Nangi Dhupਨੰਗੀ ਧੁੱਪ

About the book

Nangi Dhup (Naked Sunlight) is a semi-autobiographical Punjabi novel by Balwant Gargi, known in English as The Naked Triangle, whose title page carries the subtitle An Autobiographical Novel. Gargi is remembered first as a playwright, the author of Loha Kutt and the founder of university theatre teaching in Punjab, but reference accounts single this book out, with his Folk Theatre of India and Kashni Vehra (The Purple Moonlight), as one of the works that brought him to the forefront of cosmopolitan attention: a Punjabi writer's life, told as a novel, in two languages and on two continents.

The book grows out of a real chapter of his life. Gargi taught for two years, 1966 to 1967, at the University of Washington in Seattle, and reference accounts state plainly that this period was the basis of The Naked Triangle. There he met Jeanne Henry, called Jeannie in the book, who later became his wife. So the novel is autobiographical in its frame and its people, while Gargi himself, in his preface, warns the reader how he has handled them: he used some real names, characters and situations, he wrote, and mixed them with some imaginary ones.

What is Nangi Dhup about?

Nangi Dhup is about a visiting Punjabi professor in Seattle and the women who gather around his life there, above all Jeannie. The book opens with the narrator already dating three girls in Seattle and asking himself whom to marry, whom to promise, whom to betray. Jeannie, who edited a bulletin of the Fisheries Department, joins the special six week course on Indian culture he has started at the University of Washington. She brings him home made cake instead of bakery doughnuts, takes his laundry away and returns it washed and ironed, corrects the proofs of his book with him in cafes, and waits up knitting socks for him the night he stays out with another student, Marcea. That night, overwhelmed by her devotion, he decides to marry her, and three months later they are married at a magistrate's house on the banks of Green Lake, Jeannie in a gold edged silk sari with a red mark on her forehead, nine of his students as wedding guests.

Around that central story the book keeps moving between Seattle and the life he has brought with him from Punjab: the celebrated playwright abroad, honoured by a university, is at home a language writer of modest means, and he tells Jeannie so plainly, warning her of the heat, hardship and hard life waiting in India. She answers as an idealist who has dreamed of India since childhood and is ready to surrender her American citizenship for it. The triangle of the English title is the shape of his emotional life in those years: loyalty to one person pulling against desire for another, told without a covering layer of respectability, which is what the Punjabi title's naked sunlight also promises.

Themes: betrayal, desire and candour

Gargi named his theme himself in the book's preface: betrayal. How men and women deceive each other when they make love, how they lie in their search for truth, how being disloyal to one makes them madly loyal to the other, and the power and torture of desire, its ecstasy and its destructive nature. He also described his method there: the narrative does not follow a strict chronological order, flashbacks and flash forwards intermingle, and events and images are telescoped, the way his eye takes a horse not from head downwards but from its flying mane or kicking hooves. For a Punjabi book of its time this frankness about sex, marriage and self deception was the point and the provocation: the playwright who had scandalised the Punjab countryside with Loha Kutt in 1944 now turned the same unsparing light on himself.

The author

Balwant Gargi (4 December 1916 to 21 April 2003) was born at Sehna, in Barnala district, and studied at Government College and Forman Christian College, Lahore, taking master's degrees in English and political science and learning theatre with Norah Richards. His plays, among them Loha Kutt, Kesro, Kanak Di Balli, Sohni Mahiwal, Sultan Razia and Dhooni Di Agg, were translated into 12 languages and performed in Moscow, London, New Delhi and the United States. He won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1962 for Rang Manch and the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 1998, and he was the founder director of the Department of Indian Theatre at Panjab University, Chandigarh, where his students included Anupam Kher and Kiron Kher. His Loha Kutt and Kanak Di Balli are also in this Kosh.

Reception and legacy

The English book carried opinions that show how it landed. Elia Kazan called it full of raw passion and a sense of loneliness, critical, honest and brutal. Mulk Raj Anand praised Gargi's courage in submitting himself to self examination and called it the most daring book. Khushwant Singh wrote that Gargi spares neither himself nor the women he loved, and compared his character portrayal to an impressionist painter's dabs of colour resolving, in perspective, into a careful design on the theme of love and lust gone sour. Reference accounts credit the two semi-autobiographical novels, this one and Kashni Vehra, with bringing Gargi cosmopolitan attention beyond the theatre world. Nangi Dhup remains his most personal book: the one in which Punjab's great man of the stage made himself, and not a village or a legend, the subject under the light.