Raavi Paar and Other StoriesRaavi Paar

About the book

Raavi Paar and Other Stories is the best known book of short stories by Gulzar, the poet, lyricist and film maker born Sampooran Singh Kalra in Dina, in the part of Punjab that is now Pakistan. The stories were written in Urdu and Hindi. The original collection, titled simply Raavi Paar, was published by Rupa and Co. in 1999, and it is also known in Pakistan as Dustkhat. The English edition, Raavi Paar and Other Stories, followed from HarperCollins in 2000, in translations by Masooma Ali and Alok Bhalla, and it is the edition through which most readers who do not read Urdu or Hindi now meet the book.

Gulzar writes about Partition as an insider. He was born in 1934 in Dina, in Jhelum district, into a Sikh Kalra family, and in 1947 he himself had to migrate to India from the home he was born in. Partition split his family, he stopped his studies and came to Bombay to support himself, working small jobs, including touching up accident damaged cars in a garage, before the Progressive Writers Association circle led him towards films. Half a century later, in these stories, he returned to 1947 and to the river his title names: the Raavi, one of the five rivers of Punjab, which the new border turned into a crossing point between one home and another.

What is the title story of Raavi Paar about?

The title story follows Darshan Singh, a Sikh father in Lyallpur, the city now called Faisalabad, as the borders of Partition are drawn around him. Homes of the Sikh community are attacked every other day, and the community gathers in the gurdwara for protection, a shelter that itself faces the threat of arson. In the middle of this, Darshan Singh's wife gives birth to twins, one of them weak. There is no time or space to be joyful. Darshan Singh does not know whether to laugh or cry: fate, in the story's much quoted bargain, has given with one hand and taken away with the other.

The family boards a crowded train for India, travelling on its roof. During the journey one of the newborn twins dies. As the train passes over the River Raavi, a fellow passenger advises Darshan Singh to throw the dead child into the river and perform the last rites in that way. He picks up an infant and throws him from the train, and a moment later discovers the mistake that ends the story: he has thrown the living baby into the Raavi, while the dead one still lies on the train. Around him, as the new border approaches, the crowd takes up a slogan of celebration, and the hollowness of that sound, against a father's loss, is the note on which the story closes. Teachers of Partition literature who open their courses with this story point students to exactly that contrast.

The other stories

The title story is the heart of the book, but the collection ranges far beyond 1947. In Dhuan, a man's falling away from his faith becomes a grim public spectacle. Khauf is set in the communal anxiety of Bombay in 1993, where the lines between faiths blur in fear. Other stories turn to the world of films, which Gulzar knows from inside: Guddo, about a star struck young girl, stands behind his film Guddi, another story carries the seed of his film Lekin, and the book includes his narrative of his mentor Bimal Roy and the agony of creation, a great director's obsession with an unfinished film. Michelangelo appears, searching for the face of Jesus in an old Judas, and in one biographical story a family mistakes Gulzar himself for a child it lost in Partition.

What links the stories is not a place or a period but a way of seeing. Reviewers of the readings from the book at the Jaipur Literature Festival noted that Gulzar's stories are rooted strongly in Punjabi culture and history, while their emotions, fear, love, friendship and loneliness, are universal, and that instead of announcing political or social truths he travels through the human mind and lets the truth surface there. The poet is present in the prose throughout: short sentences, images that carry the argument, and endings that turn quietly.

Themes: a river between two homes

The Raavi of the title is more than a setting. The five rivers name Punjab itself, and in 1947 the Raavi became a line between a lost home and an uncertain one. Gulzar's refugees do not cross in triumph. They cross carrying bundles, newborn children and the dead, and again and again the stories ask where a person belongs: here, there, or in the strange no man's land in between. Reviewers have set that question beside the one Manto asks in Toba Tek Singh, the story this collection is most often compared with, and which stands beside it in this Kosh.

Faith, in these stories, is both shelter and danger. The gurdwara that shelters Darshan Singh's family has itself been attacked, and in another story a Muslim man's last wish, to be cremated after death, leaves a whole qasbah in flames. Gulzar, a Sikh who writes in Urdu and Punjabi, refuses every easy side. What his people hold on to, across the collection, is each other.

The author

Gulzar, born Sampooran Singh Kalra on 18 August 1934 in Dina, began his film career as a lyricist with the 1963 film Bandini, under Bimal Roy and Hrishikesh Mukherjee, and went on to write lyrics, dialogues and scripts and to direct films such as Aandhi, Mausam and Maachis. He writes primarily in Urdu and Punjabi. His honours include the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2002, the Padma Bhushan in 2004, an Academy Award and a Grammy for the song Jai Ho, the Dadasaheb Phalke Award in 2013 and the Jnanpith Award in 2024, India's highest literary honour. His short stories appear in Raavi Paar and in Dhuan, published in 2001. His full story is in his Kosh entry.

Reception and legacy

The English edition was received as a major story collection, not a film maker's side work. A long review in the Purple Pencil Project calls the title story as unsettling and organically painful as Manto's Toba Tek Singh, and the collection as a whole candid and cathartic. At the Jaipur Literature Festival, Raavi Paar anchored a session of readings on Punjab, with Gulzar joined by Navdeep Singh Suri, Madan Gopal Singh and Mohammed Hanif, and the title story is now taught in Partition literature courses, often as the first story students read.

For Punjabi readers the book holds a particular place. It is the Partition writing of one of Punjab's own, a Dina born Sikh who became modern Urdu's best loved poet, and it stands in this Kosh beside the other great tellings of 1947: Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan, Amrita Pritam's Pinjar, Manto's Toba Tek Singh and Bhisham Sahni's Tamas. Read together, these books show how many ways Punjab found to remember the year the Raavi became a border.