Khoon De Sohileਖੂਨ ਦੇ ਸੋਹਿਲੇ

About the book

Khoon De Sohile — 'Hymns in Blood' — was first published in February 1948, months after the Partition it describes, by Nanak Singh (1897–1971), the writer widely regarded as the father of the Punjabi novel. With little formal education beyond the fourth grade, Nanak Singh wrote fifty-nine books — thirty-eight of them novels — and received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1962 for Ik Mian Do Talwaraan. Khoon De Sohile is his Partition novel, written while the wounds were still open.

In 2022 the novel was translated into English for the first time by the author's grandson, the former diplomat Navdeep Suri, and published by HarperCollins India as Hymns in Blood — seventy-four years after the Punjabi original, and as urgently relevant as ever.

Plot & themes

The novel is set in 1947 in Chakri, an idyllic village on the banks of the Soan near Rawalpindi, surrounded by stalks of golden wheat and festive songs. Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs live side by side, eagerly awaiting the end of winter and getting together to prepare for Lohri. Amidst this joyous bustle, Baba Bhana, the erudite village elder, worries about the future of his foster daughter, Naseem.

Then news of a possible partition of India reaches the village, and life comes to a halt. Amid a frenzy of communal violence, Baba Bhana and his family must reluctantly leave their beloved village and embark on a long and dangerous journey, slowly coming to terms with the fact that their lives may be changing forever.

Nanak Singh's theme — in his grandson's phrase — is that 'a commitment to humanity is sacred, while adherence to religious faith is a personal matter.' The tide of communal violence that swept through Punjab in 1947 and the havoc wrought upon the Hindu and Sikh communities of the Pothohar was real, the novel insists, but so was the raw courage of some of the Muslim protagonists while trying to save their neighbours. The unshakeable bond between Baba Bhana Shah and Chaudhry Fazal Karim is the book's emotional centre: a deeply felt balm on the wounds of Partition.

The author

Nanak Singh (1897–1971) is, with Bhai Vir Singh, one of the two founders of the Punjabi novel. His social novels — Chitta Lahu (1932), Pavitra Papi (filmed in 1968), Adh Khidya Phul, Ik Mian Do Talwaraan (Sahitya Akademi, 1962) — exposed hypocrisy and injustice with a reformer's zeal and a storyteller's pace. Chitta Lahu was translated into Russian by Natasha Tolstoy. He wrote of rural Punjab, moneylenders, caste and the Partition with an insider's authority.

Reception & legacy

On its 2022 republication, HarperCollins presented Hymns in Blood as 'a timely reminder of the grief and trauma that a religious divide brings in its wake' — a classic Punjabi novel from 1948 that 'will resonate deeply with readers in 2022 and beyond, and also hopefully act as a cautionary tale.' Scholars of Partition literature read it alongside Pinjar and Train to Pakistan as one of the essential Punjabi accounts of 1947 — distinctive for being written almost contemporaneously, in February 1948, and for its insistence on inter-community courage amid the violence.

Read it if...

you have read Pinjar and Train to Pakistan and want the third essential Punjabi Partition novel; you are interested in the Pothohar — the now-Pakistani Punjab Nanak Singh knew; or you want a Partition novel whose message is healing rather than revenge.