Langh Gaye Dariyaਲੰਘ ਗਏ ਦਰਿਆ

Langh Gaye Dariya, in English Gone are the Rivers, is a Punjabi novel by Dalip Kaur Tiwana (1935 to 2020), first published in 1990. Its subject is the end of a world. The household of the Royal Counsellor to the Maharaja of Patiala, a family formed by the ceremony, rank and certainties of a princely court, faces a newly independent India that has no place left for the order its members were raised in, and the family's story moves towards tragedy. The English translation by Bhupinder Singh and S.C. Narula, published in 1998 in the Modern Indian Novels in Translation series, is how most readers outside Punjabi meet the book.

About the book

Patiala was one of the great princely states of Punjab, and its court was a complete society of its own, with its own ranks, rituals and codes. The Indian Novels Collective, which profiles the novel alongside Tiwana's Eho Hamara Jeevna, describes its people as used to the trappings of court in a feudal society and to unquestioning subservience to family honour. That phrase, family honour, is the key to the household: honour is not one value among others but the rule by which marriages, conduct and loyalty are all judged.

Tiwana knew this world from inside. She was educated at Patiala, where her uncle Sardar Sahib Tara Singh Sidhu was Inspector General of Prisons, and she spent her working life there as a professor at Punjabi University. Critics describe her fiction as rooted in the socio-cultural ethos of the erstwhile princely state of Patiala, addressing loneliness, rootlessness and cultural alienation, and an unrecognised longing for an anchor in the stability of the past. Langh Gaye Dariya is that longing given a family and a house.

What is Langh Gaye Dariya about?

Langh Gaye Dariya is about the Royal Counsellor to the Maharaja of Patiala and his family, and about what happens to them when independence changes the nation around them. The family is overwhelmed by the changes in the newly independent country. Its members cling to the crumbling mores of the old order, unsuccessfully, and the story ends with tragic consequences. The counsellor's authority came from the court; when the court's world dissolves, the family is left holding its code of honour in a country that has stopped rewarding it.

The title itself carries the argument. Langh gaye dariya speaks of rivers that have flowed past and gone, the rendering the English translation keeps in its title, Gone are the Rivers. A river cannot be called back, and neither can the Patiala of the durbar. The novel watches a family discover, room by room and relationship by relationship, that the water has already moved on.

Themes: honour, change and a feminine perspective

The Indian Novels Collective praises the novel for interweaving social history and ethnography with fiction from a feminine perspective, and calls it spontaneous, lyrical and compressed to the point of being a marvel of economy and elegance. The feminine perspective matters here: the costs of family honour are rarely paid by the men who proclaim it, and Tiwana's fiction is known for making those costs visible. Across her work, her characters are the downtrodden and the innocent rural folk with suppressed desires and passions, the complex inner duality of the female psyche is her chief theme, and tragedy and irony mark her fiction. In this novel the setting is a great house rather than a village, but the method is the same: an old code, tested through the inner lives of the women who must live under it.

Read beside Eho Hamara Jeevna, also in this Kosh, the novel completes a pair. That earlier book follows Bhano, a poor woman of a farming family, treated almost as a commodity. Langh Gaye Dariya stands at the opposite end of the social ladder, inside a counsellor's household at a royal court. Tiwana's subject across both is constant: what Punjab's codes of honour do to the people, and above all the women, who are made to carry them.

The author

Dalip Kaur Tiwana was born on 4 May 1935 in the village of Rabbon in Ludhiana district, in a well-to-do land-owning family, and was educated at Patiala. She took a first class first in her M.A. and a PhD from Panjab University, joined Punjabi University, Patiala as a lecturer in 1963, and rose to professor, head of the Department of Punjabi and dean of the Faculty of Languages. She wrote thirty three novels in all, of which Langh Gaye Dariya is the eighteenth in the standard lists. Her second novel, Eho Hamara Jeevna, won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1971, Katha Kaho Urvashi won the Saraswati Samman in 2001, and she received the Padma Shri in 2004, which she renounced in 2015 in protest against rising intolerance. She died on 31 January 2020.

Reception and legacy

The novel's widest reach came through translation. Gone are the Rivers, translated by Bhupinder Singh and S.C. Narula and published by Macmillan in 1998 in the Modern Indian Novels in Translation series, carried Tiwana's Patiala to readers across India and beyond, in a series built to move the best Indian-language fiction across languages. The critical praise that has lasted is for its method as much as its story: social history and ethnography folded into fiction, told briefly and lyrically, from a feminine perspective. For readers of this Kosh, it is the natural companion to Eho Hamara Jeevna, Teeli Da Nishaan and Katha Kaho Urvashi, and the fullest picture in Tiwana's work of the princely Punjab that independence brought to an end.