Interrogating Humanism and Social Consciousness: Ethics, Morality, and Realism in the Select Novels of Munshi Premchand

Abstract

This article focuses on the dynamic engagement between humanism, ethics and ideology in the novels of Munshi Premchand as it merges with social interest rooted literary realism amidst colonial India. Instead, it contextualises that Premchand’s realism stems not from abstract idealism but from the moral weave of everyday life — where moral choices emerge through caste hierarchies, gender constraints and economic vulnerability. It examines the ways in which, through its analyses of Godaan (The Gift of a Cow), Nirmala, Sevasadan, Rangbhoomi, Gaban, and Karmabhumi, the study locates Premchand performance moral conflict and social reform within the crucible pressures wrought by colonial capitalism, national awakening, uneven modernisation in the Hindi heartland. Premchand’s humanism is not sentimental charity; it is an intense ethical reflection on how to sustain the value of humanity under less than-ideal conditions of agrarian indebtedness, patriarchal domesticity, bureaucratic bribery and colonial machinery of coersion. His ethical awareness has no time for ideological purity; instead it’s all about gradualism, life’s gray areas and the realism of compromise. Specifically, it discusses Premchand’s use of irony, polyphonic narrative and free indirect discourse to destabilize moral certainty and widen the scope of the ethical in Hindi fiction. In the end, Premchand’s realism is an ethics at work-a literary technique that turns “the social problem” into a space of contested authorship and moral inquiry. It still brims with resonance for its insistence that humane life be imagined not in the abstract against structural constraint but in painful negotiation with it.