Unnamed Suffering: Silence, Gender, and Terminal Illness in Premchand's Fiction

Medical humanities scholarship has increasingly turned to literary texts to explore how illness, suffering, and care are narrated beyond the clinical encounter.Yet much of this work remains invested in explicitly named diseases and visible medical crises, often overlooking the narrative and ethical significance of silence.This paper argues that in the fiction of Premchand, women's terminal illnesses are frequently left unnamed, not as an aesthetic oversight but as a gendered form of diagnostic erasure.Drawing on feminist medical humanities and Veena Das's concept of everyday violence, the paper examines how women's bodily and psychological suffering in Kafan, Nirmala, and Bade Ghar Ki Beti is absorbed into domestic routine, moral discourse, and social inevitability.By refusing medical specificity, these narratives reveal a cultural logic in which women are permitted to suffer and die, but are denied recognition as patients.Situating Premchand within medical humanities discourse, the paper argues that silence itself functions as a narrative condition that exposes the gendered politics of care, recognition, and ethical responsibility in early twentieth-century Indian society. Index Terms -medical humanities