Katha Kaho Urvashiਕਥਾ ਕਹੋ ਉਰਵਸ਼ੀ

About the book

Katha Kaho Urvashi is a Punjabi novel by Dalip Kaur Tiwana, one of the foremost novelists of modern Punjabi literature. In 2001 it won the Saraswati Samman, the award given by the K. K. Birla Foundation for an outstanding work in any of India's scheduled languages, chosen from books published in the previous ten years. The honour placed a Punjabi novel at the very top of Indian letters for that year, and it remains the crowning recognition of Tiwana's long career. The novel is autobiographical in character: its heroine is a professor, as Tiwana herself was for decades at Punjabi University, Patiala, and its griefs are drawn from a family marked by early deaths, as hers was.

The title means Tell the Tale, Urvashi, and it is under that name, Tell the Tale Urvashi, that the novel later reached English readers in an Orient Blackswan translation. Readers who come to it expecting the mythological Urvashi of the old tales should know that this is a contemporary novel: the tale being told is the life of a modern, educated Punjabi woman, told against the memory of the family she has lost.

What is Katha Kaho Urvashi about?

The novel opens on the night of the shraadhs, the days set aside for remembering the dead. A middle aged woman, a respected professor and the mother of a young child, lies in bed holding her child and waiting, in memory, for her father, who died before his time. Around that one night the book gathers the ruins of her family: the storms and accidents of life that broke it apart, and her longing for a lost world of family and spiritual values, which the father's wandering spirit seems to recognise and answer.

From that opening the novel follows a woman carrying a double load. She has a career and an intellectual life of her own, and at the same time she is the person her traditional Sikh family leans on: caring for the ageing, holding the household together, absorbing its sorrows. Tiwana's women, here and across her fiction, live under hard pressures, in a world of strained and sometimes broken relationships, yet they remain unbroken themselves, sustained, as the editor of the English translation puts it, by a core of inner strength.

Themes: women, faith and the search for release

The chief theme of Tiwana's fiction has often been described as the inner life of women: their suppressed desires, their secondary place in the family and in society, and the complex duality of the female mind. Katha Kaho Urvashi carries that theme into her own generation of educated, professional women, who won a place in the university and the workplace without being released from the duties waiting at home.

Woven through it is a spiritual search. Tiwana was a devout Sikh, and the novel wrestles with the questions her life put to her: why the young die, what the living owe the dead, and how a person finds release from attachment, the moksha her later work returns to again and again. She draws insight from Buddhism and Hinduism as well as from Sikhism, and pilgrimage runs through her writing as a picture of the search itself: struggle, wandering and self discovery on the way to peace.

The author

Dalip Kaur Tiwana was born on 4 May 1935 in the village of Rabbon in Ludhiana district, into a well to do land owning family, and was educated at Patiala. She took her M.A. with first class honours and a PhD from Panjab University, Chandigarh, joined Punjabi University, Patiala as a lecturer in 1963, and rose to Professor and Head of the Department of Punjabi and Dean of the Faculty of Languages, living on the campus as a life fellow and writer in residence. Her first novel was Agni Prikhya, and in 1971 she won the Sahitya Akademi Award for Eho Hamara Jeevna, the novel that made her name across India. Katha Kaho Urvashi stands late in a list of more than thirty novels. She received the Padma Shri in 2004, and returned it in October 2015 in protest against rising intolerance in the country. She died on 31 January 2020, aged 84.

The Saraswati Samman and the book's standing

The Saraswati Samman is not a language prize but an all India one: a single work is chosen each year from every scheduled language, and earlier Punjabi winners include the poet Harbhajan Singh. Tiwana's win for 2001, announced in January 2002, confirmed what Punjabi readers already knew, that her quiet, inward novels belonged in the first rank of Indian fiction. The English translation, Tell the Tale Urvashi, edited for Orient Blackswan, has since carried the book to readers who cannot read Punjabi, with an editor's essay that calls it her award winning autobiographical novel.

Why does Katha Kaho Urvashi still matter?

Because it gives the modern Punjabi woman, educated, working, carrying her family and her grief at once, a full inner life on the page, at a time when few novels in any Indian language were doing so. It is also a rare bridge between the two halves of Tiwana's world: the university and the ancestral home, the lecture hall and the shraadh. For readers meeting Dalip Kaur Tiwana for the first time, it is the natural place to start after Eho Hamara Jeevna, the work of her maturity, recognised in its own time as one of the finest Indian novels of its year.