Eidgah & The Salt Inspector: Classic Indian Stories

Dhanpat Rai Srivastava (1880–1936), better known as Munshi Premchand or Premchand, was an Indian writer famous for his modern Hindi/Hindustani literature. Premchand was a pioneer of Hindi and Urdu social fiction. He was one of the first authors to write about caste hierarchies and the plight of women and labourers prevalent in the society. He is one of the most celebrated writers of the Indian subcontinent and is regarded as one of the foremost Hindi writers of the early twentieth century. He began writing under the pen name ‘Nawab Rai’, but subsequently switched to ‘Premchand’. He published his first collection of five short stories in 1907 in a book called Soz-e-Watan (Voice of the Nation). His body of work include more than a dozen novels, around 300 short stories, several essays and translations of a number of foreign literary works into Hindi.