The Village He Never Left

Dhudike, in Moga district of Punjab, is a village with an unusual claim on Indian history: it was the birthplace of Lala Lajpat Rai, and it was also the birthplace and lifelong home of Jaswant Singh Kanwal, the novelist who did more than anyone else to put rural Punjab into Punjabi prose. Born there on 27 June 1919, Kanwal died there on 1 February 2020, having crossed his hundredth year. In between he produced somewhere in the region of forty-five books and became, by common consent, the most widely read Punjabi novelist of his century.

His formal education ended early. As a teenager he left school and travelled to Malaya, part of the large Punjabi migration to Southeast Asia in the interwar years. He returned to Dhudike after a few years and settled there for the rest of his life, farming and writing. He was, in the most literal sense, a village writer — not a city intellectual writing about villages, but a man who wrote about the fields he worked and the people he lived among for eight decades.

A Career Measured in Generations

Kanwal began publishing in the mid-1930s and was still writing in 2019, a working life of more than eighty years that has few parallels in any Indian language. His first significant book, Sach nu Phansi, appeared in 1944. Over the following decades he moved between novels, short stories, poetry and essays, but it was the novel that made him.

His subject was almost always the same: the Punjabi village and the pressures pulling it apart. He wrote about social custom and inherited belief, about caste and land, and — unusually for his generation — about gender equality, giving his women characters interior lives and grievances rather than decorative roles. His prose was plain and fast-moving, deliberately accessible to readers who were not literary specialists, and it is the reason his books sold in numbers that Punjabi publishing rarely sees. Titles such as Poornima and Raat Baaki Hai passed through many editions and became fixtures in Punjabi households.

Lahu Di Lo

His most consequential novel is Lahu Di Lo — The Glow of Blood — built around the Naxalite movement that swept through rural Punjab. It was a genuinely dangerous book in its time. During the Emergency of the mid-1970s it was treated as seditious; it was first published in Singapore and copies were smuggled into India. For a generation of young Punjabis it functioned less as a novel than as a document, and its influence on the politics of the Punjab countryside was real enough that both admirers and opponents acknowledged it.

That a book written by a farmer in Dhudike had to be printed abroad and carried home in luggage says something about both the reach of Kanwal's writing and the anxieties of the state at the time. It also established the pattern of his career: he wrote from inside political movements rather than at a scholarly distance from them.

An Argumentative Public Life

Kanwal's politics moved substantially over his long life, and he never made much effort to smooth the shifts over. He began on the Marxist left, moved towards sympathy with the Maoist current in Punjab, and in later years expressed sympathy for Sikh separatist politics — a turn that caused genuine dismay among his literary contemporaries. He absorbed the criticism without retreating, arguing that he had backed whichever movement seemed to him to promise relief to the struggling rural poor, and did not see the swings as inconsistent. He courted further controversy late in life with his remarks on migrant labour in Punjab.

These positions are part of the record and should be read alongside the work rather than in place of it. What is not in dispute is the literary achievement: no Punjabi novelist of the twentieth century was read by more people, or did more to establish that the ordinary life of a Punjab village was a fit subject for serious fiction.

Honours and a Hundred Years

Recognition came steadily. He was named Shiromani Punjabi Sahitkar in 1990 and received the Sahitya Akademi Award for his novel Taushali di Hanso. The Punjabi Sahit Shiromani Award followed in 2007, and Guru Nanak Dev University in Amritsar conferred a Doctor of Literature on him in 2008. He received the Tagore Literature Award in 2009 and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Punjab Kala Parishad in 2018, at the age of ninety-nine.

Through all of it he stayed in Dhudike. Visitors — and there were many, particularly in his last two decades, when he became a kind of living monument of Punjabi letters — came to the village to find a plainly dressed old man who wanted to talk about crops and books in roughly equal measure. He died at home on 1 February 2020, having outlived nearly every writer he had begun alongside.

For a village-heritage record, Kanwal is close to an ideal case. He was not a villager who left and became famous elsewhere. He was a villager who stayed, and made the village itself the material of a national literature.