Mera Pindਮੇਰਾ ਪਿੰਡ

About the book

Mera Pind, My Village, is a Punjabi book of essays by Giani Gurdit Singh, first published in 1961 by Sahit Prakashan, Chandigarh. It is a portrait of village life in eastern Punjab, built around the author's own village, Mithewal in the Malwa region, and it has been in print continuously since it appeared, reaching a reported 23rd edition. Critics were calling it a classic within the author's lifetime, and it is still recommended for Masters classes in Punjabi literature at several universities.

The book's shape explains its hold. As the critic Dr Jaspal Singh put it, Mera Pind begins as autobiography, becomes the biography of the village of Mithewal, and ends as the story of the people of eastern Malwa and southern Puadh. In its enlarged form it runs to 29 chapters and 480 pages, with 12 comments by critics, moving through customs, folk songs, seasons and village characters. Its first cover carried a design of Phulkari embroidery, the needlework of rural Punjab; in the past two decades its covers have been designed by the artist R. M. Singh.

What does Mera Pind describe?

It describes the whole round of a Punjabi village year and a Punjabi village life. The first part is autobiographical, and covers the beliefs of village people, their devotion to sadhus and sants, their pastimes on long summer afternoons and around winter bonfires, where epics and old tales were retold aloud, and the superstitions and ritual worries that ran through daily life. Festivals and auspicious days are painted in detail: Teean, the girls' festival of the rainy month of Sawan, with its swings, new clothes and giddha dancing, gets some of the book's most vivid pages.

The other gathering place at the book's heart is the Trinjan, the women's yard where girls and married women spun together at night, singing songs of joy and sorrow. Through those songs the book records the whole structure of village kinship: the bride new to her in-laws' house, the mother missing her parental village, the jokes at the mother-in-law's expense, and the rituals that marked conception, birth, engagement and marriage, including the matchmaker, the vichola, and his troublesome opposite. Few Punjabi books hold this much of the old village world in one place, which is why Mera Pind is often called a dictionary of the cultural legacy of Punjab.

The language of the village

What lifted the book above a folklore survey was its Punjabi. Khushwant Singh, writing in The Illustrated Weekly of India, called it a collection of delightful essays on village life in eastern Punjab, a lively picture of pastoral life studded with aphorisms, anecdotes, proverbs and songs. The thing that would give it a long life, he wrote, was that Gurdit Singh had used the Punjabi language as it is spoken by the common people: full-blooded and rugged. The Encyclopaedia Britannica judged it one of the most outstanding books depicting rural life in Punjab, and almost a classic in Punjabi literature.

How was Mera Pind received?

The first reviews set the tone. Gurbachan Singh Talib, in The Tribune in 1961, called it one of the most absorbing books to appear in Punjabi in years, bringing the entire panorama of rural Punjab in prose throbbing with enthusiasm, and he noted that it contained more folk music, with commentary, than had appeared in Punjabi or perhaps any Indian language. Later critics added the cultural reading: Jaspal Singh called it a veritable cultural museum in words, a culture history of Malwa. A substantially enlarged edition, with five new chapters, appeared in 1995, and the book's sales kept its author's newspaper household going for years, according to his family.

The author

Giani Gurdit Singh (1923 to 2007) was born in Mithewal and educated at Punjab University, Lahore, where he took the Giani degree in 1945, specialising in literature, divinity, history and folklore. He was owner and editor of the Punjabi newspaper Parkash from 1947 to 1978, editor of Singh Sabha Patrika from 1973 to 2002, and a member of the Punjab Legislative Council from 1956 to 1962. Mera Pind grew out of a cluster of his 1960 village books: Tith Tihar, Reetan te Rewaj, Mere Pind di Rup Rekha and Viah Dian Rasma. He followed it with Mera Pind da Jiwan in 1967, the three volume Punjab Dian Lok Kahanian in 1971, and major research on the Guru Granth Sahib. The UNESCO prize for Punjabi literature is reported for Tith Tihar in 1960 and for Mera Pind da Jiwan in 1967, and in 2006 he received the Punjabi Sahit Shiromani Puraskar.

Why does Mera Pind still matter?

Because the Punjab it records has largely gone. The spinning gatherings, the bonfire storytelling, the matchmakers and the festival year of a Malwa village survive now mostly in memory and in this book. Mera Pind matters as literature, for the spoken Punjabi its critics praised, and as evidence: students, historians of Punjabi culture and families tracing their own roots all read it to learn how their grandparents' world actually worked. A book that has never gone out of print since 1961 has earned its place in this Kosh.