Summary
A father and son, Ghisu and Madhav, sit around a burnt-out fire outside of a hut. It is late at night. Inside, the son Madhav’s wife, Budhiya, is in labor. She screams and suffers as she tries to give birth.
Ghisu says that it appears Budhiya is dying and encourages Madhav to go check on her. Madhav, however, does not see the point of checking on her. He hopes that if she’s going to die she’ll go ahead and die already, and he would rather not see her in pain. Ghisu tells his son that he’s being hard-hearted.
The narrator fills in the backstory of these characters, telling us that Ghisu and Madhav come from a family of chamars, an untouchable caste group in India. They are known throughout the village for being lazy slackers. There are many jobs in town but Ghisu and Madhav prefer to wander around doing nothing. No one hires them because they are bad workers. They wear rags and have hardly anything in their home. They live off of peas, potatoes, and other crops that they dig up from other people's fields.
Madhav and Budhiya have been married for a year. During this time, Budhiya has worked hard to feed Madhav and Ghisu, which has only made them "even more lazy."
The men continue to sit around the fire eating potatoes dug up from someone else’s field. Ghisu and Madhav are too impatient to wait until the potatoes cool off. So they eat them burning hot, bringing pain to their throats and tears to their eyes. Ghisu again tells Madhav to go check on Budhiya but Madhav again refuses. Madhav worries that if Budhiya gives birth they won’t have anything to feed the child. But Ghisu assures him that they will manage with whatever gifts the villagers bring them.
Analysis
“The Shroud” is a short story published by Dhanpat Rai Srivastava, known by the pen name Premchand, in North India in 1935. Premchand was one of the most famous modern writers in the Hindi-Urdu language.
The short story takes place in an unnamed village in India. From the beginning, the setting of "The Shroud" is bleak. Ghisu and Madhav are extremely poor. They have hardly anything in their home. All they have to eat are potatoes that they steal from someone else’s field.
Moreover, the narrator presents Ghisu and Madhav in a critical light. Both father and son are lazy. Even though there are jobs in the village, they refuse to work. For the past year, they have only eaten due to Budhiya’s hard work grinding grain. Yet, even as she is dying in childbirth, Ghisu and Madhav refuse to go check on her. In this way, the narrator presents them as cruel and heartless.
At the same time, the story’s comic, ironic tone is apparent from the outset. The narrator’s humor is dark. For example, when Ghisu tells his son to go check on Budhiya, Madhav replies that he is afraid to do so. But in reality, he is only afraid that his Ghisu will finish eating all the potatoes while he is gone.
The narrator of "The Shroud" has a third-person omniscient point of view. This means the narrator refers to the characters using third-person pronouns. The narrator also knows the characters’ thoughts and feelings and provides broader social commentary and context.
On the one hand, the narrator of "The Shroud" presents the protagonists in a harsh light. Yet on the other hand, the narrator sometimes treats Madhav and Ghisu with understanding and even a degree of appreciation. In many ways, this complex and contradictory portrayal has to do with the broader theme of social and economic class in the story.
The narrator remarks that Madhav and Ghisu’s careless, selfish, and cold mentality "was no cause for surprise" in “[a] society in which those who labored night and day were not in much better shape than these two; a society in which compared to the peasants, those who knew how to exploit the peasants' weaknesses were much better off.” In such a society, those at the bottom of the social hierarchy have few options. They are either peasants who do back-breaking labor, or they become “clever, scheming tricksters” who manage to improve their social positions by taking advantage of the peasants.
In a way, Ghisu is an “insightful” trickster. Yet he does not even follow the rules and customs of the tricksters in order to increase his power and social position. The narrator expresses a degree of respect for this rebellious posture, since Ghisu and Madhav have found an alternative way to live in a society that offers them few paths. They have no possessions but at least they are “free from the cares of the world.” They suffer abuses and blows "but not grief." In this way, Ghisu and Madhav are anti-heroes, protagonists who lack conventional heroic qualities and defy ethical codes.
