Adh Khidya Phulਅੱਧ ਖਿੜਿਆ ਫੁੱਲ

Adh Khidya Phul, in English The Half-Blossomed Flower, is a Punjabi novel by Nanak Singh (1897 to 1971), the writer honoured as the father of the Punjabi novel. Set in the Punjab of the 1920s, it tells of Kuldeep Singh, a political prisoner in Lahore jail, whose longing for home carries him through his sentence, and of the broken life he must remake when freedom finally comes. Few Punjabi novels carry so much of their author's own life inside them: Nanak Singh first drafted this story during his own months in a Lahore jail, and its English translation, A Life Incomplete, brought it to world readers in 2012.

What is Adh Khidya Phul about?

Kuldeep Singh is serving a jail term for taking part in anti-British agitations. All that sustains him through his dark days in jail, his publisher writes, are thoughts of his beautiful wife Satwant and the dream of going home. He is desperate to return to Peshawar and to mend fences with Satwant, who had suspected him of being unfaithful. In jail he strikes up an unusual friendship with a Pathan guard, Ahmed Khan, a bond the translator held up as a testimony of inter-faith tolerance at a time when hostility between Hindus and Muslims was on the rise.

When Kuldeep finally comes home, he finds that Satwant has died, leaving behind their infant child. His world collapses, and he is pulled in different directions: a holy man urges him towards renunciation, his childhood friend Saroj has always loved him, and he finds himself drawn to Prakash, his child's maid, a tempestuous woman who hides an unsavoury past. In the ending that readers remember, Kuldeep hands his infant son to his Muslim friend Ahmad and Ahmad's wife Zubeida, and the beauty of the story, as the scholar Mohinder Singh put it at the translation launch, lies in Ahmad's care to raise the Sikh child while observing Sikh taboos, such as the one against tobacco. The translator Navdeep Suri calls the book a tragedy: an intense meditation on the choices people make and the consequences those choices carry.

A novel first drafted in a jail cell

The novel grew out of Nanak Singh's own imprisonment. It is based on his ten month stay in Lahore jail in the 1920s: he wrote a first draft in jail and redrafted it eighteen years later as the finished novel. Kuldeep is an autobiographical character, cast, as Suri says, in the shade of the writer himself. Saroj, too, has a real model: as a youngster Nanak Singh had loved a child widow named Savitri, on whom the character of Saroj is modelled, and his message against child marriage runs through the book.

Readers should know that the book's first year is reported differently. HarperCollins, which publishes the English translation, dates the Punjabi original to 1940. The Encyclopaedia of Indian Literature tradition, as carried in the Sikh Encyclopedia's survey of Nanak Singh's novels, lists Adh Khiriaphul among the novels of his second phase with the year 1948. This page reports both dates rather than choosing between them: what is certain is the jail draft of the 1920s, the long gap, and the redrafted novel that followed.

Themes: choice, faith and the half-opened life

The half-blossomed flower of the title is a life cut off before it could open fully, and the novel returns again and again to the moment where a person's road forks. Its publisher points to the author's engagement with the social questions of his Punjab: superstition and blind faith, religious bigotry, casteism and the emancipation of women, and judges that engagement as fresh today as when he wrote. Against those forces the book sets private loyalties: a prisoner's friendship across the religious divide, a friend's lifelong love, and a father's decision about who will raise his son. Character, in Nanak Singh's fiction, decides the incident, and the incident then tests the character.

The author

Nanak Singh was born as Hans Raj on 4 July 1897 at Chak Hamid in Jhelum district, and took the name Nanak Singh after embracing Sikhism. Jailed for some time as an Akali satyagrahi, he read the Urdu novelist Premchand in jail and found Gandhian egalitarianism easy to hold together with Sikh humanism, a dual spirit that runs through his novels. He wrote 59 books, including 38 novels, among them Chitta Lahu, Pavitar Papi, Khoon De Sohile and Agg Di Khed, all in this Kosh, and won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1962 for his historical novel Ik Mian Do Talwaran. He died on 28 December 1971. His full entry is in the people section of this Kosh.

Reception and the English translation

At the launch of the English translation, Mohinder Singh, honorary director of the Bhai Vir Singh Sahitya Sadan, rated Adh Khidiya Phool as the best among Nanak Singh's 59 works. The Punjabi original was by then in its 30th reprint, a mark of how steadily Punjab's own readers have kept the book in print. The translation, A Life Incomplete, was the first English rendering of the novel. It was translated by the author's grandson, the diplomat and writer Navdeep Suri, published by HarperCollins India, and released in New Delhi in February 2012 at the Bhai Vir Singh Sahitya Sadan. It was Suri's second translation of his grandfather's work, after Pavitra Paapi appeared as Saintly Sinner in 2003, and it carried the novel to the Punjabi diaspora and to readers who cannot read Gurmukhi.