Summary
As Ghisu and Madhav eat potatoes, Ghisu recalls a feast he attended twenty years ago. The occasion was the wedding procession of a landowner. Ghisu said that he has never eaten that kind of food or had such a full stomach since. He praises the generosity of the landowner, who kept serving his guests as much food as they wanted without limit.
Madhav expresses the wish that someone would offer them such a feast now. But Ghisu says that such a feast would never happen nowadays, since everyone is worried about “economy.” They would prefer to save money rather than spend it on weddings and religious ceremonies.
When they finish eating, Ghisu and Madhav cover themselves and curl up to sleep by the fire. Budhiya continues to moan. In the morning Madhav enters the hut and finds Budhiya dead. Her baby has died in her stomach.
Madhav and Ghisu begin to weep loudly and to beat their chests. Following the ancient custom, their neighbors arrive to console them. Both father and son go to the village landlord, Sahib. Ghisu weeps, tells him what has happened, and begs him for money so that they can give Budhiya a proper funeral. The landlord hates them and wishes to send them away. But he puts his anger aside and gives them two rupees, though he does so without even speaking to them.
Madhav and Ghisu continue begging throughout the village, and within an hour they manage to collect five rupees, along with wood and grain. Women from the village come to look at Budhiya’s body, while other villagers prepare the bamboo poles used to carry the dead body. Meanwhile, Madhav and Ghisu go to the market to buy a shroud to cover Budhiya’s body.
At the market, father and son remark that no one will really see the shroud, since it will be nighttime. On top of this, they feel the shroud will go to waste since it will burn along with the body anyway. They spend the day looking in at various cloth-sellers' shops but do not buy anything.
Analysis
Premchand draws a stark contrast between Ghisu and Madhav’s current meal of stolen, painfully hot potatoes and the luxurious wedding feast that Ghisu attended twenty years ago. The author emphasizes this contrast through the use of detailed, vivid imagery. Ghisu excitedly describes the many traditional Indian foods that the wedding guests ate in unlimited quantities: puris, chutney, raita, stew, vegetables, and sweets. Though the event took place decades ago, for Ghisu “its memory was fresh.” This is because it was the only time in his life he enjoyed such fine food and felt truly full and satisfied. In a life characterized by scarcity, Ghisu hangs on to this moment of limitless abundance.
Ghisu’s description of the feast also serves to deepen Premchand’s exploration of socioeconomic class in “The Shroud.” Ghisu laments that in current times such a feast would never happen. This is because “[n]ow everybody thinks about economy.” They are frugal and prefer not to spend money on parties or festivals.
Yet Ghisu feels this attitude is hypocritical. When it comes to spending, those with money adopt a mentality of scarcity. They act as if there is a lack of resources. Yet when it comes to saving “the poor people’s wealth,” those who have money act as if there is no lack of resources. On the contrary, they hoard the wealth of the poor excessively.
Ghisu’s commentary is playful and even ironic, since very little spending is not the same thing as a lot of saving. Yet couched in Ghisu’s commentary is a critique of the wealthy class’s exploitation of the poor. Ghisu implies that the money the wealthy earn and save is not really their own but rather belongs to poor people. This is because they are only able to earn so much money by exploiting poor people’s labor and severely underpaying them for their work.
Commentary on class in “The Shroud” occurs against the backdrop of the caste system, which predominated in India at the time Premchand wrote the short story. The caste system refers to a system of social and religious hierarchy. Under this system, a person is born into the caste associated with their family and stays within that caste until his or her death. Castes are also associated with occupations. In “The Shroud,” Madhav and Ghisu come from a family of chamars, an ethnic group that is part of the caste considered “untouchable.”
Dr. Frances W. Pritchett, Professor Emerita of Modern Indic Languages at Columbia University, notes that some have attacked the story for discriminating against the “untouchable” caste. However, Pritchett thinks this is unlikely, since Premchand highlights that Ghisu and Madhav are unique and isolated in their village and they are hated by villagers of all castes and social levels.
Premchand uses similes and imagery to compare Ghisu and Madhav to serpents. As the father and son fall asleep by the fire, inattentive to Budhiya’s dying screams, the author writes that they “curled up…as if two gigantic serpents lay coiled there.” Since ancient times, in many cultures snakes have been a symbol of evil, trickery, and temptation. The author thus uses imagery of serpents to highlight Ghisu and Madhav's cruelty toward Budhiya, as well as the temptation of the feast which seems to be their primary motivation. Yet at the same time, the snake has in many cultures—including Hindu culture in India—been a dual symbol, representing not only evil and destruction but also divinity, fertility, and creation. This dual symbol highlights the narrator's complex, critical-yet-sympathetic treatment of the story's anti-heroes.
When Madhav goes into the hut, the narrator uses cold, factual language to describe Budhiya’s dead body, saying that Madhav’s wife “had grown cold.” This understatement highlights how little Madhav seems to care about his wife’s death. Premchand contrasts this apparently careless attitude with the loud show of mourning that Ghisu and Madhav make. The implication is that Ghisu and Madhav are not mourning out of true feeling, but rather because they hope their show of mourning will lead their neighbors to bring them donations.
