Nange Pairan Da Safarਨੰਗੇ ਪੈਰਾਂ ਦਾ ਸਫ਼ਰ

About the book

Nange Pairan Da Safar, in English A Journey on Bare Feet, is the autobiography of Dalip Kaur Tiwana, one of the foremost novelists and short story writers of contemporary Punjabi literature. In her novels, among them Eho Hamara Jeevna and Katha Kaho Urvashi, Tiwana wrote about women carrying lives that custom had made heavy. In this book she turns to the one life she knew from inside: her own, from a childhood in Rabbon village in Ludhiana district to the head of the Punjabi department at Punjabi University, Patiala.

The Punjab government's Languages Department honoured the book with the Gurmukh Singh Musafir Award in 1982. It was the first of three autobiographies Tiwana wrote, followed by Poochte Ho To Suno and Turdyaan Turdyaan, and it remains the best known: the life story of a woman who walked, as her title says, barefoot, without the cushioning that privilege is supposed to give, from a landowning village family into the front rank of Punjabi letters.

What is Nange Pairan Da Safar about?

It is about Tiwana's own journey. She was born on 4 May 1935 in Rabbon, in a well-to-do landowning family, and educated at Patiala, where her uncle, Sardar Sahib Tara Singh Sidhu, was Inspector General of Prisons. She took first class honours in her M.A. and a PhD from Panjab University, Chandigarh, then joined the newly founded Punjabi University, Patiala in 1963 as a lecturer and rose to professor, head of department and dean of the faculty of languages. The autobiography tells that road as she lived it: the studies, the writing that began with the story collection Sadhana in 1961, the novels that followed one after another, and what it cost a woman of her generation to hold a public, literary life together.

A life told in the first person

Readers of Tiwana's fiction know her ground. The Sikh Encyclopedia sums it up: she has mostly written about the mindscape of downtrodden women and their secondary position in society, women who, even when educated and economically independent, cannot assert themselves as equals for fear of what is at stake. Tragedy and irony, it says, are the main elements of her fiction, and the complex inner duality of the female psyche her chief theme. Nange Pairan Da Safar matters because in it that examination turns inward. The novelist who spent a career asking what Punjabi society does to its women asks the same question of her own life, and answers it in the first person.

Themes: the woman writer's road

The bare feet of the title are the book's argument in one image. A journey made without shoes is made without protection: every stone is felt. Tiwana's life, as the record shows it, joined two worlds that were not made to meet, the village world of Rabbon, where a daughter of a landowning family had a set path, and the university world of Patiala, where she built a career of firsts and honours. The autobiography holds the two together. It is also a document of Punjabi literary life in the second half of the twentieth century, written by a woman who stood near its centre, as Sahitya Akademi winner, professor and, later, the writer who in 2015 returned her Padma Shri in protest against growing intolerance.

The author

Dalip Kaur Tiwana was born on 4 May 1935 in Rabbon village, Ludhiana district, and died on 31 January 2020. She joined Punjabi University, Patiala in 1963 and retired as professor and dean, remaining a life fellow and writer in residence on its campus. She married the sociologist and poet Bhupinder Singh. Her second novel, Eho Hamara Jeevna, won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1971; Katha Kaho Urvashi won the Saraswati Samman in 2001; she received the Padma Shri in 2004 and returned it on 14 October 2015. Her stories and novels have been translated into English, Hindi, Urdu and other languages, and several of her novels were telecast by Doordarshan.

Translation and recognition

The book's own honours begin with the Gurmukh Singh Musafir Award of 1982, given by the Languages Department of the Punjab government for this autobiography. In English it travels as A Journey on Bare Feet, published by Orient Longman, one of a shelf of translations that includes Such Is Her Fate, Gone Are the Rivers and The Tale of the Phoenix. For readers who cannot read Gurmukhi, it is the most direct way into the life behind some of the most read Punjabi novels of the last century.

Why does Nange Pairan Da Safar still matter?

Because Punjabi literature has many great novels by women and few full autobiographies by them, and this is the fullest of its kind from its generation: a Sahitya Akademi winning novelist accounting for her own life with the same honesty she demanded for her characters. Anyone who has read Eho Hamara Jeevna or Katha Kaho Urvashi and wondered what kind of life produced them will find the answer here, told by the woman who lived it, walking barefoot all the way.