Dalip Kaur Tiwanaਦਲੀਪ ਕੌਰ ਟਿਵਾਣਾ

Early life

Dalip Kaur Tiwana was born on 4 May 1935 in the village of Rabbon in the Ludhiana district, in a well-to-do landowning family of British India. She was educated at Patiala and built a distinguished academic career: she earned first-class honours in her M.A. and then a Ph.D. from Panjab University, Chandigarh — the first woman in the region to earn a doctorate.

Career

In 1963 she joined Punjabi University, Patiala as a lecturer in Punjabi, and went on to become professor, head of the Department of Punjabi, and dean of the faculty of languages. She was the university's first woman lecturer. She also served as a UGC National Lecturer for a year and lectured widely in England, the United States and Canada. Alongside her teaching she wrote tirelessly: twenty-seven novels, seven collections of short stories and a literary biography. Her fiction — rooted in the socio-cultural world of the erstwhile princely state of Patiala — dwells on the inner lives of women, loneliness, rootlessness and the longing for anchoring in a fast-changing world, and on the feudal exploitation and social curbs imposed on women in rural Punjab. Her first novel was Agni Prikhya (The Ordeal of Fire); Eho Hamara Jeevna (This Our Life, 1969) brought her the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1971. Among her other novels are Waat Hamari, Teeli da Nishaan, Sooraj te Samundar, Doosri Seeta, Sarkandyan de Des, Dhup Chhaan te Rukh, Lambi Udaari and Peele Pattyaan di Dastaan; her short-story collections include Sadhana, Yatra, Kise di Dhee, Ik Kuri, Tera Kamra Mera Kamra and Malan. Her autobiography is Nange Pairan da Safar (Travelling on Bare Feet), and her novel Katha Kaho Urvashi won the Saraswati Samman in 2001.

Major works

Eho Hamara Jeevna is her landmark novel. Its protagonist Bhano is a poor woman from a farmer family in rural Punjab, where women are treated as commodities and sold for very little. Bhano's father marries her off to Sarban of Moranwalli village; after the wedding, Sarban's four unmarried brothers and their friends sexually abuse and harass her. After Sarban's death her life grows more miserable and her father tries to sell her once again. Bhano tries to escape by suicide; a man named Narain saves her and accepts her as his wife. Through Bhano, Tiwana gave Punjabi literature one of its most searing portraits of a woman crushed by patriarchal custom, and the novel — translated into several languages — remains a cornerstone of post-Partition feminist writing in Punjabi.

Legacy

Tiwana received the Sahitya Akademi Award (1971), the Shiromani Punjab Sahitkar Award (1987), the Saraswati Samman (2001) and an honorary D.Litt. from Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar (2011). The Government of India conferred the Padma Shri on her in 2004; on 14 October 2015 she renounced it in solidarity with writers protesting rising intolerance and threats to free speech. She was married to the sociologist, poet and professor Bhupinder Singh, and had a son, Dr. Simranjit Singh. She lived with her family on the campus of Punjabi University, Patiala, as a life fellow and writer-in-residence. She died on 31 January 2020 in Mohali, aged eighty-four, and is remembered as one of the foremost architects of contemporary Punjabi literature.