write an essay on the critisms of social system and social custome in the story the shroud
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"The Shroud" ("Kafan") is generally thought to be the author's best, blackest, and most powerful short story. Set in an Indian village, the milieu of Premcand's best works, on a dark, chilly winter night, it is the story of a father, Ghisu, and his son, Madhav, who sit at the door of their hut roasting potatoes stolen from a neighbor's field. Budhiya, Madhav's young wife of one year, is inside groaning in childbirth. Neither man responds to her moans. In fact, Madhav is annoyed. His father urges him to look in on the girl, but he asks, "If she's going to die why doesn't she get it over with? What can I do by looking?"
Lazy, dishonest, and superstitious, Ghisu and Madhav are members of the untouchable leather worker caste, the poorest and lowest in India's highly structured social hierarchy. Both father and son refuse to do farmwork that is readily available in the community. Instead, they prefer to take handouts or to cheat others to maintain themselves at a subsistence level. Though Budhiya has been a good wife and had established some order in the men's chaotic lives, neither wishes to spend money to get her help. Believing her to be "possessed by some ghost," they will not enter the hut. Moreover, they believe that "God will provide," as he always seems to have done in the past. Speaking editorially, the author notes that Ghisu is smarter than most Indian peasants, for he has managed to earn himself the lowest reputation in the village and yet survive without engaging in honest working.
As if to negate the horror of the woman dying in childbirth, Ghisu recalls a sumptuous wedding feast he attended 20 years before. Yearning for the old days, he complains, "Nobody feeds us like that now." Instead, people are taken with "economizing and hoarding." Finishing their potatoes, they curl up and fall asleep, "just like two enormous coiled pythons."
The next morning Madhav goes into the hut and finds his wife dead, the baby having died inside the womb. Both men go about the village beating their chests and wailing "according to the old tradition." They receive consolation from the other villagers, and, to get money for the shroud and firewood needed to cremate the dead woman, they go the the village's major landowner and beg. Though the landowner knows them to be cheats, he reluctantly throws them a few rupees. They then make the rounds, collecting money for the cremation from other people, and they end up with five rupees in addition to other gifts of grain and wood.
The men decide that they have enough wood, but since no one will see the corpse when it is taken from the hut at night, they have second thoughts about purchasing a shroud, Moreover, they ask why they should spend money on something that is going to be burned anyway. Wandering through the market, the two find themselves "by some divine inspiration or other" in front of the village liquor store. They order a bottle and some food. As they drink and eat "in the lordly manner of tigers enjoying their kill in the jungle," which is the second allusion to their animal-like behavior, they gradually sink into drunkenness. They initially have qualms about not purchasing a shroud, but they rationalize their decision with praises for the dead woman: "Even dying she got us fine things to eat and drink." When they are about to leave the tavern, Ghisu magnanimously offers a famished beggar their leftovers, asking him to bless the dead woman through whose bounty he will eat.