Champions of the Oppressed: Charles Dickens, Premchand and Lu Xun

On the dawn of twentieth century there emerged three great writers on earth, one from Britain, the other two from India and China. Though from different geographical regions, their soul purpose was to champion the weaker sections of the society and to mitigate all sorts of social, religious and political corruption from earth. Their hearts used to burn with the pain their poor countrymen were suffering with. They were very harsh on the social system that allows the powerful to trample down the commoners, the farmers and the labourers. Till the last of their breath, they championed the cause of the Oppressed and shook the governments to work in the favour of the common man, to save the humanity or to bring real freedom, real democracy. These writers were either writing about the repercussion of Industrialisation or sought the way out from various kinds of oppression through socialism, Marxism and communism. They were champions of the social, economic and national issues that were imparting pain to the entire humanity like blisters. Charles Dickens is not a contemporary of Premchand and Lu Xun; their cultural background is also very different. Even the social problems, their respective countries were facing, were, too, not similar, yet one thing that binds them is that they all were the leading novelists, championing the under privileged, weaker sections or Oppressed class of their society. No doubt, being the precursor of Premchand and a great Victorian novelist, Premchand would have been influenced by his art and thought just like Karl Marx, who was a great admirer of Dickens because he has brought out the pitiable conditions of the labourers, sensitivity of thieves and the inhumanity of the so called Aristocrats. Karl Marx was the pivotal force that changed the perception of world about human history as class struggle and labelled all religion as “opium of the world”, where the oppressed does not feel the oppression. Lu Xun has termed such concealed oppression as ‘cannibalism’ in his famous work, “ Diary of a Madman”. This article is a comparative study of the major contributions of these three writers in the history of not only literature but also social reformations.