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Unit 9: The Shroud by Munshi Premchand

limited, but genuine sympathy we’re forced to feel for them, and even a sort of morbidly Notes
comic effect— how far beyond the achievements of Premchand’s previous stories! And
above all there’s the extraordinary final scene at the wine-house, in which the whole
human condition seems to be held up for reflection in the light of pie-in-the-sky longings,
bread-on-the-ground cynicism, touches of (sincere?) compassion, absurdity, and the
wild mood swings of intoxication. The scene becomes a stage for Ghisu and Madhav’s
last drunken dance, under a sky full of coldly brilliant stars, before an audience of
desperately poor peasants, as they sing about a murderous beauty and the glance of
her eye. Then, of course, they pass out, ending the story abruptly and depriving us of
any final authorial interpretation.
• Premchand is famous for his village-level “realism,” and indeed it’s there, but it has its
limits. He was notably casual about the exact wording and details of his stories, for
theoretical reasons discussed in “The Chess Players: From Premchand to Satyajit Ray”
(Journal of South Asian Literature 22,2, Summer-Fall 1986, pp. 65-78). His casualness
about detail is a primary reason for the textual discrepancies studied and reconciled in
this translation. (It’s not the only reason, alas, since even now all too few important
Urdu and Hindu stories have texts that have been reliably established and carefully
edited.)
• As a very small illustration of such casualness, in the present story the list of foods
enjoyed by Ghisu at the landowner’s long-ago wedding feast includes two separate
mentions of “chutney.” Larger awkwardnesses also exist: if Ghisu really had nine sons
(or anyway a number of them, if we assume that he exaggerates), why don’t we hear
anything at all about the others? And there are some truly serious implausibilities as
well. Why would any village family have given their daughter in marriage to the awful
Madhav? And if other villagers lived close enough to hear the funereal “weeping and
wailing” and come running, why did nobody hear Budhiya’s shrieks and cries during
her prolonged agony of labour and death? And above all, why did an admirable woman
like Budhiya have no support network among the other women of her neighbourhood?
Since she worked in the village grinding grain for other families, her pregnancy must
have been apparent. Her need of help in her terrible, isolated situation should surely
have evoked at least as much compassion and support from the women as her need of
funeral rites did from the men.
• These questions don’t occur at once, of course, and they don’t at all vitiate the story;
they’re beside the point. They just show that Premchand’s stories are often highly
stylized, and don’t depend on literal “realism” for their impact. While we’re on the
subject of the village women, a further question about their role also lingers in my
mind. At the end of section (2), is the description of the women’s brief visits to view
Budhiya’s corpse, and their shedding of a tear or two, meant sarcastically? I tend to
think so, but how can we be sure? We also, in that passage, can’t tell whether “the
sensitive-hearted women of the village” — gaa))o;N kii raqiiq ul-qalb ((aurate;N (U),
gaa;Nv kii narm-dil striyaa; N (D) — are a subset of the village women, or all of them.
And when we look even more closely, we notice that raqiiq ul-qalb is a more ambiguous
description than narm-dil (“tender-hearted”), since raqiiq means “thin, fine, delicate,
attenuated” (Platts, p.596). The adjective in the Urdu-script version thus looks more
likely to be meant ironically than the one in the Devanagari version; so we’re brought
back again to intriguing (or infuriating) textual questions. Which version did Premchand
himself compose; or which did he compose first; or which did he compose with more
attention and subtlety?

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