Lossing “Nawab Rai” and getting “Munshi Premchand”

Abstract

When Dhanpat Rai Shrivastava started writing the story while in the government service as the school inspector, at the time Dhanpat Rai used to write his works in Urdu under the name “Nawab Rai”. One day when British Government seized his first collection of short stories ‘Soje Watan’ which was published in the year 1908. “Soje Watan” means                    “Desh ka Matam” after that he had to drop the name of Nawab Rai. Later he started writing under the penname of “Munshi Premchand”.

Premchand's real name was Dhanpat Rai Srivastava.  He was a successful writer, patriotic citizen, skilled orator, responsible editor and sensitive writer.  In the first half of the twentieth century, when there were no technical facilities to work in Hindi, yet there was no one other than him who could do so much work.