Jaitu, and a childhood spent working

The town of Jaitu, in Faridkot district, sits in the dry Malwa belt of Punjab, a country of small holdings, landless labour and long summers. Gurdial Singh Rahi was born there on 10 January 1933, in a household near the bottom of the local order. His father, Jagat Singh, was a carpenter; his mother, Nihal Kaur, kept the house. Their son grew up watching the difference between those who owned land and those who worked it, and that difference became the material of nearly everything he later wrote. He would end his life as a winner of the Jnanpith Award, India's highest literary honour, and as the writer who put the Punjabi village's poorest people at the centre of its literature for the first time.

There was no cushion in that childhood. At about twelve he left school and went to work beside his father, making cart wheels and beating metal into shape, days of labour that ran to sixteen hours for a few rupees. Married at fourteen to Balwant Kaur, he was already carrying an adult's responsibilities before he had finished being a child. What rescued his education was a single teacher. A headmaster named Madan Mohan Sharma pushed him back towards study against his father's resistance, and Gurdial Singh passed his matriculation while continuing to work at whatever jobs he could find. He went on to take a bachelor's degree in English and history, and completed a master's degree in 1967, by which time he had been publishing fiction for a decade.

The schoolmaster who wrote

In 1962 he took a teaching post at a village school at Nandpur Kotra on a salary of sixty rupees a month, and teaching remained his profession for the rest of his working life, later at higher levels. He was, in the most literal sense, a writer with a day job, and his fiction shows it: he wrote about the people he taught, lived among and had worked beside, in the language they actually spoke, with the Malwa idiom left intact rather than smoothed into a literary standard.

His literary career began in 1957 with a short story, Bhaganwale, published in the journal Panj Darya. Short fiction remained a constant for him, and his collections include Saggi Phull in 1962, Kutta Te Aadmi in 1971, Begana Pind in 1985 and Kareer Di Dhingri in 1991. But it was the novel that made his name.

Marhi Da Deeva

Marhi Da Deeva appeared in 1964, and it changed the shape of Punjabi fiction. Its central figure, Jagseer, is a poor labourer of low caste whose life is bounded on every side by other people's land, other people's decisions and inherited obligations he cannot escape. Gurdial Singh wrote four complete versions of the book over four years before he was satisfied, and the care shows in the finished work: nothing in it is pleaded, and nothing is romanticised. The reader is not told that rural poverty is unjust. The reader simply watches a man be destroyed by it, slowly, in circumstances that everyone around him regards as normal.

The novel established what critics came to call the critical realist tradition in Punjabi fiction. Before it, the Punjab village in literature had been largely a place of heroic romance, folk sentiment and reformist argument. Gurdial Singh removed the decoration. His villages have moneylenders, caste hierarchy, unpayable debt and land that belongs to somebody else, and his sympathies are unmistakable without ever becoming a lecture. Punjabi cinema eventually caught up with him: Marhi Da Deeva was filmed in 1989 by Surinder Singh, and his 1976 novel Anhe Ghore Da Daan was adapted by Gurvinder Singh in 2011 into one of the most admired Indian art films of its decade.

A body of work

The novels continued across four decades. Anhoe came in 1966, followed by Addh Chanani Raat in 1972, Anhe Ghore Da Daan in 1976 and Parsa in 1991, along with plays and a substantial body of writing for children. Late in life he turned to his own story, publishing the autobiographical volumes Neean Mattiyan in 1999 and Dojee Dehi in 2000, which return to the carpenter's workshop and the schoolroom of his Jaitu childhood without a trace of self-pity.

Recognition arrived early and kept coming. Addh Chanani Raat won him the Sahitya Akademi Award in Punjabi in 1975. The Soviet Land Nehru Award followed in 1986, and in 1992 he received both the Bhai Vir Singh Fiction Award and the Shiromani Sahitkar Award, Punjab's highest state honour for a writer. In 1998 the Government of India conferred the Padma Shri on him. The following year came the honour that placed him in the front rank of Indian letters: the Jnanpith Award for 1999, shared with the Hindi writer Nirmal Verma, given for the whole of his fiction and its unflinching treatment of rural life.

Last years and legacy

Gurdial Singh remained based in Jaitu for most of his life, close to the landscape and the people he wrote about, and he was never comfortable with the role of literary celebrity. He suffered a heart attack and subsequent paralysis in his final years, and died on 16 August 2016 at Bathinda, aged eighty-three, survived by Balwant Kaur, a son and two daughters.

His achievement is easy to state and hard to overvalue. A carpenter's son from a Malwa town, who worked with his hands before he worked with words, gave Punjabi literature a permanent record of the lives of people it had previously passed over. Jagseer and the other labourers of his novels are now part of the standard furniture of Indian fiction, taught in universities and translated into other Indian languages and into English. Jaitu produced a writer who never left his subject behind, because he had never been outside it.