The Politics of Absence: Gender, Caste, and Subalternity in Munshi Premchand’s “The Shroud”

Abstract

Munshi Premchand’s “The Shroud” (“Kafan”) establishes moral disturbance mostly via the actions of Ghisu and Madhav. While the focus on Ghisu and Madhav results in the neglect of Budhiya, the focus on Budhiya and her absence from direct speech helps bring into view the formal and the political. Budhiya’s presence via her work and her child and her death and her corpse help structure the story. Yet, she remains outside the story in the absence of an articulated perspective. Using social reproductive theory, along with an intersectional, Dalit feminist, and subaltern perspective, the absence of Budhiya as a speaking subject and her presence as a laboring body are analyzed. Gender, caste, and class are not problematized separately. Ghisu and Madhav occupy an inferior position in the village caste hierarchy, but their relative marginalization does not erase the unequal control of work, movement, speech, and hierarchy in the home. The absence of direct speech along with the unequal distribution of direct speech confirms the concentration of speech around the two men with Budhiya receiving none. The analysis then follows the movement of Budhiya’s body from domestic work and the act of reproduction to death and the subsequent male consumption of the charity and ritual obligation she served. The shroud comes to represent much more than the dualism of poverty or ceremonial hypocrisy. Her silence is not a void. It is produced by narrative form, along with the intersecting pressures of gender, caste, poverty, and ritual. Reading this absence reveals the gendered cost of the celebrated ambiguity of the story.