The Shroud
A father, a son, the money meant for a shroud — Premchand's bleakest and most honest masterpiece.
★ An editorial appreciation. The original Hindi text ("Kafan") is on Wikisource. English translations include those by David Rubin and Francine Pritchett.
A father and son sit outside their hut warming themselves at a fire, roasting potatoes. Inside, the son's young wife is dying in childbirth. Neither goes to her. Not from cruelty — from something more unsettling: they are so accustomed to suffering that the calculation of caring has become too expensive.
By morning she is dead. Now they must buy a shroud. They beg coins through the village, collect enough. Then they spend it on liquor and roasted potato. They raise a glass to her memory. They are not sorry. They are not villains.
"Kafan" — "The Shroud" — was the last story Premchand completed before his death in 1936. He had spent thirty years writing Hindi-Urdu fiction with a reformist impulse: stories about peasants and low-caste communities that believed, at their core, in the possibility of dignity. "Kafan" abandons that belief entirely.
It argues something darker — that poverty, sustained across generations, can strip away not just comfort or security but the very instinct to grieve. When the story was published it shocked his admirers. He had always been their champion of the dispossessed. Now he had written a story where the dispossessed are not dignified — where they are not even, in the conventional sense, sympathetic.
The genius of "Kafan" is that it refuses the easy moral. Ghisu and Madhav are not bad men. They are men who have been starved so long that the difference between a funeral expense and drinking money has ceased to register as a distinction. This is perhaps the bravest thing a writer can do: abandon the argument that made him beloved in order to say something true.
The original Hindi is on Wikisource. Francine Pritchett's English translation, available through Columbia University's South Asian Studies resources, is considered closest in tone.