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"...the moment Kunda set his eyes upon Kelu in the dim
light of the lantern, he forgot almost everything he wanted to
ask him. Seeing a huge turban tied upside down and unkempt
beard, as long as the tail of a falcon, he comes across as some
kind of ‘Sardar’. Then seeing his olive-green, checked
shirt, three-four inches wide leather belt around the waist and
trousers with flair, as loose as the bottoms of a salwar, Kunda
could barely suppress his smile between his moustaches."
"Bai, what on earth do you look like, really? said
he with a smile, "It appears as though you have returned
from Amreeka just now".
The above extract
taken from a story titled "The Watch Isn’t Working
Anymore!" tells us about the "microscopic vision"
of Gurdial Singh, a Jnanpith Award winner. Like his character,
Kunda, his eyesight (vision) is penetrating. He can see the
imperceptible "things" without the borrowed
spectacles.
Through Kunda and
his son Kelu, Gurdial Singh unfolds the invisible crisis of
kinship in the Punjab peasantry. While sending his son (Kelu)
off to college, Kunda had to mortgage four acres of land out of
the 13 he owned, "something that had really made him lose
face within the community," After completing his education,
Kelu gets a job far away from his native place. One fine day
arrives Kelu’s letter along with a photograph of his and his
friends—and girls. Kunda cannot stomach this bit about his
friendship with girls. But in the letter Kelu tries to
"console his father: ‘It’s all right. After all, one
has to swim with the current. Even the English used to move
around freely with each other…’"
Kunda is perturbed
to "read" the letter from his "enlightened"
son. The microscopic vision of the short story writer draws a
distinction between the soil of Kunda and the space
that surrounds his son Kelu, who presents his father a watch and
staff to encroach upon the time and space of the vernacular
traditions!
Gurdial expands
the narrative of an inherent tension between soil and space in
another story, "A Season of no Return," which is the
second in Earthy Tones. In this story Kauri, like Kunda,
is not away from her son. She experiences, in the continuous
presence of her son Santokh and daughter-in-law, the pangs of
cleavages between soil and space. Kauri is physically as well as
emotionally imprisoned in the alienated space where her only job
is to look after her grandson in the absence of his parents.
Only in the post-Independence scenario of prosperity can Kauri
be both mother and maid. Could we call it a post-colonial social
formation, particularly after the 1960s?
For Gurdial Singh,
it seems, the primordial goal of colonial revolution is not the
attainment of formal independence from imperialism. No wonder
the Green Revolution in Punjab has failed to liberate Kauri. She
is, in fact, the byproduct of the ‘Green’ prosperity that
has added a new dimension to the dynamics of internal
relationship, besides creating a new model in the open-ended
market economy of Punjab.
Gurdial’s vision
peeps into the barren soil and space of Attra, the central
figure of "Black Bull." Both, the animal and the ‘man’
Attra have the same sin—of being single. Attra, the naïve, or
‘lola’ as the village boys often call him, cannot quite make
out whether his pangs are because of hunger or because of the
cheeks of Bacchni, as soft as butter. His entire self longs for
"a draught of vintage" of relationship. Attra feels
reduced to the level of a "bull," "donkey"
and "dog." Deprived of social life he asks himself:
"Who is mine?" He turns to God, even wishes to crush
Him with a single blow of his spade: "Why did you send me
on this earth as a man. It would have been much better to be
born a bull."
Gurdial’s short
stories, identifying the gap between space and soil, point out
the lack of harmony between people and paradigms constructed for
their growth and development. "Alienated" paradigms of
development tend to pollute their "vernacular" space,
though the soil grows green unevenly. With his microscopic
vision, Gurdial Singh demystifies the romanticism of the
"macro" narrative of "overall" development.
Printed in a bold font and available in paperback, Earthy
Tones is recommended particularly to authors of
macro-paradigms of development who cannot read Gurdial Singh in
Punjabi.
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IT
is easier to translate the discourse of a critic than the
"speech" of a specific cultural space. Aware of it, Rana
Nayar has translated 14 short stories of Gurdial Singh, the
celebrated fiction writer of the Malwa region of Punjab, under the
title Earthy Tones. In the introduction he rightly states:
"Often the local idiom is so deeply embedded in the cultural
layers that any attempt at a simple rendering could, at best, turn
into a contradiction or reduction and at worst, a deflection, if not
a total loss of meaning."
