Nanak Naam Chadhdi Kalaਨਾਨਕ ਨਾਮ ਚੜ੍ਹਦੀ ਕਲਾ

About the novel

Nanak Naam Chadhdi Kala (Blessed Are Those Who Remember God) is a Punjabi novel by Kartar Singh Duggal, published in 1989 by Navyug Publishers, New Delhi. It is the first volume of a trilogy, completed by Tere Bhane (1991, As Willed by You) and Sarbat Da Bhala (1992, The Welfare of All), which together, in the judgement of the scholar Anne Murphy, take as their scope a comprehensive view of Sikh history. Duggal was in his seventies, already the master of the Punjabi short story, when he turned to the largest canvas his tradition offers: the age of the Gurus, retold as the story of one family.

The book's scale shows in its construction. It is structured in four sections, each with forty small chapters, comprising in total a linear narrative about a family, though loosely structured and at times straying far from clear linear development. It arrived framed as scholarship as well as fiction: Principal Satibir Singh's foreword opened with references to Rattan Singh Bhangu's early nineteenth century Prachin Panth Prakash and to M. A. Macauliffe's six volume The Sikh Religion of 1909. The novel has not been translated into English, and Murphy's essay in Cracow Indological Studies remains its fullest scholarly reading.

What is Nanak Naam Chadhdi Kala about?

Nanak Naam Chadhdi Kala is about how the Sikh tradition was born and carried, told through ordinary people caught inside great events. It opens, unexpectedly, in the recent past: the Punjabi Suba movement of the 1950s and early 1960s, with jailed demonstrators singing Raj Karega Khalsa day and night, and prisoners reciting the Babur Bani, Guru Nanak's verses on Babur's invasion of India. Through that doorway the narrative steps back four centuries. Guru Nanak enters the story as a character, shown as one of many imprisoned by Babur's forces, his voice singing out in imprisonment and haunting Babur, and his life is then summarised in key scenes and incidents.

Around the Guru's story Duggal builds his family's. Teji, renamed Mumtaz after she is kidnapped, and Nasrin are both taken captive by soldiers of Babur's army, forcibly married and assaulted, and they become friends through their shared experience. Their sons, Shaili and Aman, carry the bulk of the volume: Aman stays close to the Guru and the community gathered around him, and his letters open windows into the lives and seva of the early Sikhs, while love and intrigue keep the human story at the centre. Aman falls in love with Shakti, and later meets Sundari, a woman captured by an official who intended to marry her; when Shaili recovers her but rejects her for having lived in another man's household, Aman decides to marry her himself, convinced of her innocence. Shaili eventually marries Naseem. The Janam Sakhis and the Mahima Prakash are woven through as the novel's own sources, so that the book shows the tradition being told even as it tells it.

A storyteller, not a historian

Duggal stated his method himself at the opening of the volume. Born in a Sikh family, he wrote, he did not claim to be a historian: this effort was the story of the distinguishing features of the Sikh faith, in the words of a short story writer. He was not telling the history of Sikhism, he said, but a story that reflects that history as he understood it, and every literary work, for him, was a writer's search within the self to understand self, community and culture. He had prepared for a generation. An earlier trilogy, Hal Muridan Da (1962), Man Pio Jae (1974) and Jal Ki Pias Na Jai, had searched, in his phrase, for the shape of Punjab. The Guru trilogy is that search carried to its source. The Sundari episode makes the lineage explicit: Murphy reads Duggal's Sundari against Bhai Vir Singh's Sundari of 1898, the first modern Punjabi novel, and finds the later writer deliberately answering the earlier one's vision of the Sikh past.

The author

Kartar Singh Duggal (1 March 1917 to 2012) was born in Dhamal, in Rawalpindi district, now in Pakistan, and took a master's degree in English from Forman Christian College, Lahore. He joined All India Radio in 1942 and rose to station director, left in 1966 to lead the National Book Trust of India, and later served as an information advisor in Delhi. Across his career he published twenty four collections of short stories, ten novels, seven plays, seven works of literary criticism, two collections of poems and an autobiography, writing in Punjabi, Urdu, Hindi and English. His honours include the Padma Bhushan and the Sahitya Akademi Award, which he won for the story collection Ik Chhit Chanan Di, also in this Kosh. The Guru trilogy, written in his seventies, was his last great undertaking.

Reception and legacy

Because the novel has never been translated, its reputation rests with Punjabi readers and with the scholars who have carried it into English discussion. Murphy's study treats it as a key case of how modern Punjabi literature constructs Sikh history: a narrative in which exclusionary and plural impulses coexist, where the story of the Gurus is told through women, captives and letter writers as much as through the famous. Within Duggal's own body of work it stands as the summit of his second career, the short story master's long, late act of remembrance. For readers coming from his Partition fiction, Nanak Naam Chadhdi Kala shows the same moral attention turned from the Punjab that was divided to the Punjab that was founded.