ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the versions of Premchand's texts are layered by various political considerations surrounding language, cultural representation and historicity. It begins by contextualising Premchand against a tradition of translational endeavours and linguistic politicisation, both of which compelled him to self-translate. Premchand published his Hindi short story The Chess Players in Madhuri, in 1924. Sometime before 1928, he brought out an Urdu version of the same story with a slightly different title, A Game of Chess, which was published in Stories of Dreams and Visions, published by Lajpatrai and Sons. The chapter discuses Satyajit Ray's cinematic historicisation of Premchand's text, as a mimetic, creative exercise by depicting the cultural zenith and nadir of erstwhile Awadh. In 1977, Ray adapted Premchand's story into his first big-budget Urdu-English film, Shatranj ke Khiladi. Premchand had inherited about century-old translational traditions and witnessed at first-hand the cultural chauvinism which led up to the division of the related linguistic traditions of Urdu and Hindi.
