The Gift of a Cow
Hori Ram, a tenant farmer near Lucknow with a few bighas and a debt that renews itself every harvest, wants one thing beyond the next meal, which is a cow of his own, and takes one on credit from a herdsman of another caste. Caste council fines, the priest's cut, the landlord's arrears, and his son's flight to the mills of the city work on the family through a single agricultural year, while the men who own the land argue about reform in their drawing rooms. Premchand's last completed novel, and the work against which the Hindi and Urdu social realist tradition is still measured.
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Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
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Conflict
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Closest analogues
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