Human Dignity and Social Equality in the Fiction of Premchand and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay: A Comparative Socio-Literary Analytical Framework

Abstract

— Premchand (Dhanpat Rai Srivastava) and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay stand as the two foremost architects of social-realist prose fiction in early twentieth-century India, writing respectively in Hindi–Urdu and Bengali. Both novelists turned away from the ornamental romanticism that dominated preceding literary generations and instead placed the peasant, the untouchable, the widow, and the economically dispossessed woman at the centre of their narratives. This paper develops a structured comparative framework for examining how the two authors treat human dignity and social equality across four thematic axes: caste and untouchability, gender and domestic subjugation, economic exploitation under feudal and colonial conditions, and the moral agency of marginalized protagonists. The framework is applied to a purposively selected corpus of eight major works — four by each author — and the resulting qualitative comparison is presented through descriptive tables rather than fabricated quantitative metrics, in keeping with the interpretive nature of literary analysis. The study finds substantial convergence in the two writers' humanist critique of institutionalized inequality, alongside a marked divergence in narrative register: Premchand anchors dignity in economic self-sufficiency and the social recognition of labour, whereas Sarat Chandra anchors it in emotional autonomy and liberation from patriarchal domestic control. The paper argues that this replicable comparative method offers a useful model for cross-linguistic literary scholarship, subaltern studies, and the design of comparative Indian-literature curricula.