Lahu Di Loਲਹੂ ਦੀ ਲੋ

About the book

Lahu Di Lo, in English Dawn of the Blood, is a Punjabi novel by Jaswant Singh Kanwal about the Naxalite movement in Punjab. Written in the Emergency years of the 1970s, it was refused by publishers in India, printed in Singapore in 1975 and smuggled home, then published openly in Punjab once the Emergency had ended.

Reference works call it Kanwal's most notable novel, and it has been translated into English. Detailed plot summaries of the book in English are scarce, and this page does not invent one: what the record establishes firmly is the novel's subject, the extraordinary story of its publication, and its standing as the book by which the novelist of Dhudike is best known.

Why was Lahu Di Lo published in Singapore?

Because no publisher in India would touch it. The novel, based on the Naxalite movement in Punjab, was controversial during the Emergency of the 1970s, when political writing faced heavy pressure. Kanwal had the book published in Singapore instead and smuggled copies into India. A New Left Review essay on the Punjabi Maoist years dates that Singapore printing and smuggling to 1975. Only after the Emergency was lifted was the novel published openly in Punjab; a Delhi edition from Aarsi Publishers is catalogued under 1978.

The movement behind the novel

The Naxalite current reached Punjab from the Naxalbari rising of 1967 and the formation of the CPI (Marxist-Leninist) in 1969, whose supporters called India semi-feudal and semi-colonial and backed guerrilla struggle. Punjab made an unlikely setting: the Green Revolution was filling its villages with tractors, tubewells, fertilisers and credit cooperatives. Yet Maoist ideas seeded a fierce underground culture of magazines, poems and secret meetings, and the young men who joined the movement in Punjab faced arrest, torture and death. Lahu Di Lo is the major Punjabi novel of that moment, written by a sympathetic insider of the left rather than by a distant observer.

Themes: land, revolt and the village

Kanwal's fiction, the Sikh Encyclopedia records, specialises in realistic, rural and rustic life in the Malwa region, with the Malwai dialect used for local colour. He satirised the misdeeds of unscrupulous rich people and encouraged the downtrodden to rise in strength and unity, arguing for a fairer, socialistic pattern of society. Those commitments run through his whole shelf: his writings question firmly held social customs and beliefs, and his popular novels champion social and gender equality. Lahu Di Lo turns that village realism onto armed revolt, asking what drove Punjab's young men to take up the gun and what it cost the villages that sheltered them.

The author

Jaswant Singh Kanwal was born on 27 June 1919 in Dhudike, Moga district. He left school as a young teenager and went to Malaya, where he first became interested in literature, then returned to Dhudike and lived there for the rest of his life, farming and writing in the village he wrote about. His first novel, Sach Nu Phansi, appeared in 1944, and he went on to publish dozens of books. He died at Dhudike on 1 February 2020, aged 100.

His honours include the Sahitya Akademi Award for his novel Taushali Di Hanso, the Punjabi Sahit Shiromani Award in 2007 and an honorary Doctor of Literature from Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar in 2008. The Sikh Encyclopedia calls him, in many respects, the real successor of Nanak Singh, the father of the Punjabi novel.

Why does Lahu Di Lo still matter?

It matters because of the double rarity of the book: a major novel about Punjab's Naxalite years, and a book that had to be printed abroad and smuggled home to reach its own readers. Kanwal's earlier novel Raat Baaki Hai, his chronicle of the sharecroppers' movement, was once so popular that excerpts were read aloud on loudspeakers in the villages. Lahu Di Lo carried that same direct line between the Punjabi novel and Punjab's political struggles into a darker decade, and it remains the fullest fictional record of the movement in Punjabi.