Nirmala (novel)

Nirmala (The Second Wife)

Nirmala novel cover
Author	Munshi Premchand
Original title	Nirmala
Translator	Alok Rai and David Rubin[1]
Cover artist	Orient Paperbacks (Alok Rai) Oxford India Paperbacks (David Rubin)
Language	Hindi
Genre	Fiction
Published	January 1927[1]
Publication place	India
ISBN	978-0-19-565826-2 (translated version by Oxford India)[2]
Original text	Nirmala at Hindi Wikisource

Nirmala^[a] is a Hindi novel written by Indian writer Munshi Premchand. The melodramatic novel is centered on Nirmala, a young girl who was forced to marry a widower of her father's age. The plot unfolds to reveal her husband's suspicion of a relationship between her and his eldest son, a suspicion that leads to the son's death.

A poignant novel first published between 1925 and 1926, Nirmala's reformist agenda is transparent in its theme which deals with the question of dowry, and consequently mismatched marriages and related issues. The story uses fiction to highlight an era of much needed social reform in 1920s Indian society. Nirmala was serialised in Chand, a women's magazine in which the novel's feminist character was represented. Nirmala is somewhat like Godaan (published in 1936) in that it deals with the exploitation of the village poor, and Nandita (2016) in similarities of being shackled by society's narrow expectations of how a woman should be. Nirmala was translated by multiple scholarly translators. It was first translated in 1988 as The Second Wife by David Rubin,^[3] and in 1999 as Nirmala by Alok Rai, Premchand's grandson.

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