Baba Boharਬਾਬਾ ਬੋਹੜ

About the play

Baba Bohar, which means The Old Banyan, is a Punjabi verse play by Sant Singh Sekhon, one of the tallest figures of twentieth-century Punjabi literature. It first appeared in 1941, and six years later, in 1947, it appeared again in an enlarged form. It is a play in verse, a story told in poetry rather than prose, and it is the best known of the seven plays Sekhon wrote on Sikh history, out of the twelve full-length plays of his career.

The play has a single setting and a single speaker for most of its length: an old bohar tree, a banyan, standing in a Punjab village. Two village boys sit under it, and the tree tells them the story of the land it has watched for two hundred years. It is history as a tree would tell it: not a list of dates, but a chain of lives, sacrifices and betrayals, told to children who will carry the story on.

The story the tree tells

The tree begins with the death of Guru Gobind Singh in the first decade of the eighteenth century and carries the story forward through two centuries of Sikh and Punjabi history. It recalls the kings and sardars who, as the tree puts it, sold the country for wealth and land, the exiled Maharaja Duleep Singh writing his last letter of complaint to Queen Victoria before his lonely death in Paris, and the freedom struggle that the people, in the tree's words, never lost in any country. The first version of the play ended with the martyrdom of Bhagat Singh in the early 1930s. The enlarged version of 1947 carries the tale on to the independence of India.

The boys interrupt, ask questions and argue, and the tree answers them in verse. That is the play's form: a dialogue between an old witness and young listeners, in which history is not lectured but argued over. The tree has stood through everything it describes, and its authority comes from that endurance. It is a banyan: it has watched generations come and go under its shade, and it remembers what people forget.

A play written before freedom

Baba Bohar was written while India was still under British rule, and its first version appeared six years before independence. Sekhon's impulse, as the introduction to the English translation puts it, was the urge to see Punjab, and by implication the country, free from colonial rule. The enlarged version of 1947 reaches independence itself, but it does not mention the Partition of the country, a silence that later readers have often remarked on. The play looks back at two centuries of struggle. It does not look at the division that came with freedom.

The Sikh Encyclopedia lists a 1964 edition of the play, and it has remained in print in Punjabi ever since. In 2011 the Sahitya Akademi published Seven Plays on Sikh History, Tejwant Singh Gill's English translation of Sekhon's seven historical plays, with Baba Bohar among them, so that readers who cannot read Punjabi can read the play for the first time.

Why does a tree tell the story?

Sekhon could have written a history book. He was, after all, a historian of Punjabi literature. He chose a tree instead, and the choice is the play's meaning. A banyan lives longer than any king or government. It gives shade to everyone, whatever their faith or station, and it asks nothing in return. When the tree tells the story of Punjab, it tells it from below, from the village ground, not from a throne or a textbook. The boys who listen are the play's real audience: the next generation, who must decide what to keep of the past the tree remembers.

The author

Sant Singh Sekhon was born in 1908 at Lyallpur, in what is now Pakistan, and began teaching English in 1931, at Khalsa College, Amritsar. He began by writing short stories in Urdu, then turned to his mother tongue, Punjabi, and became one of its great modern writers: twelve full-length plays, collections of one-act plays, novels, short stories, poetry and criticism, including a history of the Punjabi language. His play Mittar Pyara, about Ghadar patriots and Lenin, won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1972. He died in 1997.

Reception and legacy

Baba Bohar is the most widely read of Sekhon's historical plays, and the one most often staged and quoted. Its image of the old tree has entered Punjabi culture: the bohar that has seen everything and tells it plainly has become a way of talking about history itself. The English translation of 2011 brought it to readers outside Punjab, and reviewers noted how the Punjabi original could still be felt through the English text. For readers of Punjabi drama, it remains the finest example of the verse play as a form for telling history: not a pageant of kings, but a conversation under a tree.