 22 short stories by the founder of modern Hindu fiction – Dhanpat Rai, known in the literary world as Premchand (1889–1936). They have been selected from a large corpus of over 300 short stories. The presented text is a result of comparison of different Indian editions, removing printing errors and unifying the punctuation and spelling in general. Punctuation and spelling varies considerably amongst Indian publishers. Contemporary Hindi uses European punctuation, however it is not systematically observed in most editions. Considering the fact that the author uses numerous loan words from Persian and Arabic, also the transliterations of loan words in the Hindi Devanagari Script had to be systematically and carefully corrected using diacritics.
In his selection, Kostić used a linguistic and stylistic approach. The selected stories are considered the best of all author's stories (the book's subtitle is Premchand's Best Short Stories). Many of them appear in other selections published in India. This selection is representative also in terms of the themes depicted: life in a family, the status of an Indian woman in the family and society as well as the life of villagers and the lowest social castes. It also contains historic, patriotic, children's, psychological and other themes. An adept at human psyche, Premchand is considered the founder of psychological fiction in Hindi.
This selection's lexical and phraseological compilation of texts is also a positive contribution. Vocabulary is listed according the Hindi alphabetical order and in addition to English equivalents it also includes etymological and grammatical explanatory notes on lexemes. To facilitate understanding of texts, the glossary also contains all explanatory notes and notes concerning historic and cultural facts and events. The book is intended for non-Indian readers and can be used as a textbook for students of Indian studies and others interested in Hindu literature.