Baba Naudh Singhਬਾਬਾ ਨੌਧ ਸਿੰਘ

About the book

Baba Naudh Singh is the fourth novel of Bhai Vir Singh, the writer credited with creating both the Punjabi novel and modern Punjabi prose. Its full title — Subhagji da Sudhar Hathin Baba Naudh Singh, 'The Redemption of Subhagji through the Grace of Baba Naudh Singh' — announces its purpose plainly: this is a homiletic novel, a story meant to teach. It was serialized in Nirguniara, the journal of the Khalsa Tract Society, from 1907 onwards, and published in book form in 1921.

Where Vir Singh's earlier romances — Sundari (1898), Bijay Singh (1899), Satwant Kaur (1900) — recreated the heroic 18th century, Baba Naudh Singh is set in the author's own time. It is a portrait of a Punjabi village imagined as secure, self-sufficient and open to new influences, held together by the leadership of a man of deep humanity, faith and courage.

Plot & themes

The story follows Jamuna, a young Jain widow, whose troubled experiences form the novel's spine. She is decoyed into false positions, given new names and false conversions in rapid succession, and everywhere she goes she meets avarice, lust and sin wearing pious garb. Appalled by men's depravity, she seeks refuge in death and throws herself into a nearby stream.

The plunge becomes her rescue. A young Sikh saint meditating by the stream saves her, initiates her into the ordained Sikh faith, and disappears as suddenly and mysteriously as he appeared — in Vir Singh's transparent symbolism, an emblem of divinity in human form. Jamuna, who has been Dumeli and then Ghulam Fatima along the way, is rechristened Subhagji, 'the Fortunate One'. The wheel of her trials having come full circle, she is freed from the aches and illusions of life.

The novel's didactic bias is open: it seeks to present the Sikh way and vision of life through incident, example and argument. But its lasting value lies in the portrait of the village and in Vir Singh's prose, which critics say achieves its full pliancy and exactitude in this book — plainer than his earlier romances, but more precise.

The author

Bhai Vir Singh (1872–1957) was the central literary figure of the Singh Sabha movement's cultural revival. He founded the Khalsa Tract Society in 1894 and edited its journal Nirguniara, which carried much of his early work. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1955 for Mere Saiyan Jio and the Padma Bhushan in 1956. His annotated edition of Bhai Santokh Singh's Sri Gur Pratap Suraj Granth ran to fourteen volumes and 6,668 pages.

Reception & legacy

Baba Naudh Singh shares with the epic Rana Surat Singh (which Vir Singh began serializing in 1905) the theme of a widow's desperate urge for reunion with her dead husband — a subject Vir Singh returned to repeatedly. Literary histories treat the novel as the point where his prose style fully matured, moving beyond the plain style of Sundari and the metaphorical manner of Satwant Kaur. As a document of the Singh Sabha ideal of village life, it remains one of the clearest statements of what the movement hoped Punjab could become.

Read it if...

you have read Vir Singh's earlier romances and want to see him write about his own time; you are interested in the Singh Sabha movement's vision of Sikh life; or you want a short, purposeful novel in which the teaching is the point and the story is the vehicle.