"Poos Ki Raat" is written by which famous author?
2013
"Poos Ki Raat" is written by which famous author?
- A.
Munshi Premchand
- B.
Sarojini Naidu
- C.
Jai Shankar Prasad
- D.
R.K. Laxman
Show answer & explanation
Correct answer: A
Concept: Munshi Premchand (1880-1936) pioneered social-realist Hindi-Urdu short fiction (kahani), portraying the everyday struggles of India's rural and lower-middle-class life with unflinching realism -- a register quite distinct from the romantic/spiritual poetry of the Chhayavad movement or the purely visual medium of cartooning.
Application: "Poos Ki Raat" (written in 1930; later collected in the anthology Maansarovar) is one of Premchand's most celebrated short stories. On a bitterly cold night, the poor farmer Halku lights a bonfire in a mango grove to warm himself while his dog Jabra keeps watch over the field; when wild nilgai enter, Jabra barks in alarm but cannot drive them off alone, and Halku -- unwilling to brave the biting cold -- stays by the dying embers until he falls asleep. By morning the nilgai have ravaged his standing crop, yet Halku feels relief rather than despair at being freed from the punishing nightly vigil. This portrait of a peasant choosing survival over duty is the hallmark of Premchand's realist prose, and every standard reference on Hindi literature attributes the story to him.
Cross-check: The other names do not fit this genre: Sarojini Naidu was a poet and freedom fighter (The Golden Threshold), not a writer of rural social-realist fiction; Jai Shankar Prasad was a leading Chhayavad-era poet-dramatist (Kamayani, Skandagupta) working in a lyrical/romantic register; and R.K. Laxman was a celebrated cartoonist (creator of the Common Man), not a Hindi prose author at all -- ruling out each distractor independently confirms the authorship.