India, Feb. 8 -- As legatees of an ancient civilisation, Indians like to believe that they have an uninterrupted cultural memory. We invoke our past easily, and often with pride. Yet when one looks for evidence of that pride in the way we preserve, project, and commemorate the lives of our great poets, writers, artists, and thinkers, the confidence falters. A civilisation that does not take care of the physical sites of its intellectual inheritance risks turning its reverence into rhetoric, and memory into amnesia.

Dhanpat Rai Shrivastava, known as Munshi Premchand (1880-1938), was one of the most important voices in modern Indian literature. He gave the Hindi-Urdu novel its conscience, and chronicled peasants, debt, caste cruelty, and t...