Haaniਹਾਣੀ

About the book

Haani is a Punjabi novel by Jaswant Singh Kanwal (1919 to 2020), published in 1961. The Punjabi bibliography of Kanwal's works counts it as his eighth novel, coming after Roop Dhara (1959) and before Mittar Pyare Nu (1966). Its title is a common Punjabi word for a mate of one's own age and heart: English lists of Kanwal's books gloss Haani as Soul-mate.

The Sikh Encyclopedia names Haani among Kanwal's important novels, in the company of Puranmashi, Raat Baaki Hai, Civil Lines and Roop Dhara, and English reference lists of his notable works include it too. That standing matters because Kanwal wrote more than thirty novels: Haani is one of the handful that reference works keep singling out. The book is still in print: a current paperback edition in Punjabi (Gurmukhi) runs to 168 pages.

What is Haani about?

Haani is about two young women of the labouring quarter of Baddowal village, Dhanto and Biro, and their search for a mate of the heart, a haani, in a village order stacked against them.

Dhanto's mother Tapi and Dhanto herself labour all day at bone-breaking work, while Tapi's husband Kishna, called Feela, does no work at all. An addict, he sits the day out talking at the shop of Jagna the Brahmin and blows the women's earnings on his addiction. Drunk, he abuses Tapi, who never answers back, though Dhanto hates it. Around the household sit Feela's sworn brother Kara, a retired soldier from Pamal village whom the village does not respect because of the story of his mother's past, and Mana, the strong cousin who is the one man Feela fears.

Dhanto's close friend is Biro, from the houses of the vehra, the labourers' quarter: quick, clever and sharp-tongued, courted by landlords' sons but too proud for any of them to dare approach her. When heavy rains flood the village and Feela's mud house collapses, the two friends' lives turn on the same search: each is looking for her haani. Dhanto finds hers in Modan. Biro, in the Punjabi account's plain phrase, is left empty of the happiness of a mate. Through this love story, the novel aims its satire at the economic and caste subordination on which village life rests.

Themes: love against caste and money

Kanwal's fiction is known for its realistic picture of rural Malwa, written with a generous use of the Malwai dialect, and Haani belongs to that body of work. The Sikh Encyclopedia describes his method across the novels: he satirises the misdeeds of unscrupulous rich people, inspires the downtrodden to rise in strength and unity, and argues for a socialistic pattern of society, with a fair use of sentimentality. English accounts add that his writings question firmly held social customs and beliefs, and champion social and gender equality.

Haani puts those commitments inside a love story. The question the novel asks is not only whom Dhanto and Biro will love, but what a woman's labour, caste and poverty allow her to choose. One friend finds her mate and the other does not, and the difference between them is not worthiness: it is the village's arithmetic of money and caste, which the novel exposes by letting the reader feel it as a love story first.

The author

Jaswant Singh Kanwal was born on 27 June 1919 in Dhudike village, now in Moga district, and lived there nearly all his life. He left school young, spent his teenage years in Malaya, where his interest in literature began, and returned to farm in Dhudike and to write. In all he published around a hundred books, among them more than thirty novels, beginning with Sach Nu Phansi in 1944.

His honours include the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship for his story collection Pakhi in 1996, the Sahitya Akademi Award for the novel Taushali Di Hanso in 1998, the Punjabi Sahit Shiromani Award in 2007, and an honorary Doctor of Literature from Guru Nanak Dev University in 2008. Often called the writer of movements, he died at Dhudike on 1 February 2020, aged 100. His Puranmashi, Raat Baaki Hai, Lahu Di Lo and Taushali Di Hanso are also in this Kosh.

Translations and legacy

Haani travelled beyond Punjabi early. A Hindi translation appeared in 1976 under the title Milan, and a Shahmukhi edition carried the novel to Punjabi readers in Pakistan. No English translation is recorded in the sources for this page, so the novel's reputation in English rests on its place in Kanwal's bibliography rather than on a translated text.

Within that bibliography its place is secure. Kanwal is considered in many respects the real successor of Nanak Singh, the father of the Punjabi novel, and Haani shows why readers kept faith with him across six decades: a village love story, told in the language of Malwa, that refuses to separate the heart's choices from the caste and cash that govern them. For readers meeting Kanwal for the first time, it is a gentler door into his work than the movement novels, and the reference books treat it as one of the essential ones.