Nawan Jahanਨਵਾਂ ਜਹਾਨ

About the book

Nawan Jahan — 'The New World' — is a 1942 poetry collection by Dhani Ram Chatrik (1876–1954), the writer widely regarded as the founder of modern Punjabi poetry. It appeared late in a long bibliography: Fullan Di Tokri (1904), Bharthri Hari Bikramajit (1905), Nal Dmayanti (1906), Dharmvir (1912), Chandanwari (1931), Kesar Kiari (1940) — and after it, Noor Jahan Badshahbegum (1944) and Sufikhana (1950).

The date matters. Published in the middle of the Second World War, with India under colonial rule and the freedom movement at full pitch, Nawan Jahan is Chatrik's vision of what should rise from the ruins: a new world built on the ruins of the old order's injustices.

Plot & themes

Chatrik's poetry is written in simple, fresh vocabulary meant to be understood by the masses, and Nawan Jahan is his most programmatic statement. Its poems imagine a world without the divisions that obsessed him all his life: caste and creed buried, as his famous poem 'Kora Qadir' puts it — 'You a Sayyid, I a Brahmin, let us finish this foolish din. We have to bear each other... Let our hearts be one this evening.'

The collection's other great theme is labour. Chatrik's best-known lines depict peasant life in narrative, almost qissa-like style — 'Toorhi tand saamb haarhi vech watt ke... Maarda damaame jatt mele aa gya' — the Jatt going to the fair beating his drum, having settled accounts with moneylender and landlord. In Nawan Jahan the peasant is not a figure of pity but the foundation of the new world: dignity belongs to those who work.

Stylistically the book shows Chatrik's refreshing directness — metaphor, tone and style all easy to grasp — and his willingness to experiment across genres, from lyric to narrative to Sufi-inflected verse.

The author

Dhani Ram Chatrik (1876–1954) was born in Pasian-wala, Sheikhupura district, and became, improbably, the great moderniser of Punjabi letters: a typographer who went to Bombay to learn Gurmukhi typography, standardised the Gurmukhi typeset, and at his Sudarshan Press in Amritsar printed the Guru Granth Sahib and Bhai Kahn Singh Nabha's Mahan Kosh with modern technique. Inspired by Bhai Vir Singh, though a Hindu by birth and an admirer of the Sikh faith, he devoted his life to lifting the status of the Punjabi language — serving as president of the Punjabi Sahit Sabha (1926) and founding president of the Punjabi Sabha. He has been called Punjab's greatest lyricist and poet.

Reception & legacy

Nawan Jahan is read as Chatrik's wartime testament — the old pioneer's answer to a world tearing itself apart. His humanism, unusual in its explicit rejection of caste and communal division at a time when both were hardening, looks prescient now. In 1988 the Sahitya Akademi published Surinder Singh Narula's monograph on him, and Punjabi University, Patiala honoured him by dedicating its annual diary to him — late recognition for a man who had given Punjabi its modern printed form.

Read it if...

you want the roots of modern Punjabi poetry — the generation before Vir Singh's followers took over; you are interested in wartime visions of a just world; or you like poetry that a farmer and a professor can read with equal pleasure.