Gurdial Singh: Messiah of the Marginalized

Gurdial Singh: Messiah of the Marginalized Rana Nayar Panjab University, Chandigarh In the past two months, Indian literature has lost two of its greatest writers; first it was the redoubtable Mahasweta Devi, who left us in July, and then it was the inimitable Gurdial Singh (August 18, 2016). Both these writers enjoyed a distinctive, pre-eminent position in their respective literary traditions, and both managed to transcend the narrow confines of the geographical regions within which they were born, lived or worked. Strangely enough, despite their personal, ideological, aesthetic and/or cultural differences, both worked tirelessly, all their lives, for restoring dignity, pride and self-respect to “the last man” on this earth. What is more, both went on to win the highest literary honor of India, the Jnanpeeth, for their singular contribution to their respective languages, or let me say, to the rich corpus of Indian Literature. Needless to say, the sudden departure of both these literary giants has created such a permanent vacuum in our literary circles that neither time nor circumstance may now be able to replenish it, ever. And it is, indeed, with a very heavy heart and tearful, misty eyes that I bid adieu to both these great writers, and also pray for the eternal peace of their souls. Of course, I could have used this opportunity to go into a comparative assessment of the works of both Mahasweta Devi and Gurdial Singh, too, but I shall abstain from doing so for obvious reasons. The main purpose of this essay, as the title clearly suggests, is to pay tribute to Gurdial Singh's life and work. A Personal Note Let me start off by stating that more than the loss of the literary world, Gurdial Singh's death has been a huge personal loss for me. Though at a professional level, our relationship was that of an author and a translator, at a more personal level, I held him in the same respect and awe that one ordinarily reserves only for one's mentor, guide, philosopher and a friend. Today, if I can claim to know something about Punjabi language, literature, history or culture, I must say, I owe a great Nayar: Gurdial Singh 207 deal of it to the teachings of Gurdial Singh. The manner in which he, very gently and compassionately, led me into the complexities of Punjabi culture, helping me develop its nuanced understanding, also makes me think of him as my ‘cultural guru’. I feel that in his passing away, I have lost my ‘literary ancestor’; if at all one could posit such a category. I must confess that before 1992, when my association with Gurdial Singh began in the most fortuitous manner, I had not even read his works. My readings in Punjabi fiction were few and far between, and were limited largely to the short/long fiction and/or poetry of Vir Singh, Nanak Singh, Gurbaksh Singh Preetlari, Kartar Singh Duggal, Amrita Pritam, Mohan Singh, Shiv Batalavi, Paash et al. Having done some preliminary readings in Punjabi literature, I had started narrowing it down to short fiction, a form into which I wanted to make my initial forays as a translator. This I did mainly because somewhere down the line, I had convinced myself, for a variety of reasons, that the future of Punjabi literature was secure with short, and not long, fiction. Twenty-five years down the line, the short fiction in Punjabi continues to offer startling possibilities and could legitimately be said to have a very promising and a vibrant future in our context. And had Macmillan India not launched its prestigious series Modern Indian Classics in Translation in 1992, and not commissioned both Pushpinder Syal and I to translate Gurdial Singh's Sahitya Akademi award-winning title Adh Chanini Raat for this series, I would have probably never known or discovered the greatness of Gurdial Singh, both as a man, and a writer. Gurdial Singh: A Brief Profile As one reflects on Gurdial Singh's personal life, the first thought that comes to mind is that, in so many different ways, it was far stranger than the fiction he wrote. While his fiction was always enmeshed in social and cultural reality of a very raw kind, from the first to the last; his life reads more like a slice of fiction crafted by not-so-benign a fate. He was born into an extremely impoverished Sikh Ramgarhia family of Jaito Mandi, a small commercial town of Punjab, where he lived for the better part of his life, and where he did most of his writing, too. Though his family lived at Jaito, his birthplace was Bhaini Fateh, a small village in Faridkot, where the maternal side of his family lived. His father, the only bread- winner of a large family, used to double up as a blacksmith-cum-carpenter, hammering out tin or even iron sheets to make trunks and ploughs, or chiseling 208 JSPS 23:1&2 chunks of wood into door-frames and windows. Not being much educated himself, he didn't quite understand the value of education or its transformative potential in human life. Young Gurdial was a bright student and loved going to school, if only to escape long hours of grueling, physical labor his father expected him to put in, in his spare time. Not that he was ever shy of doing physical labor, but his weak constitution and fragile frame, something that dogged him all his life, is what made him shun strenuous physical work almost like the plague. It is another matter that once he had taken to writing, he never ever treated it lightly and always pored over his manuscripts laboriously, working hard on chiseling each word and painstakingly refining his craft and skill. In his autobiography (which was published in two parts; Nyan Mattian and Dooji Dehi, and was later translated into English, too), he mentions how he would either run away to the local gurdvara or just spend hours painting canvases, simply to get away from the overweening demands of his hard-to-please father. Though his father, whom he called tayya, was a stentorian figure, young Gurdial grew up listening to the folk tales of Malwa region from his uncle. His uncle, as he professes in one of the sections of his autobiography, was a charming storyteller, who often made children of the house sit around him in a circle, before rolling out his improvised versions with panache. This is how the seeds of a future storyteller were sown, and young Gurdial's imagination slowly began to take wings. Despite being studious, he loved playing truant, like other boys his age. On such occasions, he would sneak off with his classmates to the sandy mounds on the outskirts of his village, and spend his time, playing inventive, ingenuous games. These “sweet-sour days of his childhood”, as he calls them, would have continued uninterrupted had it not been for his father's sudden, irrational decision not to allow him to continue with his studies beyond the eighth grade. Gurdial Singh was certainly not prepared for it. This meant that now his dream of completing his education would be in a shambles, and the dreadful nightmare of physical labor would stare him, once again, right in the face. But for the intervention of his headmaster, Madan Mohan Sharma, whose shaping influence upon his personal life Gurdial Singh never tired of reiterating, he would have probably ended up as a replica of his father. On hearing that Gurdial had discontinued his schooling, Sharma came home, persuaded his father to send him back to school, and later, when his father cited ‘poverty’ as one of the Nayar: Gurdial Singh 209 reasons, even offered to pay his fee from his pocket. This is how Gurdial first completed his matriculation and then his JBT. Interestingly, it was Sharma again, who got Gurdial his first job as a schoolteacher. Though frail in body and health, Gurdial always possessed a rare firmness of mind and spirit. It was this resilient spirit coupled with his indomitable will that always egged him on, against all odds, to steer ahead in life. It's not that he wasn't happy or content being a school teacher, but he had this irrepressible urge to do better, to improve his lot, a quality that he also imbued all his fictional characters with. Almost all his fictional characters, without an exception, are fighters, in true- blue Punjabi style, and they simply refuse to be cowed down by the forces inimical to them. Their lust for life (incidentally Irving Stone's biography of Vincent Van Gogh Lust for Life was Gurdial Singh's all-time favorite) is insatiable, and so is their passionate longing for change and renewal. Much before Gurdial Singh could evolve fictional strategies to craft such characters, he had, in reality, worked assiduously on himself and his own life to alter his destiny. In his times, marriage was not a personal decision, but always that of the immediate family. He once confessed that had it been left to him, he would have liked to defer it by a couple of years (only to give himself a chance at self-growth), though he was clear that he would have only married Balwant Kaur, his life-long companion and 'sahridya', who gave him all the support he needed, without ever making any demands on him. She, indeed, was the woman, who stood solidly behind him all his life is something he never failed to mention in course of several of his informal conversations.

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