Premchand Sevasadan

Sevasadan (The House of Service), originally written in Urdu under the title Bazaar-e-Husn (Market of Beauty), is one of the most iconic novels by ‘Upanyas Samrat’ Munshi Premchand, first published in Hindi in 1919. A Brahmin woman is beguiled into a loveless marriage owing to her family’s poverty. Suman’s journey from her maternal home to an orphanage, sheltering daughters of courtesans, is a life-changing one. Premchand offers an incisive and yet a sensitive representation of a ‘fallen’ woman in a hypocritical patriarchal society at the turn of the 20th century. Suman’s reformation is a powerful narrative revolving around themes of sexuality, matrimony and prostitution. Set in Varanasi, Sevasadan foregrounds the socio-cultural history of India through a woman’s gaze.