"Like timidity, bravery is also contagious"
About this Quote
Bravery, Premchand suggests, isn’t a private virtue so much as a social climate. The line’s sting comes from the comparison: we all accept that fear spreads fast, that one person’s hesitation can turn a room cautious, a neighborhood silent, a society compliant. By pairing bravery with timidity, he flips the usual moral framing. Courage isn’t just a heroic exception; it’s a rival pathogen, capable of moving through crowds with the same velocity as panic.
The subtext is political. Premchand wrote in colonial North India, where public life was shaped by surveillance, economic pressure, and the daily grind of inequality. In that environment, timidity is rational: it keeps you employed, safe, unharassed. Calling it “contagious” acknowledges how fear becomes self-reinforcing, passed along through family advice, community gossip, even respectable “prudence.” His counterclaim is a strategy: if fear is learned, courage can be learned too, and the mechanism is imitation. One act of refusal, one person speaking plainly, can recalibrate what others believe is possible without immediately paying the maximum price.
The line also avoids romanticizing bravery as an inborn trait. Contagion implies proximity, repetition, and networks. It’s a writer’s insight into mass behavior: movements don’t start when everyone becomes fearless; they start when a few visible bodies model the risk and survive it. Premchand isn’t selling hero worship. He’s pointing to the quiet, unsettling fact that our moral temperature is often borrowed from whoever goes first.
The subtext is political. Premchand wrote in colonial North India, where public life was shaped by surveillance, economic pressure, and the daily grind of inequality. In that environment, timidity is rational: it keeps you employed, safe, unharassed. Calling it “contagious” acknowledges how fear becomes self-reinforcing, passed along through family advice, community gossip, even respectable “prudence.” His counterclaim is a strategy: if fear is learned, courage can be learned too, and the mechanism is imitation. One act of refusal, one person speaking plainly, can recalibrate what others believe is possible without immediately paying the maximum price.
The line also avoids romanticizing bravery as an inborn trait. Contagion implies proximity, repetition, and networks. It’s a writer’s insight into mass behavior: movements don’t start when everyone becomes fearless; they start when a few visible bodies model the risk and survive it. Premchand isn’t selling hero worship. He’s pointing to the quiet, unsettling fact that our moral temperature is often borrowed from whoever goes first.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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