Archiving Punjabi’s pioneering magazine
As Preetlari steps into its 80th year, the National Archives at New Delhi acquires the back issues
Nirupama Dutt

"Readers would stand on their terraces looking for the postman who would bring their copy of Preetlari," says Punjabi writer Gulzar Singh Sandhu commenting on the great yesteryear popularity of the monthly magazine. "To be published in Preetlari meant that you had made it as a writer," adds short fiction writer Mohan Bhandari. Late Ram Sarup Ankhi, novelist, confessed to stealing Preetlari from the letterbox of a neighbour in Barnala. Such was its pull.

Its decline began with the death of its founder-editor Gurbax Singh Preetlari (1895–1977), but it has survived the onslaught of time. This is no mean task, whereas other popular Punjabi magazines like Mohan Singh’s Panj Dariya, Bhapa Pritam Singh’s Arasi or Amrita Pritam’s Nagmani are now a thing of the past. Readers have issues with its content and quality as of now but it has survived and there are no two opinions on the fact that it was the forerunner of a movement of literary magazines in Punjabi. It is for this reason that first an offer came from P.C. Joshi Library at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi and then Mushirul Hasan, who was Director of the National Archives till recently, approved its acquisition.

At an intimate function in the premises of the Archives on Janpath, issues of the magazine covering a period of 24 years, were formally handed over and the others are to follow. According to Poonam Singh, Editor, "Preetlari has seen many ups and downs but we have somehow survived and by doing so also kept alive the secular and progressive values it stood for."

This magazine, multi-lingual at first, was started by Gurbax Singh, a US-educated civil engineer in 1933. He also set up a cultural village named Preet Nagar, at a spot equidistant from Lahore and Amritsar. The magazine’s name was suffixed to his name. Preet Nagar had the best of litterateurs and artists of the times associated with it. To name but a few: Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Balraj Sahni, Sahir Ludhianvi, Nanak Singh, Amrita Pritam, Balwant Gargi, Upendra Nath Ashq, Sobha Singh and Mohan Singh. It may have become Punjab’s own Santiniketan but for the Partition. It was cut off from Lahore and reduced to a border village in this part of Punjab. The magazine continued and so did the founder’s popularity among the readers but its English, Urdu and Hindi editions closed down. It then passed to the Gurbax Singh’s writer son, Navtej Singh, after his father’s death, who died young of cancer, and his son Sumeet Singh, who tried to keep it alive against all odds, was gunned down by militants in 1984 when he was barely 30. Sumeet’s wife Poonam, still in her twenties, decided to carry on with it, saying: "Preetlari still has a lot of blood to shed, so what if Sumeet is gone." In a few years, remarried to Sumeet’s younger brother, the two steered it together. Sandhu says: "Former Chief Secretary, Punjab, late P.H. Vaishnav, put it on terra firma by establishing a trust." A corpus fund of Rs 25 lakh was sanctioned by the Punjab Government and the interest could be utilised for its publication. "The old glory may not be there but Poonam has bravely gone on with the task," says Bhandari. It remains to be seen if Gen-next will enthuse it with fresh vision and thought. to steer it to a hundred years or even more. Amen!

HOME