Dhanpat Rai Srivastava was born on 31 July 1880 in Lamhi, a village located near Banaras, and was named Dhanpat Rai (“master of wealth”). He was an Indian writer famous for his modern Hindustani literature.
He learned English at a missionary school and studied several works of fiction including George W. M. Reynolds’s eight-volume The Mysteries of the Court of London. He enrolled at the Queen’s College at Banaras as a day scholar.
He was one of the first authors to write about caste hierarchies and the plights of women and laborers prevalent in the society of the late 1880s. He is one of the most celebrated writers of the Indian subcontinent and is regarded as one of the foremost Hindi writers of the early twentieth century.
His works include more than a dozen novels, around 300 short stories, several essays, and translations of a number of foreign literary works into Hindi.
