Premchand was born on July 31, 1880 in the village Lamhi near Varanasi to Munshi Ajaib Lal, a clerk in the post office, and his wife Anandi. His parents named him Dhanpat Rai ("master of wealth") while his uncle, Mahabir, a rich landowner, called him Nawab (Prince), the name Premchand first chose to write under. His early education was at a local madarsa under a maulvi, where he studied Urdu. Premchand's parents died young - his mother when he was seven and his father while he was sixteen or seventeen and still a student. Premchand was left responsible for his stepmother and step-siblings.
Premchand was married at fifteen to a girl from a neighboring village but the marriage was a failure and, when Premchand left the village in 1899, the girl returned to her village. Several years later, in 1909, he married to a child widow named Shivrani Devi. This step was considered to be revolutionary at that time and Premchand had to face a lot of opposition.
The schoolmaster
In 1899, Premchand left Lamahi to take up the position of a schoolmaster at a mission school in the town of Chunar at a salary of eighteen rupees a month, with which he had to support his wife, his stepmother, his half-brother, his stepmother's younger brother and himself. Times were hard for the young man and they became harder still when he was fired from the job for being 'too independent'. He returned to Lamahi and soon got a job as an assistant master at a government school in Banaras, only to be transferred two months later to Pratapgarh, Uttar Pradesh a district near Allahabad where he first started writing seriously. After two years at Pratapgarh, in 1902, he was sent to Allahabad to obtain training as a teacher where he impressed the principal enough to be offered a job as the headmaster of the Model School attached to the teacher's training college. In 1904, he passed the special vernacular examination in Hindi and Urdu and was transferred to Kanpur as the deputy sub-inspector of schools.
While at Allahabad, Premchand's first novel, Asrar e Ma'abid (The Secrets of the Sanctum Sanctorum) was serialized in the Urdu weekly Awaz-e-Khalq (first publication date 8 October 1903), but it was in Kanpur where his writing career really took off with his association with the Urdu magazine Zamana where he published a regular column, The March of Time, focusing on national and international affairs. In Kanpur, he became a part of the literary circle and gained a reputation as a journalist and writer with a social conscience. His second novel, also in Urdu, Kishna (1907) was written during this period (the text of this novel has not survived). He also published a collection of short stories in Urdu, Soz-e-vatan. In 1910, he was hauled up by the District Magistrate in Gorakhpur for his anthology of short stories Soz-e-Watan (Dirge of the Nation), which was labeled seditious. All the copies of Soz-e-Watan were confiscated and burnt.
In 1921, he responded Mahatma Gandhi's call and resigned from his government job. In the same year his son, Amrit Rai, was born; Rai also became a writer, and wrote a highly regarded biography of his father. Then Premchand worked as the proprietor of a printing press, editor of literary and political journals (Jagaran and Hans). Briefly, he also worked as the script writer for the Bombay film world. He didn't think much of the film world of his times and once remarked about the film Mazdoor (The Labourer), "The director is the all in all in cinema."
Premchand lived a life of financial struggle. Once he took a loan of two-and-a-half rupees to buy some clothes and had to struggle for three years to pay it back.
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