Punjabi literature
Billing earns top billing
by Jaspal Singh
AVTAR SINGH BILLING has made a name for himself as a short-story writer with the publication of two collections, “Maut de sae heth” and “Apna khoon”. Now he has established himself equally well as a novelist with the publication of his very first “Naranjan Mashalchi” (Ravi Sahit Parkashan, Amritsar).
He is probably among a few novelists in Punjabi who have used new narrative techniques and devices. The novelist skilfully experiments with first person narrative to give expression to his ideas and feelings. Woven around a well constructed plot, “Naranjan Mashalchi” begins from the end and Kashmira Singh, one of the main characters, unfolds the story in the flash-back technique. Naranjan, the protagonist and the father of the narrator, kills his wife before killing himself in a fit of neurotic anger sparked by extreme suspicion and paranoia.
As the people wait for the dead bodies to reach the cremation ground from nearby town hospital where postmortem and certain other legal formalities have to be completed, Kashmira, in deep anguish, follows the memory trail and “sees” the events of last 25 years or so like a film in slow motion.
It is a story of a family of marginal Jat farmers in a village near Khanna. Naranjan, the head of the family, tills his small plot of land which he gets as his share from the joint family of three brothers. Both he and his wife Gurmeet work very hard, yet they lead a wretched life.
With the advent of the green revolution and addition of a little more land, they generate a surplus, buy a new house and sink a tubewell in the field. They send their son Sheera (Kashmira Singh) to school and then to college where he gets stuck in the third year. He is then withdrawn from the college and is engaged in farming. However, his younger sister Jeeto now goes to college as a science student.
With Sheera now looking after the farm, the family becomes a little more prosperous. In the days of hardship both the husband and wife jointly waged a grim struggle for survival. But now with economic ease, the husband gradually becomes redundant, more so after his son’s withdrawal from the college.
At this juncture he is possessed by suspicion, verging on mental sickness, about the doings of his wife who has become totally indifferent to his physical needs. He tracks her movements, thinking that she has gone utterly immoral. This obviously is a false suspicion.
In such a situation Gurmeet, after having totally withdrawn from her husband, remains attached to her daughter. Sheera is usually busy in the field. The old man is isolated and pushed to the wall. He stops taking interest in the village affairs as well where earlier he enthusiastically participated against the wishes of his wife. In fact during night-long singing and dancing in the village, he would be in charge of the torch, which earns him the sobriquet “mashalchi”. More, he would join wandering bards for some time, that is why he could recite and sing many verses based on various legends.
Now in his fifties, this extrovert and indulgent farmer keeps severely to himself. The husband and wife cannot stand each other. The clash of egos and the inordinate urge to dominate create unbearable tension in the family. The husband being alone and alienated, becomes morbidly capricious. Neurotic disorder deepens with time. His wife’s ill-temper and negligence aggravate the malady.
The son tries to resolve the tension by stressing the importance of harmonious husband-wife relationship. He even seeks some psychiatric advice for his father. But in vain. Instead the father believes that everybody around is eccentric and abnormal, always out to harm him in one way or the other. So once a virile Naranjan now behaves like a patient of schizophrenia and in this condition he kills his wife and then kills himself in an attempt to seek release from the intolerable worldly bondage.
Within the framework of this chronological story-line, the novelist has packed a lot of information about the people’s way of life, their beliefs and superstitions, their caste and community relations in the village, their rites, rituals and ceremonies, their festivals and entertainments and how they underwent a transformation from pre-partition days upto the advent of the green revolution and the linguistic reorganisation of the state of Punjab. The emergence of the naxalite movement in Punjab that shook village society in the sixties and seventies is also woven into the novel.
At the time of partition in 1947, the Muslims in the village were converted to Sikhism. They were given sacred “kakkas” to wear. But as soon as peace returned, an army truck came to the village to help them out. All Muslims except one “Ali” happily boarded it with the words,”Sambhalo kachh, kara, kirpan/asin tan challe Pakistan.” (here take your kachh, kara and kirpan; we are off to Pakistan). While departing, they threw the newly made kachhs, and gatras over the gurdwara fence.
Even in the fifties though Sikhism had been formally adopted by most of the farming families, they still practised many Hindu rituals. For instance, faith in sadhus and sants who belonged to various tantaric cults still persisted among the Sikhs. Many Sikhs carried the mortal remains of their elders to Hardwar, not to Kiratpur. Worship of dead ancestors (saradh) Sitala Mata, Guga and certain other local manifestations was common among the Sikhs.
In fact the Punjabi Suba morcha of the fifties and early sixties broke the Sikhs away from the Hindu cults and brought them around the gurdwaras. The morcha also created a little bitterness between the two communities in Punjab since the Hindus were not ready to accept Punjabi as their mother tongue. The Hindus had their own reasons. The wounds of partition were still fresh in their minds.
The new generation of the farming community in the Punjabi-speaking part of Punjab quickly adopted Sikhism, though the elderly people, leaving aside a few jathedars, still practised Hindu rituals and used tobacco. All the villages in Malwa and Puad did not have gurdwaras, though they had shivalas, guga maaris and sitala thaans.
This change in beliefs and perceptions, a relevant topic for sociological studies, is presented in a natural way in the novel. The worship of rain gods in the days of drought and the cremation of a rag doll by village maidens to propitiate the Megh (cloud gods) to drench the parched land have been arrestingly delineated with accompanying incantations. Worship of Sanjhi with songs and verses has been made part of the text. A marriage ceremony, when the baraat stayed for two days has also been given with folk rituals like bonding of the marriage party with a riddle by the girls at the time of the main meal and its unbonding with a recitation by one of the members of the marriage party.
A sample of marriage folk songs particularly “sithanian” (sarcastic songs) has also been given. Even in the fifties brides could not be found for all the boys in the villages. Exchange marriages and “buying” of a bride from the East or from the hills was not a taboo among the farming communities. The village entertainments at that time mainly consisted of jalsas, akharas, nakals, kavishari, dhadhis and so on. Entertainments were organised after the sundown and they went on into late night. Old legends of Punjab or tales from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana were narrated in the form of folk verses and lyrics with the accompaniment of traditional musical instruments.
Politics of Punjabi Suba as it was discussed in the village communities has been realistically presented in an argument mode. The reorganisation of Punjab in the sixties and the advent of the green revolution in the state and the consequent transformation in people’s outlook has been captured vividly but in glimpses. The turbulent sixties in Punjab also gave birth to the naxalite movement which at that time created panic among the landed aristocracy. This movement has been briefly commented upon by introducing a few leftist characters in the novel.
To do justice to all these socio-economic-politico-cultural aspects of life, the novel needs to be of epic proportion. Billing has devised a unique narrative method to present his subject matter in 216 compact pages. His arrangement of events and development of characters in well structured sub-plots make for smooth reading; the book can be finished in a couple of sittings.
Avtar Singh Billing has raised the reader’s expectations and he is a writer to watch in the years to come.

Politics as it is practised
The Insider by P.V. Narasimha Rao. Viking, India. Pp 767. Rs 695.
CONSIDERING the length, the content, the time-frame and the characters, “The Insider” is a book written in epic tradition. The question whether it is an autobiography or part fiction can be endlessly debated by the readers, the critics and the reviewers. The fact, however, remains that this long narrative by Narasimha Rao on the life of Anand is coterminous with his own life. The Machiavellian characters and political mazes encountered by Anand and portrayed in the book are probably the experiences of the author himself which made him one of the most mature players — to the extent of being stoic — in the contemporary political history of India. The moral of the epic is also reasonably well brought out and well woven into the plot: politics is all intrigues hidden under endless onion peels of “morality.”
The question about the autobiographical nature of this book stands reasonably answered on the very first page where the author has recorded his acknowledgements to, “First and foremost, the scores of friends, colleagues and other persons who are fictionalised in this book as characters in the story. They have generously lent their flesh and blood, their tempers and idiosyncrasies, and their remarkable human characteristics.”
Further, in the preface, Rao asserts that “this is not a regular autobiography, nor is it entirely a work of fiction, wherein the writer has the freedom to create characters and improvise the situation at will. It is, however, a tale of Indian politics in two volumes, spanning half a century in which I have tried to mesh historical reality with the lives of several fictional and semi-fictional characters and situations ...” There is also this candid admission that the experiences of the central character are drawn from the experiences of the author.
In American and English literature there is an established tradition of politics-based fiction. Allen Drury’s famous novel “Advice and Consent” and Jeffray Archer’s recent works which liberally draw inspiration from the British political scene are outstanding examples. In India the first literary expose of backroom manoeuvres in the political arena is “The Insider”.
The characters may be fictional but the deeds attributed to them are routine real-life happenings. Take, for example, the birthday celebrations of Mahendra Nath. A committee is appointed under the chairmanship of an octogenarian leader who craves for some public notice after being banished to political backwaters. How well he does his job comes out from the inventory of gifts prepared later by the CBI at the specific instance of the Prime Minister! One reads about these scandals in newspapers, remembers them for a day or two and then dismisses them as inconsequential in the vast terrain of political gun-battles where actions and fighters change very rapidly. Narasimha Rao has woven these situations into a revealing mosaic in his book, which can rightfully be rated as a political epic.
I would not hazard the identification of the characters because many politicians do similar things while in politics. But what is most important is that this book evokes two different and contradictory feelings about politics and politicians. The first is a sense of disgust at the political culture as it has evolved during the past 50 years and the second is sympathy for those who unwittingly enter the whirlpool of politics and then are forced to resort to sleazy actions and dirty antics to keep afloat in the ebb and flow of political tide. And these are the people and these are the games they play for survival and what can the country expect from them in terms of doing real service? This is the question the reader of “The Insider” is bound to ask.
Even though many will disagree, this book projects Narasimha Rao, who was otherwise cautious to the point of being fatalistic when he was the Prime Minister, as a man with courage of conviction. His political opponents will interpret the fictional play in the story in their own critical way, but a student of psychology will surely assess Narasimha Rao as a person whose inner-self was detached from the other self when he played the political games. Probably, no other leader, who had reached the zenith of political power in the country would have liked or dared to expose the moral squalor in which he had to function and climb to the top. It does require tremendous courage to admit and record it all for the benefit of posterity.
Until now Narasimha Rao’s rightful claim to fame lay in setting the country on the path of liberalisation as the Prime Minister. Now with this literary work, he can also claim to have set the pace for cleansing the political system.
The book deals with what happens in state politics and how central leaders influence their state-level counterparts. We should hope that in the second volume Rao would reveal the mysteries of the corridors of power in Delhi.
Detailed comments have to wait on the characterisation of Anand; it is wise to wait for the sequel to properly appreciate the fuller evolution of his character. Overall, the book is definitely a front-runner in this genre of literature, despite long-winding descriptions of political episodes, which may not interest a reader of literature.
— Jivtesh Singh Maini