Sundariਸੁੰਦਰੀ

About the book

Sundari, published in 1898, is the first novel written in the Punjabi language. Its author, Bhai Vir Singh (1872-1957), is regarded as the father of modern Punjabi literature, and Sundari is the book that opened the form: before it, Punjabi storytelling lived in verse, in the qissa and the folk song, not in the novel. Bhai Vir Singh conceived the story while he was still in high school and wrote part of it then, building it on a Punjabi folk song about a young girl carried away by force.

The novel is set in the Punjab of the 18th century, in the hard decades when Sikhs were hunted by the Mughal governors and lived in the forests. It follows a young woman who refuses to surrender her faith and her honour, and it ends with the events of 1752, the year Kaura Mal, the dewan of Mir Mannu and an ancestor of Bhai Vir Singh himself, died.

More than a century after it appeared, Sundari is still in print and still read. The introduction to its English translation records scores of editions, and a scholarly study estimates it to be the most widely read novel in Punjabi.

The story of Sundari

The story opens in a Punjab village, where a young Hindu girl, newly married and about to leave for her husband's home, is singing with her friends when a Mughal officer on a hunting trip seizes her and carries her off to his camp. Her father, brother and husband follow to plead for her release, offering silver and gold, but the officer refuses.

Left alone, the girl resolves to burn herself alive rather than lose her honour. As she gathers wood for the fire, her elder brother arrives: Balwant Singh, who had left home years earlier to become a Sikh and had not been heard from since. He lifts her from the pyre and carries her away, and when their own family turns them out in fear of the officer's revenge, brother and sister ride on to join the roving band of Sikhs hiding in the forests.

Among the jatha, the girl is received as a sister. She takes the Sikh faith, receives amrit and is given the name Sundari, and she learns to live the hard, hunted life of the forest camps: prayer at dawn, the langar shared alike, and the sword carried only to defend the defenceless. The novel follows her through the persecutions of those years and closes with the events of 1752.

Why is Sundari called the first Punjabi novel?

Because no Punjabi prose narrative of this kind existed before it. Punjabi literature before 1898 was poetry: the qissas of Waris Shah and Peelu, the kafis of Bulleh Shah and Shah Hussain, the vars and the folk epic. Bhai Vir Singh took the novel form, which he had met at school in the works of Sir Walter Scott and in English novels available in Urdu translation, and filled it with Punjabi material: a folk song, a village, a family, and the living memory of persecution.

The claim is made by the scholars who study him. Literary historians trace the origin of modern Punjabi prose, the novel, the lyric and the epic to Bhai Vir Singh, and the anniversary tribute published by Sikh Heritage Education states plainly that Sundari, published in 1898, was the first novel of the Punjabi language.

It was also a deliberate act. The Punjab of the 1890s was a generation past the fall of the Sikh kingdom, and Bhai Vir Singh wrote to restore pride in Sikh heritage at a moment when many Sikhs doubted it. The novel's didactic purpose is open: its heroine is a model of faith, courage and sacrifice, and every episode is chosen to show the Sikh character at its best.

Themes: faith, courage and chardi kala

The novel's centre is the dignity of a woman who refuses to be a victim. Sundari chooses death over dishonour, then chooses a hard life of service over safety, and the book treats her choices as the measure of a whole community's spirit.

Around her, Bhai Vir Singh sets out the Sikh ethic as he understood it: the sword is carried only for defence and to remove tyranny, never for aggression; the hungry are fed without asking their religion; even a wounded enemy is treated with charity. In one early episode Sundari tends an injured Mughal sepoy, and he turns on her with a dagger when he learns she is a Sikh: the book's answer to that hatred is not hatred in return but steadfastness.

Above all, the novel is a portrait of chardi kala, the high spirits the Sikhs kept even while hunted. The forest camps pray, sing and share their food while a price sits on their heads, and Sundari's courage is presented as the natural fruit of that faith, not as an exception to it.

The author

Bhai Vir Singh was born in Amritsar on 5 December 1872, into a family steeped in classical learning: his father was widely read in Sanskrit, Braj and Sikh texts, and his maternal grandfather, Giani Hazara Singh, belonged to a noted line of scholars. He studied at the Amritsar Mission School, founded a printing press in 1892 and the Khalsa Tract Society a year later, and in 1899 began the weekly Khalsa Samachar, one of the earliest Punjabi newspapers.

Sundari was his first book and the first of four novels: Bijay Singh and Satwant Kaur followed in the same historical vein, and Baba Naudh Singh (1921) moved the same ideals into a contemporary village. After 1907 he wrote no more novels, turning to poetry and scholarship, above all his epic Rana Surat Singh (1905) and his exegesis of the Sikh scriptures. He died in 1957, honoured as the father of modern Punjabi literature.

Reception and legacy

Sundari carried an instant appeal for the Sikhs who read it with enthusiasm and pride, in the words of its English edition's introduction, and it has never gone out of print: the same introduction records scores of editions, and readers still meet it in school and university syllabuses and in family libraries across Punjab and the diaspora.

Its influence is structural, not just literary. It showed that Punjabi could carry the modern novel, and the novelists who followed, from Nanak Singh to Gurdial Singh, worked in a form Bhai Vir Singh had made respectable. The characters became household words in Punjab, and the book's heroine remains the best-known woman of Punjabi fiction.

English readers can meet the novel in two translations: Dr. G. S. Mansukhani's Sundri, published by the Bhai Vir Singh Sahitya Sadan in 1983, and Bimal Kaur's translation carried by SikhNet and SikhiWiki. Both keep the novel's plain, didactic voice and its forest world intact.