ALMS IN THE NAME OF

  A BLIND HORSE

  ALMS IN THE NAME OF

  A BLIND HORSE

  A Novel in Punjabi

  GURDIAL SINGH

  Translated from Punjabi by

  RANA NAYAR

  Published by

  Rupa Publications India Pvt. Ltd 2016

  7/16, Ansari Road, Daryaganj

  New Delhi 110002

  Copyright © Gurdial Singh 2016

  Translation copyright © Rana Nayar 2016

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any actual person, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-81-291-3731-9

  First impression 2016

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated, without the publisher’s prior consent, in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published.

  Dedicated to

  The struggling, voiceless millions in our land

  Who are yet to find their voice

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Translator’s Note

  Anhe Ghore Da Daan

  Introduction

  Gurdial Singh: Life and Times

  As I sit down to reflect on the range and quality of Gurdial Singh’s fiction, Plato’s famous dictum inevitably comes to my mind. In his Republic, Plato is believed to have stated that he looked upon a carpenter as a far better, a far more superior artist than the poet or the painter. For Plato, the carpenter embodied the image of a complete artist, or rather that of a total man. After all, wasn’t he the one who imbued the formless with a sense of structure and form and infused the rugged material reality with untold creative possibilities?

  By all counts, Gurdial Singh answers the Platonic description of a complete artist rather well. Born to a carpenter father, who insisted that his young son, too, should step into his shoes, Gurdial Singh chose to become instead, a carpenter of words, a sculptor of human forms and a painter of life in all its myriad hues. On being refused funding by his parents for education beyond the matric level, he decided to be his own mentor, slowly toiling his way up from a JBT teacher to a school lecturer, from there to a college lecturer and finally, a professor at the Regional Centre of Punjabi University at Bathinda. As one of the most illustrious exponents of Punjabi language and culture, he has served its cause for well over six decades now.

  Though he started his literary career by writing a short story, Gurdial Singh first tasted success as a novelist when he published his first major path-breaking work, Marhi Da Deeva, in 1964. Translated into English as The Last Flicker (Sahitya Akademi, 1991), it was hailed as a modern classic soon after it appeared in print. However, his early success didn’t stand in the way of, or turn into a disincentive for, his later, equally powerful and significant works of long fiction, such as Unhoye (1966), Kuwela (1968), Addh Chanini Raat (1972), Anhe Ghore Da Daan (1976), Parsa (1991), among others.

  Despite his immense success and popularity as a pioneering novelist in Punjabi, he continued to nurture his first love for short fiction. Indeed, he has authored as many as ten collections of short stories so far, the more notable among them being Saggi Phul (1962), Kutta Te Aadmi (1972), Begana Pindh (1976), Rukhe Misse Bande (1982) and Kareer Di Dhingri (1991). In addition to Marhi Da Deeva, three other novels of his viz., Addh Chanini Raat (Night of the Half-Moon, Macmillan, 1996), Parsa (NBT, 2000) and Unhoye (The Survivors, Katha, 2005), are also available in English translations.

  Tall and gangly, Gurdial Singh is modest to a fault, and has consistently shunned media attention and unnecessary publicity. Recognition has certainly come his way in the form of countless awards and honours, national as well as international. Among others, special mention may be made of the Punjab Sahitya Akademi Award (1979), the National Sahitya Akademi Award (1976), the Soviet Land Nehru Award (1986), the Bhai Veer Singh Fiction Award (1992), and the prestigious Jnanpith (1999), the highest literary honour in India. Having retired from active teaching and research, he now writes and lives in Jaito, his home-town.

  The Tradition of Punjabi Literature

  Much in the manner of other world languages, Punjabi literature, too, had its early beginnings in poetry. A Sufi strain was very much in evidence in the compositions of Baba Farid, a twelfth-century saint, often seen as one of the early practitioners of Punjabi poetry. For almost three hundred years thereon, until the advent of Guru Nanak Devji on the scene, Punjab went through an extended, nightmarish phase of foreign invasions, bringing its literary/cultural march to a sudden, temporary halt. However, once the Guru’s bani had begun to resonate through the fields of Punjab, soaking into and fertilizing its large tracts, there was no looking back. Some of this philosophical and mystical bani ultimately found its rightful place in the Guru Granth Sahab, a true repository of the collective wisdom of the Sikh gurus and other proponents of the Bhakti movement. In Punjabi literature, the Guru Granth Sahab occupies the same pre-eminent, canonical position that is often conceded to the Bible in the realm of English literature.

  The Beginnings of the Punjabi Novel

  The novel, however, did not emerge in the Punjabi language until the latter half of the nineteenth century, initially developing largely in the shadows of its European counterpart. Bhai Vir Singh, one of its early practitioners, who was known primarily for his historical romances, sought inspiration in the fictional works of Walter Scott and his ilk. Under the reformist influence of the Singh Sabha Movement, his successor Nanak Singh sought to break away from the imitative efforts, rooting the novel in the very soil and substance of Punjab. Turning to indigenous modes of storytelling such as quissas, popular in the medieval period, Nanak Singh gave to the Punjabi novel a distinct local character and habitation as it managed to reclaim its vital link with the oral tradition.

  Ideological Inheritance of Gurdial Singh

  Until the times of Gurdial Singh, two diametrically opposed ideologies, viz., a brand of naive romanticism and an indigenous form of realism, had continued to exert pressures and counter-pressures upon the content and/or form of the Punjabi novel. Apart from these ideological tensions, which helped shape the aesthetic concerns as well as their articulation, Punjabi fiction had continued to shift back and forth between the rural and the urban, the past and the present, the poetic and the realistic. The historical importance of Gurdial Singh’s fiction lies in the fact that it sought to encapsulate the dialectics of tradition and modernity, even tried to attain a rare synthesis of the two wherever possible, something that had eluded Punjabi fiction until then. Conscious of his role in reconstituting the novelistic discourse, Gurdial Singh ruptured the tradition of the Punjabi novel from within while continuing to nurture it from without.

  Gurdial Singh could very well be seen as an exponent of the regional novel, in the sense in which Thomas Hardy and R.K. Narayan essentially were. In novel after novel, he has assiduously recreated a fictional replica of an insulated, enclosed, provincial world of the Malwa region, where he has lived all his life and whose dreams and desires, folklore and culture he best understands and empathizes with. However, the self-limiting nature of the Malwa region does not in any way prevent Gurdial Singh from giving an artistically wholesome expression to the complexities of life he has set out to explore.

  Gurdial Singh and the Radicalization of the Punjabi Novel

  Gurdial Singh radicalized the Punjabi novel or re-inscribed its ideological and/or aesthetic space by infusing into it a new consciousness about the underprivileged and the oppressed. Commenting upon his first-ever novel Marhi Da Deeva, published in 1964, Namwar Singh, an eminent Hindi critic, is believed to have said: ‘When the novel was a dying art-form in Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century, it was Tolstoy’s War and Peace that resurrected faith in novel as a form. In a similar fashion, when in Indian languages novel was going through its worst ever crisis, Gurdial Singh’s Marhi Da Deeva revitalized this form as only he could.’

  The significance of Marhi Da Deeva lies in the fact that for the first time ever in the history of Punjabi fiction, a social and economic outcast, leaping out of his shadowy terrain, made it to the centre stage of fiction-scape. While seeking to project the sufferings and agonies of the hopelessly marginalized individuals as well as social classes and castes in a rather involved manner, Gurdial Singh has never lost sight of the imaginative and creative demands of his own vocation as a novelist. Steeped in history without being explicitly historical, his fiction mediates its way through myriad, often disparate, crosscurrents of the mainstream and folk traditions of storytelling, latent in both orature and ecriture.

  Gurdial Singh’s Fiction: An Overview

  In one of his novels, Parsa, a low-caste siri, Tindi, requests his benevolent master to tell him an ‘interesting’ story. On being asked as to what really makes for such a story, Tindi first hesitates and then shoots off a counter question: ‘Why are the stories always about
kings and princes?’ More than a mere rhetorical question, it is the very raison d’être of Gurdial Singh’s counter-narratives. He is no less than a messiah of the marginalized, who has consistently and tirelessly tried to put the dispossessed, the dislocated and the de-privileged at the centre of his fiction. From a poor, illiterate farmhand, a small-time worker or peasant to an overburdened rickshaw puller or a low-caste carpenter, it is always the primal rawness of human life that strikes a sympathetic chord in him.

  Conceived as victims of social/historical tyranny, most of his characters fight back even in the face of an imminent defeat. He strongly believes that man’s ultimate dharma is to fight the tyranny and oppression built into his situation. This is what often imbues his characters, even his novels, with a definite sense of tragic inevitability. This tragic sense is more pronounced in his early novels, such as Marhi Da Deeva (1964) and Kuwela (1968) than it is in his later works. While Jagseer in Marhi Da Deeva is an easy prey to the machinations of a beguiling feudal power play, Heera Dei in Kuwela stands firm, refusing to cringe before a taboo-ridden society.

  However, the heroic or revolutionary potential of his characters began to come fully into play with the creation of Bishna in Unhoye (1966) and Moddan in Addh Chanini Raat (1972). Unlike Jagseer, both Bishna and Moddan not only steadfastly refuse to become accomplices in the process of their own marginalization, but also make untiring efforts to rise in revolt. They even go so far as to interrogate the dehumanizing social and legal practices working against them, but stop short of overturning them. It is their lack of self-awareness that ultimately makes failed revolutionaries out of them.

  With Parsa, a Jat-Brahmin, moving centre stage, the dialectics turns inwards. Parsa (1991) has widely been acclaimed as an important cultural text, a triumph of Gurdial Singh’s lifelong commitment to the art of fiction. In Aahan (2008), Gurdial Singh has explored the ways in which the Praja Mandal movement and Jaito morcha, two significant political developments in the history of Punjab, dovetail into the national freedom struggle. Against this backdrop, he has portrayed a very sensitive and sombre picture of a village, Karamgarh, and its hapless people, who first face a natural calamity in the form of a swarm of locusts, and then are subjected to economic and political oppression by the establishment.

  There’s both a touch of authenticity and self-absorption about Gurdial Singh’s ability to fashion a wide range of human characters. For him, man is essentially a social and historical being. As a natural corollary, his characters remain intermediate agents, individualized yet typical concretizations of the context in which they live and operate. He believes that a character is not only important in himself, but also as a vehicle of an idea or an ideology. Both the personal and the collective aspects of character/characterization are equally important for Gurdial Singh, and his portrayals often maintain a delicate balance of the two.

  Gurdial Singh’s creative imagination is imbued with a rare sense of synthesizing power. Like a true artist, he understands the dilemmas and conflicts of both art and life exceedingly well. He is a minimalist in the true sense of the word, as he manages to make it not just an expression of his style, but also the very texture of his vision and thought. No wonder, he is able to strike a precarious, though fine balance between the narrative and the dramatic, the personal and the historical, the political and the artistic.

  Anhe Ghore Da Daan: A Perspective

  Anhe Ghore Da Daan is a significant cultural text, a sort of contemporary classic. It derives its title from an ancient myth associated with the churning of the ocean, in which Lord Vishnu was less than fair in his dispensation of the nectar to the Asuras, supposedly the progenitors of latter-day Dalits. Through this novel, Gurdial Singh emphasizes that just as the Asuras had to depend upon the arbitrary dispensation of the Lord, in the same way, the modern Dalits, too, have to depend on the mercy and compassion of the village overlords. On the days of lunar and solar eclipses, Dalits still ask for alms in the name of the blind horse (which in the myth is shown to pull the chariot of Rahu and Ketu, who despite being Asuras, had partaken of the nectar through subterfuge, while it was being distributed only among the Devtas).

  The events of the novella are confined to one such day of lunar eclipse in the lives of its characters. Often, it is believed that poor, landless and marginalized characters such as Melu, his bapu, his chacha Partapa etc., lead banal and uneventful lives, which are not even worthy of description, let alone artistic treatment. Exploding this myth, Gurdial Singh has created this ‘whirlpool of a novella’ around a spate of events that enmesh the hapless lives of his characters, all in the course of a day. The story begins in the early hours of dawn, when Melu’s bapu is rudely jolted by the unexpected news that Dharma and his family, who belong to the same caste as he, have been uprooted from the house they had lived in for more than twenty years.

  The paternalistic feudal order that had supported their existence and provided for their sustenance is now threatened with collapse, as the market value of land has shot up considerably, slowly giving way to the surreptitious entry of capitalism into the village economy. Now the owners of the land are of the view that it makes much better economic sense to dispossess Dharma and his family and sell the land to factory owners. When persuasion doesn’t work, coercive and ruthless methods are used in collusion with the police and the panchayat. Even the collective strength of the Dalits fails to make a dent in a world insulated by an uninhibited display of power, money and influence. The choices before marginalized characters like Dharma, Melu, and several others like them, are limited: either go down fighting against a tyrannical system, or migrate to a nearby town in search of alternative modes of livelihood. Even the town offers no easy palliatives, as is revealed through the (mis)fortunes of Melu and his friends who struggle to survive in one such town, apparently against all odds.

  Displaced from the village and abandoned by their own community (which nurtures false notions of how they are living in clover in town), they struggle hopelessly to find a resting place there. Lost to both the worlds, these characters ponder over their never-ending dilemmas and conflicts as they oscillate back and forth between the two extremes of ‘home’ and ‘homelessness’. Not only does Gurdial Singh present a very authentic and poignant picture of Dalits in a Punjabi village, caught in the throes of change and flux, with its rigidities of caste politics and prejudices still intact, he also gives a clarion call for social and political change by asking them to make a clean break from crippling traditions and customs.

  Towards the end of the story, the Dalit panch reprimands one such seeker of alms, saying, ‘Nothing will change till you stop colluding in your own oppression.’ The novella ends on a positive note of consciousness-raising.

  Anhe Ghore Da Daan: Approaching the Novella

  Let me now talk about the specific features of Anhe Ghore Da Daan, so that we are able to understand how this particular novella is different from Gurdial Singh’s other novels. Unlike other novels, in which he covers one particular phase in the history of Punjab, Anhe Ghore Da Daan is not set in a particular historical period. Notionally, it is set in the times of transition, when the paternalistic model of rural, agrarian economy in Punjab was being threatened with collapse and technology was slowly entering into urban life. By this reckoning, it would perhaps relate easily to the 1960s, the pre-Green Revolution period, when the dialectics of tradition and modernity had just about begun to operate in Indian as well as Punjabi society.

  Apart from this, Gurdial Singh has made no conscious effort to locate the novella in a particular time frame. Incidentally, in this novella, he has not created a big story of a small man (as he is known to have done in some of his other novels), but he has created a small story of several small men, thrown together in similar situations by fate and circumstance. In other words, he has sought to create several micro-narratives within the frame of a single macro-narrative. As such, it was but natural for him to have paid special attention to the temporal scheme of the novel, which is confined to a single day. The total ‘narrative time’ of this novella is around twelve hours, as the story runs through a complete diurnal cycle, from dawn to dusk. The novella begins in the early hours of the morning and ends somewhere before midnight.