A Life Incomplete, page 24
‘Better?’ She gives him a strange smile. ‘I am feeling better, Bhapa ji. But why am I crammed into this tight little corner? And Bhapa ji…I think I am going now…This house…This house is going to collapse, Bhapa ji…Ah…’
The doctor admonishes Waryam Singh, ‘Let her lie down properly and don’t make her talk.’
‘Doctor Sahib,’ Waryam Singh croaks, ‘please don’t separate her from me now.’ His throat is choked with the pain rising from his heart.
Saroj’s eyes are closed but she makes another effort to speak. ‘Kuldeep…I must save him, Bhapa ji…Kuldeep…that evil man…that devil…that heartless stone…that Kuldeep. Bhapa ji…I am going…save me, Bhapa ji!’
Tears stream down Waryam’s face. He looks at the doctor, who rubs his hands helplessly and rolls his eyes towards the heavens.
The driver honks incessantly to persuade bullock carts, cyclists and other slow-moving vehicles to give way. Waryam Singh feels her cries subside and her body become still. Her head stops moving in his lap and he feels the warmth ebb out of her body. His tears stop and his hand ceases caressing her forehead. The doctor takes a long while to check her pulse before silently shaking his head.
The taxi speeds through the dark, lonely night, its silence punctured every now and then by the angry blaring of the vehicle’s horn. It sounds like the roar of death, sending birds into a scared huddle in the safety of their nests, their heads buried under their wings until the taxi is out of earshot.
PS
Insights
Interviews &
More …
Translator’s Note
List of Books
Translator’s Note
He was an unusually gifted man, my grandfather Sardar Nanak Singh. Affectionately called Bauji by friends and family, his prodigious literary output over half a century won him the status of ‘Father of the Punjabi Novel’ from literary critics. To his millions of fans, he was simply Nanak Singh – the ‘novelist’ who enthralled them with his tales of romance and tragedy, of noble heroes and rapacious villains.
BOOKS
Novels
Matraiyee Maa
(1924)
Kaal Chakkar
(1924)
Mitha Mohra
(1926)
Prem Sangeet
(1929)
Phauladi Phul
(1931)
Chitta Lahu
(1932)
All these and more are revealed in the undulations of Adh Khidya Phul, in characters that draw the reader into their lives. But what sets this book apart from the two score others that he wrote is the presence of several incidents and characters that are drawn from the first twenty-five or thirty years of Bauji’s own life. We get an inkling of this when we read the foreword, not that it is always a reliable guide to reality. Bauji often used the foreword as a device to lure the reader into his web. But in this one, he does seem to go that extra yard to suggest that the first few pages are more fact than fiction.
Kagtaan di Bedhi
(1935)
Paap Di Khatti
(1936)
Pyar Di Duniya
(1938)
Garib Di Duniya
(1939)
Adh Khidya Phul
(1940)
I was intrigued by this declaration. Did characters of the purity of Waryam Singh, the duplicity of Sant Prem Singh, the virtuosity of Saroj, the fickleness of Kuldeep actually exist? I did know from family folklore that Bauji had gone to Borstal Jail as part of the freedom struggle, that he had also been present at the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. There were, in fact, some in the family who complained that we never secured the material benefits of being a ‘freedom fighter’s family’ because Bauji simply didn’t believe in any of that.
Questions about Adh Khidya Phul took me into conversations with family elders and into a serious rereading of Meri Duniya, the autobiography that Bauji first wrote in 1949. On Waryam Singh, the answer was ambiguous but illuminating. Bauji explains this in the context of his own early days and a digression at this juncture might be worthwhile.
Nanak Singh was born into a modest Hindu family in the small hamlet of Chak Hamid in Daadan Khan tehsil of Jhelum district (now in Pakistan) in 1897. The oldest of four siblings, he was named Hans Raj and spent his first eight years in the village before accompanying his father to Peshawar to help him in his shop. His mother and two younger brothers joined them a few months later but the joy of a family reunion was short-lived. His father was consumed by a bout of pneumonia even while his mother was on the verge of delivering her fourth child. The responsibility of running the family store fell on young Hans Raj at an early age, taking him out of school before he had completed fifth grade.
Pavitar Paapi
(1942)
Jeewan Sangram
(1942)
Dhundle Parchhaven
(1944)
Door Kinara
(1945)
Tuttee Veena
(1946)
He was barely an adolescent when he came into contact with Savitri, who lived a couple of houses down the street from him in the Sadar area of Peshawar. As youngsters, they would spend hours together and Bauji describes her as his first and only romance. He saw her get married while she was still in her early teens, and return home as a child widow a few months later. She was fond of literature and music and he had a gift for crafting poetry and songs with a simple rhyme and metre. To make an impression on her, he also took to learning music from a Bengali friend and soon reached a level of proficiency that allowed him to be her tutor. They spent hours together, he on the harmonium with a new melody each day, she the doting student singing along in her lilting voice. But it was not to be. She was struck by a strange malady – tuberculosis, perhaps. None of the medicines worked, and while a last-ditch effort to take her into the clean mountain air of the hills near Peshawar seemed to induce a miraculous recovery for a while, it turned out to be a false dawn. Not yet twenty, Bauji saw her life ebb away before his eyes.
Love Marriage
(1947)
Gangajali Vich
Sharab
(1947)
Agg di Khed
(1948)
Khoon De Sohile
(1948)
Manjhdhar
(1949)
Chittarkar
(1950)
He speaks about this in his autobiography, sharing his pain with his readers. ‘What was Savitri like?’ he poses the rhetorical question. In response, he quotes his own description of Saroj in Adh Khidya Phul – a quiet, elegant, self-confident young woman who retains her dignity even after suffering the ignominy of being a child widow.
Savitri’s death left the young poet adrift. His mother, who anchored his early years, also passed away and he found himself in the company of an aimless group of youth who were happy to wine and dine him while he entertained them with his poems and couplets. He took to smoking, drinking and even the occasional theft of cash from his uncle’s store. But he was fortunate to find a mentor in Giani Bagh Singh, an erudite Sikh scholar who encouraged him to use his skills as a musician and start his own kirtan jatha to sing hymns at the local Singh Sabha Gurudwara.
The gurudwara congregations and the discipline of practice sessions and performances with his newly formed kirtan jatha of hymn singers restored a sense of order to young Hans Raj’s life and it is around this time that he ran into Giani Sher Singh, a fiery preacher and ardent nationalist. Still in search of his moorings, the combined influence of Giani Bagh Singh and Giani Sher Singh led him to convert to Sikhism with the name Nanak Singh. With all the zeal of the recent convert, he plunged headlong into the communal politics of the day, writing diatribes against the Arya Samaj movement and turning his poetic skills towards writing verses in praise of the Sikh gurus. Satguru Mahima, a small booklet of such poems, became an instant hit, selling over one hundred thousand copies and becoming the source of his financial sustenance for the next several years.
Aadam Khor
(1951)
Katti Hoi Patang
(1952)
Suman Kanta
(1952)
Nasoor
(1953)
Banjar
(1956)
Aastak Nastak
(1956)
He also fell in love with the atmosphere of the gurudwara – the melodious singing of hymns, the sermons by religious leaders on the virtues and rewards of leading a pious life and the joys of entering a world that is infused by spirituality and stands at a distance from mundane material concerns. He also came under the influence of a preacher who bears an eerie resemblance to Sant Prem Singh. In the chapter ‘From Peshawar to Amritsar’ of Meri Duniya, Bauji describes his infatuation with the magnetic personality of the preacher and the power of his words. Barely twenty years old, Nanak Singh wound up the printing press that he was running with a partner and moved into the preacher’s dera to spend his days in close proximity to his spiritual master. He wanted to live the life of detachment from the material world that the preacher advocated so lucidly in his sermons. But the affair was short-lived. It wasn’t long before he discovered that the preacher enjoyed all the good things of life, maintained a healthy bank balance and was probably engaged in a sexual relationship with the woman who was believed to be his most ardent devotee. Unable to accept the hypocrisy, a disillusioned Nanak Singh made a hasty exit from the dera. He was chastened by the experience and remained a lifelong sceptic about religious charlatans that often show up in his novels in the form of characters like Sant Prem Singh of Adh Khidya Phul.
Sangam
(1957)
Pujari
(1958)
Chhalava
(1959)
Anseetey Zakham
(1959)
Ik Mian Do
Talwaraan
(1960)
Pathar De Khamb
(1960)
Reading the autobiography, in fact, makes it quite clear that Bauji’s quest for his own identity during his teens and early twenties finds a reflection in the fickle character of Kuldeep. He is a decent fellow, means no harm to anyone but lacks the strength of conviction that can guide his own destiny.
This discovery came as something of a shock to me. Although Bauji died in 1971 when I was all of twelve years old, I have vivid memories of him as this saintly figure in his simple white kurta-pyjama with a plain white turban and flowing grey beard. True, during our summer vacations in Preet Nagar, he would often regale my cousins and me with some impromptu stories that provided us a glimpse into his literary genius. But it was his simplicity, his idealism and his deep-seated commitment to social reform that gave him a kind of other-worldly, almost ethereal quality. We knew, as we were growing up, that we were privileged to be in the family of a truly exceptional individual. To read so many years later that he indulged in smoking and drinking and admitted to other aberrations gave me a completely new insight into his character.
Var Nahi Sarap
(1962)
Koi Harya Boot
Rahio Ree
(1964)
Sarapian Roohan
(1965)
Gagan Damama
Bajia
(1967)
Which brings us back to our original question about Waryam Singh. If Saroj is Savitri from real life, Sant Prem Singh takes after the preacher in Amritsar and Kuldeep bears resemblance to the early phase of the author himself, who is Waryam Singh? Was he a real person too? Where was that cottage of his located in the hills? Bauji acknowledges in Meri Duniya that the character of Waryam Singh has shades of a real person. As does the character of Baba Rode in his novel Chitta Lahu, of Sant Som Prakash in Kaal Chakkar, of Sunder Das in Love Marriage, of the editor in Gangajali vich Sharab…and so on. Each of these characters represents a facet of the idealism of Giani Bagh Singh, the mentor to whom Bauji proclaims his own undying gratitude.
In what looks like a curious epiphany, it was Giani Bagh Singh who advised the young Nanak Singh to go to jail to discover his true calling in life. And so he signed up for the Guru ka Bagh campaign aimed at wresting control of major Sikh gurudwaras from priests who were British loyalists. The British government had declared the campaign illegal and protestors were marched off for varying spells at Lahore’s infamous Borstal Jail, where Bauji was interned for over nine months.
SHORT
STORIES
Hanjhuan De Haar
(1935)
Sadhran De Haar
(1935)
Midhey Hoye Phul
(1938)
Thandiyaan
Chhawaan
(1940)
True to the epiphany, the months spent in jail in 1922 gave him the time to reflect, to overcome the loss of Savitri, to introspect on his own fickleness and to look for solutions to his dilemmas within himself. He was also fortunate to meet several unusual individuals, one of whom was an activist of the Congress party named Pandit Jagan Nath. Clearly a man of some influence, Pandit Jagan Nath had been able to get permission for bringing a trunk-load of books including an extensive selection of Hindi novels by Munshi Premchand into his cell. Undeterred by the minor constraint that he had a barely passing acquaintance with Hindi, Bauji proceeded to borrow and read each one of the novels before coming to the momentous conclusion that this was what he really wanted to do – to write novels that would move the hearts and minds of people, that would bring social reform, that would transform society and perhaps even help in bringing independence to the country. And so it was that he managed to lay his hands on some paper and started to write his first novel. Tentatively titled Adh Khidi Kali or A Half-blossomed Bud, it looked at the problems in contemporary society through the travails of his beloved Savitri. But an untimely search of his cell led the jailors to confiscate his still incomplete novel, leaving the budding novelist despondent and loathe to take up another novel for several more years. But write he did, and by the time he resumed the tale of Savitri as Saroj in Adh Khidya Phul a good eighteen years later in 1940, he had already established a formidable reputation as one of the pre-eminent writers of his generation. Had it not been for the intervention of the jailor, it could have been his first novel, written when he was all of twenty-five years old.
PLAYS
B.A. Pass
(1944)
Paap Da Fal
(1972)
Chaur Chaanan
(1973)
Dhobi Da Kutta
(1981)
Saarh Sati
(1981)
But my digression has taken me away from an important milestone. Even before his participation in the Guru ka Bagh campaign, it is believed that Bauji was present in Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar when General Dyer’s troops unleashed a hail of bullets on a group of peaceful protestors. It was the popular Baisakhi festival, 13 April 1919, and he had gone to the venue with two of his friends. Both died in the firing and family folklore has it that Bauji fainted and was piled up amongst the dead bodies. He also lost partial hearing during the firing. Having started off in his teens as a writer of songs and religious poems, he expressed himself through a long poem called ‘Khooni Visakhi’.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Meri Duniya
(1949)
Published in May 1920, Khooni Visakhi traces the run-up to the infamous Rowlatt Act, promulgated on 18 March 1919 to suppress the growing tide of protests against the excesses of colonial rule. It speaks of the call for nationwide strike or ‘hartal’ given by Mahatma Gandhi on 6 April and the impact of the hartal in Punjab and, in particular, in Amritsar. There is a particularly moving reference to the Hindu–Muslim unity forged by prominent local Congress leaders Dr Satya Pal and Dr Saifuddin Kitchlew who led a public rally on the occasion of the Ram Navami festival on 9 April. Both leaders were arrested and a wave of popular anger swept the city when they were taken away to an undisclosed location on 10 April. A group of protestors went to the office of Deputy Commissioner Michael Irving to seek the release of their leaders but police firing on them exacerbated tensions, leading to rioting in several parts of the city. Brigadier General R.E.H. Dyer was summoned from the Jallandhar Cantonment to come with a military contingent and establish order.
The poem recounts the resolve of the people of Amritsar to assemble at Jallianwala Bagh on Baisakhi day to express their anger and to map their future course of action. The firing on the unarmed, peaceful congregation, the deaths of many hundreds and the bullet injuries suffered by thousands of others cast a pall of gloom over the city. Khooni Visakhi captures the pathos in verse, mocking at British rule and celebrating the stoic resistance of the ordinary people of Amritsar. The colonial administration banned the book and confiscated and destroyed virtually all copies. And it remained unavailable to the public for another six decades until a copy was located and the book was republished in 1980.
PROSE
Charhdi Kala
(1972)
At a very different level, Adh Khidya Phul also provides an insight into Nanak Singh, the writer who saw his novels as catalysts for social change. It was written in 1940 at a time of rising tension between the Sikh and Muslim communities. But the friendship between Kuldeep and Ahmed Khan, the adoption of Kuldeep’s child by Zubeida, and Ahmed’s promise that the Muslim household will ban beef and tobacco from their home in deference to Sikh sensibilities are a strong testament for religious tolerance.
The character of Saroj underlines another of the author’s favourite themes – the empowerment of woman. He presents Saroj as a strong, talented and educated woman. She has suffered the social ignominy of being a child widow and could easily have gone into a shell. Yet, she is prepared to live life on her terms and to contribute to society through her own idealism.
POETRY
Satgur Mahima
(1918)
Gur Kirat
(1919)
Khooni Visakhi
(1920)
Zakhmi Dil
(1922)
Sant Prem Singh, too, is used to highlight one of the author’s recurrent themes. Beware of superstitious beliefs and of religious charlatans who claim to show you the true path. There is no virtue in renouncing the material world, in abdicating your obligations to your family. The true path is more likely to be found through honest toil and dedication.
The doctor admonishes Waryam Singh, ‘Let her lie down properly and don’t make her talk.’
‘Doctor Sahib,’ Waryam Singh croaks, ‘please don’t separate her from me now.’ His throat is choked with the pain rising from his heart.
Saroj’s eyes are closed but she makes another effort to speak. ‘Kuldeep…I must save him, Bhapa ji…Kuldeep…that evil man…that devil…that heartless stone…that Kuldeep. Bhapa ji…I am going…save me, Bhapa ji!’
Tears stream down Waryam’s face. He looks at the doctor, who rubs his hands helplessly and rolls his eyes towards the heavens.
The driver honks incessantly to persuade bullock carts, cyclists and other slow-moving vehicles to give way. Waryam Singh feels her cries subside and her body become still. Her head stops moving in his lap and he feels the warmth ebb out of her body. His tears stop and his hand ceases caressing her forehead. The doctor takes a long while to check her pulse before silently shaking his head.
The taxi speeds through the dark, lonely night, its silence punctured every now and then by the angry blaring of the vehicle’s horn. It sounds like the roar of death, sending birds into a scared huddle in the safety of their nests, their heads buried under their wings until the taxi is out of earshot.
PS
Insights
Interviews &
More …
Translator’s Note
List of Books
Translator’s Note
He was an unusually gifted man, my grandfather Sardar Nanak Singh. Affectionately called Bauji by friends and family, his prodigious literary output over half a century won him the status of ‘Father of the Punjabi Novel’ from literary critics. To his millions of fans, he was simply Nanak Singh – the ‘novelist’ who enthralled them with his tales of romance and tragedy, of noble heroes and rapacious villains.
BOOKS
Novels
Matraiyee Maa
(1924)
Kaal Chakkar
(1924)
Mitha Mohra
(1926)
Prem Sangeet
(1929)
Phauladi Phul
(1931)
Chitta Lahu
(1932)
All these and more are revealed in the undulations of Adh Khidya Phul, in characters that draw the reader into their lives. But what sets this book apart from the two score others that he wrote is the presence of several incidents and characters that are drawn from the first twenty-five or thirty years of Bauji’s own life. We get an inkling of this when we read the foreword, not that it is always a reliable guide to reality. Bauji often used the foreword as a device to lure the reader into his web. But in this one, he does seem to go that extra yard to suggest that the first few pages are more fact than fiction.
Kagtaan di Bedhi
(1935)
Paap Di Khatti
(1936)
Pyar Di Duniya
(1938)
Garib Di Duniya
(1939)
Adh Khidya Phul
(1940)
I was intrigued by this declaration. Did characters of the purity of Waryam Singh, the duplicity of Sant Prem Singh, the virtuosity of Saroj, the fickleness of Kuldeep actually exist? I did know from family folklore that Bauji had gone to Borstal Jail as part of the freedom struggle, that he had also been present at the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. There were, in fact, some in the family who complained that we never secured the material benefits of being a ‘freedom fighter’s family’ because Bauji simply didn’t believe in any of that.
Questions about Adh Khidya Phul took me into conversations with family elders and into a serious rereading of Meri Duniya, the autobiography that Bauji first wrote in 1949. On Waryam Singh, the answer was ambiguous but illuminating. Bauji explains this in the context of his own early days and a digression at this juncture might be worthwhile.
Nanak Singh was born into a modest Hindu family in the small hamlet of Chak Hamid in Daadan Khan tehsil of Jhelum district (now in Pakistan) in 1897. The oldest of four siblings, he was named Hans Raj and spent his first eight years in the village before accompanying his father to Peshawar to help him in his shop. His mother and two younger brothers joined them a few months later but the joy of a family reunion was short-lived. His father was consumed by a bout of pneumonia even while his mother was on the verge of delivering her fourth child. The responsibility of running the family store fell on young Hans Raj at an early age, taking him out of school before he had completed fifth grade.
Pavitar Paapi
(1942)
Jeewan Sangram
(1942)
Dhundle Parchhaven
(1944)
Door Kinara
(1945)
Tuttee Veena
(1946)
He was barely an adolescent when he came into contact with Savitri, who lived a couple of houses down the street from him in the Sadar area of Peshawar. As youngsters, they would spend hours together and Bauji describes her as his first and only romance. He saw her get married while she was still in her early teens, and return home as a child widow a few months later. She was fond of literature and music and he had a gift for crafting poetry and songs with a simple rhyme and metre. To make an impression on her, he also took to learning music from a Bengali friend and soon reached a level of proficiency that allowed him to be her tutor. They spent hours together, he on the harmonium with a new melody each day, she the doting student singing along in her lilting voice. But it was not to be. She was struck by a strange malady – tuberculosis, perhaps. None of the medicines worked, and while a last-ditch effort to take her into the clean mountain air of the hills near Peshawar seemed to induce a miraculous recovery for a while, it turned out to be a false dawn. Not yet twenty, Bauji saw her life ebb away before his eyes.
Love Marriage
(1947)
Gangajali Vich
Sharab
(1947)
Agg di Khed
(1948)
Khoon De Sohile
(1948)
Manjhdhar
(1949)
Chittarkar
(1950)
He speaks about this in his autobiography, sharing his pain with his readers. ‘What was Savitri like?’ he poses the rhetorical question. In response, he quotes his own description of Saroj in Adh Khidya Phul – a quiet, elegant, self-confident young woman who retains her dignity even after suffering the ignominy of being a child widow.
Savitri’s death left the young poet adrift. His mother, who anchored his early years, also passed away and he found himself in the company of an aimless group of youth who were happy to wine and dine him while he entertained them with his poems and couplets. He took to smoking, drinking and even the occasional theft of cash from his uncle’s store. But he was fortunate to find a mentor in Giani Bagh Singh, an erudite Sikh scholar who encouraged him to use his skills as a musician and start his own kirtan jatha to sing hymns at the local Singh Sabha Gurudwara.
The gurudwara congregations and the discipline of practice sessions and performances with his newly formed kirtan jatha of hymn singers restored a sense of order to young Hans Raj’s life and it is around this time that he ran into Giani Sher Singh, a fiery preacher and ardent nationalist. Still in search of his moorings, the combined influence of Giani Bagh Singh and Giani Sher Singh led him to convert to Sikhism with the name Nanak Singh. With all the zeal of the recent convert, he plunged headlong into the communal politics of the day, writing diatribes against the Arya Samaj movement and turning his poetic skills towards writing verses in praise of the Sikh gurus. Satguru Mahima, a small booklet of such poems, became an instant hit, selling over one hundred thousand copies and becoming the source of his financial sustenance for the next several years.
Aadam Khor
(1951)
Katti Hoi Patang
(1952)
Suman Kanta
(1952)
Nasoor
(1953)
Banjar
(1956)
Aastak Nastak
(1956)
He also fell in love with the atmosphere of the gurudwara – the melodious singing of hymns, the sermons by religious leaders on the virtues and rewards of leading a pious life and the joys of entering a world that is infused by spirituality and stands at a distance from mundane material concerns. He also came under the influence of a preacher who bears an eerie resemblance to Sant Prem Singh. In the chapter ‘From Peshawar to Amritsar’ of Meri Duniya, Bauji describes his infatuation with the magnetic personality of the preacher and the power of his words. Barely twenty years old, Nanak Singh wound up the printing press that he was running with a partner and moved into the preacher’s dera to spend his days in close proximity to his spiritual master. He wanted to live the life of detachment from the material world that the preacher advocated so lucidly in his sermons. But the affair was short-lived. It wasn’t long before he discovered that the preacher enjoyed all the good things of life, maintained a healthy bank balance and was probably engaged in a sexual relationship with the woman who was believed to be his most ardent devotee. Unable to accept the hypocrisy, a disillusioned Nanak Singh made a hasty exit from the dera. He was chastened by the experience and remained a lifelong sceptic about religious charlatans that often show up in his novels in the form of characters like Sant Prem Singh of Adh Khidya Phul.
Sangam
(1957)
Pujari
(1958)
Chhalava
(1959)
Anseetey Zakham
(1959)
Ik Mian Do
Talwaraan
(1960)
Pathar De Khamb
(1960)
Reading the autobiography, in fact, makes it quite clear that Bauji’s quest for his own identity during his teens and early twenties finds a reflection in the fickle character of Kuldeep. He is a decent fellow, means no harm to anyone but lacks the strength of conviction that can guide his own destiny.
This discovery came as something of a shock to me. Although Bauji died in 1971 when I was all of twelve years old, I have vivid memories of him as this saintly figure in his simple white kurta-pyjama with a plain white turban and flowing grey beard. True, during our summer vacations in Preet Nagar, he would often regale my cousins and me with some impromptu stories that provided us a glimpse into his literary genius. But it was his simplicity, his idealism and his deep-seated commitment to social reform that gave him a kind of other-worldly, almost ethereal quality. We knew, as we were growing up, that we were privileged to be in the family of a truly exceptional individual. To read so many years later that he indulged in smoking and drinking and admitted to other aberrations gave me a completely new insight into his character.
Var Nahi Sarap
(1962)
Koi Harya Boot
Rahio Ree
(1964)
Sarapian Roohan
(1965)
Gagan Damama
Bajia
(1967)
Which brings us back to our original question about Waryam Singh. If Saroj is Savitri from real life, Sant Prem Singh takes after the preacher in Amritsar and Kuldeep bears resemblance to the early phase of the author himself, who is Waryam Singh? Was he a real person too? Where was that cottage of his located in the hills? Bauji acknowledges in Meri Duniya that the character of Waryam Singh has shades of a real person. As does the character of Baba Rode in his novel Chitta Lahu, of Sant Som Prakash in Kaal Chakkar, of Sunder Das in Love Marriage, of the editor in Gangajali vich Sharab…and so on. Each of these characters represents a facet of the idealism of Giani Bagh Singh, the mentor to whom Bauji proclaims his own undying gratitude.
In what looks like a curious epiphany, it was Giani Bagh Singh who advised the young Nanak Singh to go to jail to discover his true calling in life. And so he signed up for the Guru ka Bagh campaign aimed at wresting control of major Sikh gurudwaras from priests who were British loyalists. The British government had declared the campaign illegal and protestors were marched off for varying spells at Lahore’s infamous Borstal Jail, where Bauji was interned for over nine months.
SHORT
STORIES
Hanjhuan De Haar
(1935)
Sadhran De Haar
(1935)
Midhey Hoye Phul
(1938)
Thandiyaan
Chhawaan
(1940)
True to the epiphany, the months spent in jail in 1922 gave him the time to reflect, to overcome the loss of Savitri, to introspect on his own fickleness and to look for solutions to his dilemmas within himself. He was also fortunate to meet several unusual individuals, one of whom was an activist of the Congress party named Pandit Jagan Nath. Clearly a man of some influence, Pandit Jagan Nath had been able to get permission for bringing a trunk-load of books including an extensive selection of Hindi novels by Munshi Premchand into his cell. Undeterred by the minor constraint that he had a barely passing acquaintance with Hindi, Bauji proceeded to borrow and read each one of the novels before coming to the momentous conclusion that this was what he really wanted to do – to write novels that would move the hearts and minds of people, that would bring social reform, that would transform society and perhaps even help in bringing independence to the country. And so it was that he managed to lay his hands on some paper and started to write his first novel. Tentatively titled Adh Khidi Kali or A Half-blossomed Bud, it looked at the problems in contemporary society through the travails of his beloved Savitri. But an untimely search of his cell led the jailors to confiscate his still incomplete novel, leaving the budding novelist despondent and loathe to take up another novel for several more years. But write he did, and by the time he resumed the tale of Savitri as Saroj in Adh Khidya Phul a good eighteen years later in 1940, he had already established a formidable reputation as one of the pre-eminent writers of his generation. Had it not been for the intervention of the jailor, it could have been his first novel, written when he was all of twenty-five years old.
PLAYS
B.A. Pass
(1944)
Paap Da Fal
(1972)
Chaur Chaanan
(1973)
Dhobi Da Kutta
(1981)
Saarh Sati
(1981)
But my digression has taken me away from an important milestone. Even before his participation in the Guru ka Bagh campaign, it is believed that Bauji was present in Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar when General Dyer’s troops unleashed a hail of bullets on a group of peaceful protestors. It was the popular Baisakhi festival, 13 April 1919, and he had gone to the venue with two of his friends. Both died in the firing and family folklore has it that Bauji fainted and was piled up amongst the dead bodies. He also lost partial hearing during the firing. Having started off in his teens as a writer of songs and religious poems, he expressed himself through a long poem called ‘Khooni Visakhi’.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Meri Duniya
(1949)
Published in May 1920, Khooni Visakhi traces the run-up to the infamous Rowlatt Act, promulgated on 18 March 1919 to suppress the growing tide of protests against the excesses of colonial rule. It speaks of the call for nationwide strike or ‘hartal’ given by Mahatma Gandhi on 6 April and the impact of the hartal in Punjab and, in particular, in Amritsar. There is a particularly moving reference to the Hindu–Muslim unity forged by prominent local Congress leaders Dr Satya Pal and Dr Saifuddin Kitchlew who led a public rally on the occasion of the Ram Navami festival on 9 April. Both leaders were arrested and a wave of popular anger swept the city when they were taken away to an undisclosed location on 10 April. A group of protestors went to the office of Deputy Commissioner Michael Irving to seek the release of their leaders but police firing on them exacerbated tensions, leading to rioting in several parts of the city. Brigadier General R.E.H. Dyer was summoned from the Jallandhar Cantonment to come with a military contingent and establish order.
The poem recounts the resolve of the people of Amritsar to assemble at Jallianwala Bagh on Baisakhi day to express their anger and to map their future course of action. The firing on the unarmed, peaceful congregation, the deaths of many hundreds and the bullet injuries suffered by thousands of others cast a pall of gloom over the city. Khooni Visakhi captures the pathos in verse, mocking at British rule and celebrating the stoic resistance of the ordinary people of Amritsar. The colonial administration banned the book and confiscated and destroyed virtually all copies. And it remained unavailable to the public for another six decades until a copy was located and the book was republished in 1980.
PROSE
Charhdi Kala
(1972)
At a very different level, Adh Khidya Phul also provides an insight into Nanak Singh, the writer who saw his novels as catalysts for social change. It was written in 1940 at a time of rising tension between the Sikh and Muslim communities. But the friendship between Kuldeep and Ahmed Khan, the adoption of Kuldeep’s child by Zubeida, and Ahmed’s promise that the Muslim household will ban beef and tobacco from their home in deference to Sikh sensibilities are a strong testament for religious tolerance.
The character of Saroj underlines another of the author’s favourite themes – the empowerment of woman. He presents Saroj as a strong, talented and educated woman. She has suffered the social ignominy of being a child widow and could easily have gone into a shell. Yet, she is prepared to live life on her terms and to contribute to society through her own idealism.
POETRY
Satgur Mahima
(1918)
Gur Kirat
(1919)
Khooni Visakhi
(1920)
Zakhmi Dil
(1922)
Sant Prem Singh, too, is used to highlight one of the author’s recurrent themes. Beware of superstitious beliefs and of religious charlatans who claim to show you the true path. There is no virtue in renouncing the material world, in abdicating your obligations to your family. The true path is more likely to be found through honest toil and dedication.
