"The Shroud" and Other Short Stories Literary Elements

Short story

India in the 20th Century

Third-person omniscient narrator

The tone of the story is cold and cynical; the mood is sad.

Ghisu and Madhav are the protagonists. In a way, they are also the antagonists, since they themselves provide their own source of conflict in the story.

The major conflict in the short story is the need for Ghisu and Madhav to obtain a shroud to cover Budhiya's body after she dies.

The climax of the story is when Ghisu and Madhav decide to spend the donated money on food and alcohol, instead of buying the shroud.

The author foreshadows that Ghisu and Madhav will not use the money the villagers donated to buy Budhiya’s shroud through the men's commentaries about the uselessness of burial shrouds.

The narrator understates Budhiya’s death by factually stating that Madhav’s “wife had grown cold.” The effect of this understatement is to reflect how little Madhav seems to care about his wife’s death.

The story alludes to the Indian caste system by describing Ghisu and Madhav as belonging to a family of Chamars, a group within the Dalit or "untouchable" caste.

The author uses rich, detailed imagery to describe the many delicacies and total abundance of the feast Ghisu attended twenty years ago.

Premchand draws a parallel between the wedding feast Ghisu attended long ago and the feast that Ghisu and Madhav enjoy at the wine-house. One way the author does so is through the repeated mention of puris, an Indian deep-fried bread. In describing the wedding Ghisu mentions the puris, made with real ghi and served in abundance, several times, stating that he must have eaten fifty of them. At the wine-house Ghisu orders a huge amount of puris—so many that the men eventually gift their leftovers to a beggar.

Toward the end of the story, the narrator comments that "the disaster of life seized [Ghisu and Madhav] and dragged them" to the wine-house. This personification of the disaster of life emphasizes the idea that the men ended up at the wine house due to the unfair circumstances of the society they live in.