Nanak Singh's 'Hymns in Blood': Season of hope & despair

Surbhi Goel

CAROLYN Forché coined the genre of poetry of witness in the 1990s, thereby proposing that the ‘poem as witness’ is an experience rather than a symbolic representation. Readers are marked by the encounter with ‘poem as witness’ and turn witnesses to what is presented; the text becomes a living archive for the readers. Nanak Singh intuited this act of witnessing in ‘Khoon de Sohile’ (1948), recording the shocking events of violence, arson and hatred during the partition of Punjab and what it did to its people, communities and the cultural fabric. In the Foreword, the writer traces a brief account of the events and his intentions of recounting the tragedy of Punjab through the novel. The book has been translated into English by Navdeep Suri as ‘Hymns in Blood’, while preserving the linguistic lyricism of the original text in Punjabi.

The agrarian setting of the narrative in Chakri, a village on the banks of Soan in the Pothohar region of Punjab, is recorded through changing seasons, vegetation and how villagers adapt to these through their cyclic activities of cultivation and festivities. In the village, traditions dissolve differences and shared values are an effective antidote to discord — all guarded by the village elders. Baba Bhana is an ideal figure who inspires through his conduct and actions, and this enables propagation of an ethical community in Chakri. This is reflected in his own son and foster daughter, Naseem, both being deeply empathetic.

The villagers have an intense distrust of the British, which is reflected in the collective opprobrium of the village lad, Yusuf, when he joins the police constabulary. However, by the January of 1947, the bonds of kinship, formed over several generations, start showing fissures. The festival of Lohri, which was always marked by community participation, turns sour with communal tensions percolating from the towns. What follows is how opportunism, greed and self-interest co-join with misguided notions of communalism and toxic masculinity to unleash an intense wave of hatred, violence and annihilation. Nanak Singh has not shied away from detailing the perilous journey of escape by the Khatris and the slaughter of the escaping group near the cave. The emotional breakdown of Naseem and Baba Bhana, who miraculously escape the massacre, is described in even greater detail.

In proposing ‘poem of witness’, Forché suggested that such a poem was an event and the trace of the event. A poet experiences the traumatic event involuntarily, but creates another voluntary event, the poem itself. Nanak Singh had no control over the events around Partition. He records these events, shoring up his abilities to tell a vivid tale with immediacy, for posterity. However, as is suggested by the translator, Nanak Singh was also trying to re-imagine a future of communal harmony and united India.

The final event — when the almost-blind, frail, but ethically strong Baba Bhana and his foster daughter, a Muslim, who would not stay with her dying mother but her foster father to protect and support him — is a flicker of hope that Nanak Singh holds on to, the hope of a united and harmonious India, thereby suggesting a voluntary choice for all of us.