Reading surfaces deeply: affect(ion) in Premchand’s ‘The Holy Panchayat’

The essay argues that Munshi Premchand’s hugely popular short story, ‘The Holy Panchayat’ (1916), casts light on the contemporary debate around surface reading, postcritique, and symptomatic reading. Anticipating some of the issues raised, the theory of reading I identify in Premchand’s much earlier story problematises drawing rigid distinctions between methodological protocols that emphasise a literary work’s affective structure against critical prerogatives that are invested in examining a work’s ideological ramifications. Specifically, by reading the meaning of the story’s prevailing reading – which I suggest has been singularly attentive to the affect evinced by the text – the essay underlines the problems of separating reading practices that focalise ethics and affect, to the exclusion of ideology. The essay thus recovers a latent strain of symptomatic reading or ideology-critique: one that neither reduces its purchase to investigating a work’s conditions of possibility nor limits itself to attending to a work’s historical context, but rather affirms its impetus to reflect on the affect-laden act of reading itself.