The changing world - through the lens of a story

Munshi Premchand, was undoubtly one of the greatest writers of modern Hindi and Urdu literature. I recently read one of his stories in the July issue of 'Navneet' titled Rooh-e-Hayat". The story was orginially published in the year 1921. The plot of the story reveloves around an orphan girl, raised in a village, and how she deals with her life. What amazed me ( more than the literary genius of Munshi Premchand) was the social mileu the story presents. To think of an orphan girl child, born in a village where people care for , raise her, get her married - without coming to any harm, let alone surviving is an amazing revelation of the social environment and sensibilities that existed not such a long time ago, and the deterioration that our social sensibilities have suffered.