Author | Munshi Premchand |
---|---|
Original title | Nirmala |
Translator | Alok Rai and David Rubin[1] |
Cover artist | Orient Paperbacks (Alok Rai) Oxford India Paperbacks (David Rubin) |
Language | Hindi |
Genre | Fiction |
Published | January 1927[1] |
Publication place | India |
ISBN | 978-0-19-565826-2 (translated version by Oxford India)[2] |
Original text | Nirmala at Hindi Wikisource |
Nirmala[a] is a Hindi novel written by Indian writer Munshi Premchand. The melodramatic novel is centered on Nirmala, a young girl who was forced to marry a widower of her father's age. The plot unfolds to reveal her husband's suspicion of a relationship between her and his eldest son, a suspicion that leads to the son's death.
A poignant novel first published between 1925 and 1926, Nirmala's reformist agenda is transparent in its theme which deals with the question of dowry, and consequently mismatched marriages and related issues. The story uses fiction to highlight an era of much needed social reform in 1920s Indian society. Nirmala was serialised in Chand, a women's magazine in which the novel's feminist character was represented. Nirmala is somewhat like Godaan (published in 1936) in that it deals with the exploitation of the village poor, and Nandita (2016) in similarities of being shackled by society's narrow expectations of how a woman should be. Nirmala was translated by multiple scholarly translators. It was first translated in 1988 as The Second Wife by David Rubin,[3] and in 1999 as Nirmala by Alok Rai, Premchand's grandson.
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