| Summary: | Rural India and Peasantry in Hindi Stories: Narratives after Premchand deals with the literary representation of peasant life in a vast expanse of land designated as the Hindi Heartland. Multiple regions in north and central India, that might be placed under this rubric, form a continuum of agrarian culture. Exploring non-canonical rural stories in Hindi, those that have not received the much-deserved attention, this study offers rich resources and possibilities for analysis of the diverse modes of expression of peasant culture - their anguish and hopes, desires, and dreams - in a major geo-cultural zone of India. More than thirty stories that are studied here, in ten chapters, inherit a strong tradition of peasant narratives after Munshi Premchand and engage in serious reflection on an intricate array of messy complications and contingencies the rural populace has experienced since the early decades of independent India through the period of liberalization till the recent decades. Undoubtedly, these stories bring to the fore the diverse subterranean issues as well as visible circumstances: the issues of caste, class, gender, intergenerationality, etc. and urge us to revisit the history and politics of famine and floods, rural education, and deforestation, deepening our interest in the topography of north and central Indian peasantry and the records of rural lives almost as reliable as a sociological survey. This book invites us to include the world of rural India and peasantry in our approaches to the studies of human sciences, thereby remapping their contours.
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