Kanwal — The man who refused to be fence sitter

Chandigarh

One may agree or disagree with Jaswant Singh Kanwal, but an undisputed view about him is that he has never been a fence sitter. Perhaps that is why he was slapped with sedition charges for questioning Rajiv Gandhi with Dooja Zafarnama in 1986. And much before that, his most famous novel Lahoo Di Lo had to be secretly printed in Malaysia and smuggled to villages of Punjab, where it attained a cult status.

To celebrate eight-decade-long journey of words of resistance, writers, scholars and activists from across the state will start converging in Moga’s Dhudike village as Kanwal will turn 100 on Thursday.

A five-day “Punjabi Jor Mela” is being organised to celebrate several aspects of Kanwal’s writing. His first novel, a romantic tale Sach Nu Phansi, was published in 1945. The literary critics called him a “linear successor” to father of Punjabi novel Nanak Singh. “His field of concern is the rural Sikh population, whereas Nanak Singh’s field is almost limited to the urban part,” Kartar Singh Duggal and Sant Singh Sekhon writes in A History of Punjabi Literature.

However, Kanwal’s significance lies in giving a new language and thought to the Punjabi society. Sumail Sidhu, a historian and Kanwal’s grandson, says rural countryside became an active eco-system and not a passive landscape in his novels. Besides, he invented an appropriate rural diction for novel.

Kanwal continuously engaged with almost every process that unfolded around him, whether it was the struggle of the landless in 1940s or the Naxalite movement or the Khalistani militancy.

Sukhdarshan Natt, a Left political activist, says: “He always looked at life from people’s perspective and never remained a durbari writer.”

Perhaps that is why his works often invited the wrath of the state. During Emergency, his most famous novel Lahoo Di Lo, themed on the Naxalite movement, had to be printed in Malaysia.

Dr Kulbir Singh Suri, Amritsar-based publisher son of Nanak Singh, recalls that in the early days of 1976, Kanwal had approached him with a work which he termed quite risky. “I held him in high regard, so I agreed to prepare an off-print of the book. Kanwal took that to Malaysia via Kolkata. The prints were brought back from Malaysia and the binding was done here. The book was later secretly sold in villages of Punjab,” he says.