He may be limp from living, but the lust for life remains. At 100, the world is a receding blur, but his vision of a new social order remains intact. The body has withered under the glare of time, yet the ideology has evolved: the Gandhian who turned leftist voted for the Bahujan Samaj Party in the recently concluded Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections. Maiku Prajapati could be a character straight out of a novel. Actually, he is.

The potter served as muse for Munshi Premchand, the indisputable master of Hindi and Urdu literature and the font of modern Hindi fiction. His short story, Maiku, is based on a true incident from Prajapati’s life.

When the freedom struggle intensified and Mahatma Gandhi called for an anti-liquor campaign, Prajapati thrashed a drunkard. He was instantly remorseful and recited the incident to Premchand. The narrative soon found its way in the story, Maiku, where the protagonist beats up a person trying to stop him from entering a liquor shop, but ends up attacking the shopkeeper and destroying the shop.

“Munshiji used to say that literature was the torch-bearer for politics. I have read all his works and felt that he was asking me to support the BSP,” says Prajapati, who first met Premchand at Lamhi (the litterateur’s village) in 1934, two years before his death on October 8, 1936.

On the villagers’ request Premchand invited him to work in his printing press at Ramkatora in Varanasi. Soon, he was witness to the creation of some of Premchand’s greatest works, Godan and Kafan. “I also helped him bring out Hans, a representative literary magazine of the time. A companion of Munshiji during his worse but creatively active days, I learnt everything from him,” says Prajapati.

... contd.