Folk Traditions and Rural Consciousness in the Literature of Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay and Munshi Premchand

Abstract

Rural India, with its customs, kinship networks, and agrarian rhythms, forms the imaginative ground of both Bengali and Hindi realist fiction in the early twentieth century. This paper offers a comparative examination of folk tradition and rural consciousness in the selected works of Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay and Munshi Premchand, arguing that although both writers ground their fiction in village life, they mobilise that setting differently. Chattopadhyay’s village, drawn from riverine Bengal, functions chiefly as a landscape of moral and emotional negotiation for individuals bound by kinship and custom, as seen in Palli Samaj and Srikanta. Premchand’s village, by contrast, is an economic organism in which folk custom, caste, and rural credit are themselves the mechanisms of the protagonist’s fate, as seen in Godaan and “Sadgati.” Drawing on close reading supported by verified secondary scholarship, the paper shows that this difference reflects each author’s distinct relationship to the rural world he depicts, and that reading the two together clarifies the range of ways early Indian realist fiction absorbed folk life into literary form.