Morality in Premchand’s Kafan: For Dalits or Anti-Dalit ?

It is an article on Premchand's most controversial short story, Kafan. This article attempts to describe how the story gives an alternative voice to the downtrodden and how the characters define a morality of their own, which is outside the purview of the Brahmanical framework. In an extremely hierarchical religious structure as in Hinduism, this morality is governed by the uppermost castes, who are generationally privileged, both socially and financially. The morality they practise is very much dependent on the availability of resources. The funeral rites, the marriage customs, and the work ethic they advocate are nearly impossible to follow for characters like Ghisu and Madhav who are generationally crushed under the burden of being Dalits. The callousness and the moral depravity of both of them are not represented as an intentional fallacy but rather an imposed one by the varna system.