This article examines the nuanced and open-ended representations of women in the fictional works of Premchand, one of the most versatile and popular Urdu-Hindi writers of the 1920s and 1930s. By looking into a wide range of his writings, it argues that Premchand’s literary engagement with the women’s question cannot be summarily understood through such binaries as ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal/radical’. While the virtuous and compliant woman is valorised as an ideal within the domestic sphere in certain stories, Premchand’s narratives in the nationalist mode foreground an alternative set of ideals for the urban, educated and middle-class Hindu woman. Far from being formulaic, Premchand’s portrayals of womanhood seem to be shifting, tentative and thematically contingent.

中文翻译：

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Premchand 对北印度殖民时期女性形象的转变：在顺从与反抗之间

本文探讨了 Premchand 虚构作品中女性的细致入微和开放式表现，她是 1920 年代和 1930 年代最多才多艺、最受欢迎的乌尔都语-印地语作家之一。通过研究他广泛的著作，它认为不能通过诸如“保守派”或“自由派/激进派”之类的二元论来概括地理解普雷姆昌德对妇女问题的文学参与。虽然在某些故事中，贤淑顺从的女性被视为家庭领域的理想，但普雷姆昌德在民族主义模式下的叙述则为城市、受过教育和中产阶级的印度教女性提供了另一种理想。Premchand 对女性的描绘远非公式化，似乎在不断变化、试探性和主题上的偶然性。