Tutan Wala Khuhਟੂਟਾਂ ਵਾਲਾ ਖੂਹ

About the book

Tutan Wala Khuh, which means The Well Surrounded by Mulberry Trees, is a Punjabi novel by Sohan Singh Sital, first published in 1963. It is one of the most discussed Punjabi novels of the Partition of 1947. The story is set in Piruwala, a village close to Kasur town in undivided Punjab, and it follows that one village across roughly a decade, from the Second World War years to the day Partition places Piruwala in Pakistan and its Sikh families must leave for the border. At about three hundred pages it is a long novel with, as the critic Chaman Lal puts it, a definite sociological and historical perspective.

The title names the village's centre. On the outskirts of Piruwala stands a well shaded by mulberry trees, the tootan of the title, and the sixteen bigha of land around it is held in equal shares by S. Chanda Singh and Chaudhary Charagdin, who own the well in common. In summer the place under the trees is where the village sits, talks and plays cards: Sikh and Muslim, landlord and labourer, around one shared source of water. Almost everything the novel values is gathered in that image, and almost everything it mourns is the breaking of it.

What is Tutan Wala Khuh about?

Sital gives the village a genealogy before he gives it a plot. Piruwala was founded six or seven generations ago by one Yaatri, and his two lines have run through the village ever since: the elder son's line kept alive in the family of Sajjan Singh, the younger's in the family of Ilamdin. Because their ancestors were the same, all the Sikh and Muslim families of the village worship at Yaatri's samadhi as at a common ancestor's shrine. Sajjan Singh and Ilamdin themselves are fast friends. Into this woven village comes Dhanne Shah, a moneylender of Kasur town who wants the mulberry tree land. He first traps both friends in debt, then sows discord between them by playing the communal card, drawing in communal leaders from outside, until the people of Piruwala stand divided on religious lines and armed against each other, while the colonial police watch the drama with amusement and make little effort to stop it.

Against him stands Karam Singh, known to the village as Baba Akali, a veteran of the freedom struggle who has suffered imprisonment again and again, and through whom Sital narrates the whole national movement: Kartar Singh Sarabha and the Ghadar Party, Bhagat Singh, the Babbar Akalis, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and Udham Singh's revenge in England in 1940, the Sikh morchas, the Quit India movement and Subhas Chandra Bose's Azad Hind Fauj. When the village reaches the edge of a communal clash, it is Baba Akali who steps between the two armed sides at the risk of his own life and pulls them back. But then Partition is announced. Piruwala falls in Pakistan, and Ilamdin, who had fought bitterly with Sajjan Singh in Dhanne Shah's trap, weeps in his friend's arms and, with his family, escorts all the Sikh families of the village safely to the border, to the sound of Baba Akali's parting conviction that people of one blood and one nationality, divided by the departing British, will meet again.

Themes: class before creed

Chaman Lal's reading of the novel is the one later criticism follows. For Sital, people are not good or bad because of their religious background, but because of their economic position: the exploiters of the village, the moneylenders Dhanne Shah and Lakkha Singh, are the villains of the book, and the working people, peasants like Sajjan Singh and Ilamdin, are generally good, whatever their faith. Dhanne Shah himself says he can wear a Gandhi cap after independence: the exploiters will serve any ruler. From that follows the novel's politics. Sital sees Partition as tragic and unnatural, rejects nationhood built on religious identity, and holds that Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims are equal partners in one nation. Freedom, for him, was never only about driving the British out: it meant true social, political, economic and cultural freedom for the working people of India, closer to Bhagat Singh's vision of a classless, exploitation free society than to a simple transfer of power.

That is why scholars call the novel multidimensional. It is not only the life story of one or two characters: its hero, Baba Akali, is a hero in the national and cultural sense, a device for carrying the history of an entire movement inside a single village, and the village itself, with its shared well, its shared ancestor and its shared land, becomes the novel's real central character.

The author

Sohan Singh Sital (1909 to 1998) was born at Qadiwind in Kasur tehsil, the same Kasur country in which Piruwala is set, and he knew its villages from inside. He was a novelist, poet and lyricist, and a celebrated dhadi singer, a performer of the traditional sung ballads of Punjab, who formed his own dhadi jatha in 1935 and toured with it widely. He wrote more than sixty books, including twenty two novels of rural Punjab. His novel Jug Badal Gaya, also in this Kosh, won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1974. Tutan Wala Khuh came earlier in his career, and its authority comes from that double position: a writer of the Kasur countryside writing about his own ground, in the years when the memory of 1947 was still raw.

Reception and legacy

The novel's standing rests largely on Chaman Lal's chapter Partition and Punjabi Novel, which sets it beside Saanjh by the Pakistani Punjabi writer Salim Khan Gimmi, a novel of a border village from the other side and the other point of view. Lal finds the two books share a thrust towards the basic unity of Punjabi people, but concludes that Tutan Wala Khuh, built on emotion and reason both, emerges as the more representative novel of the tragic events of the Partition of India in 1947. The Wire's survey of Partition literature likewise singles the book out among Punjabi novels, remembering Sital as a veteran voice connected to the dhadi style of devotional singing, and the novel as the story of a Kasur village where the shared bonds between communities were real and thriving until Partition disrupted their everyday coexistence.

Tutan Wala Khuh repays reading beside the other Partition novels in this Kosh, Tamas and Train to Pakistan. Where they work through a city and a border village of the east, Sital's novel is rooted in the Kasur countryside that went to Pakistan, and its ending, a Muslim family walking its Sikh neighbours to the border in tears, is one of the most quietly hopeful scenes in Punjabi Partition writing: the well and its mulberry trees stay behind, but the people who shared them refuse, at the last, to be enemies.