Premchand

Born Dhanpat Rai in a village near Varanasi, Premchand lost his mother young, worked as a schoolteacher and minor education official under British rule, and wrote his early fiction in Urdu before switching to Hindi to reach a wider readership. Colonial authorities banned and burned his first story collection, Soz-e-Watan, for its nationalist sympathies in 1910, ending his position as a government inspector.

He edited literary journals, ran a small and financially ruinous printing press, and wrote hundreds of short stories and more than a dozen novels depicting peasants, moneylenders, and the machinery of rural debt with unusual tenderness for a genre then dominated by romance and fantasy. Godan (1936), his last completed novel, follows a peasant's lifelong wish to own a single cow, crushed by loans, custom, and caste obligation.

He died later that same year, having effectively founded socially conscious realism in Hindi-Urdu fiction.