Nirmala
by Munshi Premchand
1925 · Hindi
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About Nirmala
Nirmala is one of Munshi Premchand's most powerful and heartbreaking novels — a devastating portrait of a young woman destroyed by the institution of dowry and an unjust marriage. Nirmala, beautiful and innocent, is married against her will to an elderly widower with grown sons. Her life in the new household is a quiet, relentless tragedy of suspicion, loneliness and thwarted hope.
Premchand wrote Nirmala in 1925 as a direct critique of the dowry system and child marriage, both of which were — and in many places remain — serious social problems in India. His great gift was to make the social political: Nirmala is not a statistic or a symbol but a fully realised human being whose suffering makes the reader rage at the injustice that destroys her.
Listen free to Nirmala by Munshi Premchand — the Hindi masterpiece about injustice, read in the original Hindi language.