A love story, 100 years ago

The late Hazara Singh Cheema started working on this novel in 1927 as a law student and finished it a decade later. Busy in his legal practice, he could not publish it. He thought he had lost the manuscript when shifting from Lahore to Amritsar during Partition. His son found it at their Amritsar home in 1981. Hazara Singh passed away suddenly in 1983, but not before instructing his family to have it published. That wish has finally been fulfilled.

Set in the Punjab of the 1920s and ’30s, ‘Rural Romance’ is the love story of Jwandu, a tall and sturdy Jat boy, and the beautiful Bibi Banto, the daughter of a Brahmin widow whose husband had passed away when Banto was only two years old.

The two, madly in love, keep their affair a secret, but the rumour mills in the village are on an overdrive. Banto’s mother thinks her daughter is possessed by spirits and sets a date for her wedding to an older, wealthy man. Jwandu and Banto elope on the day of her wedding.

The novel has vignettes aplenty of the customs, traditions, and the social as well as economic patterns that defined the region nearly a century ago. The book though is marred by poor editing and proofreading. A reprint perhaps can take care of the several avoidable errors.