Kartar Singh Duggalਕਰਤਾਰ ਸਿੰਘ ਦੁੱਗਲ

Kartar Singh Duggal (1 March 1917 to 26 January 2012) was a Punjabi writer who wrote with equal ease in Punjabi, Urdu, Hindi and English, and one of the most decorated Punjabi authors of the twentieth century. Across more than five hundred short stories, ten novels, plays, poetry and criticism, he recorded the trauma of Partition and the inner lives of ordinary people, while also helping to build the literary institutions of independent India.

Early life in Dhamal and Lahore

Kartar Singh Duggal was born on 1 March 1917 in Dhamal, a village in Rawalpindi district in the Punjab of British India, in the part of Punjab that is now in Pakistan. His father was Jiwan Singh Duggal and his mother was Satwant Kaur. The country he came from stayed with him for life: the Pothohar region around Rawalpindi, and its dialect, run through his fiction with what his obituary called nostalgia and intimacy.

He took his M.A. in English at Forman Christian College, Lahore, and married Ayesha Duggal, a medical doctor. In 1942 he began his professional career at All India Radio, the workplace that would shape his first two and a half decades and give Punjabi writing a new public platform.

All India Radio: a writer inside a new medium

Duggal worked at All India Radio from 1942 to 1966, rising through several posts to Station Director. For the broadcaster he wrote and produced programmes in Punjabi and other languages, and he authored a large number of plays and dramas for the microphone. Radio in those years was the one medium that reached villages and cities at once, and Duggal used it as a literary workshop as much as a job.

His radio years straddled the defining event of his generation. Partition in 1947 divided his home country: Dhamal remained on the Pakistan side of the new border, while Duggal's working life unfolded in India. The split, and the violence and displacement that came with it, became the great subject of his fiction, which his obituary described as weaving the historical strands of the Partition saga together with the intricacies of human relationships in modern society.

Why is Kartar Singh Duggal important to Punjabi literature?

He is important because he helped to invent modern Punjabi fiction and then spent a lifetime building the institutions that published, broadcast and honoured it. His obituary called him a virtual pioneer of modern Punjabi fiction, a master storyteller and a naturalistic chronicler of the tragic social events that followed Partition.

Two qualities gave him his distinct identity. The first was range: he wrote novels, short stories, plays, poetry and criticism in four languages, and his books were translated into other Indian and foreign languages and adopted by universities for graduate courses. The second was sympathy: critics singled out his exploration of women's inner lives, which made him a powerful voice for the other gender inside a patriarchal society, in his obituary's phrase.

Stories, novels and the Partition trilogy

The scale of his output is hard to match. Across a career of more than four decades he published twenty four collections of short stories and ten novels, along with seven plays, seven works of literary criticism, two collections of poems and an autobiography. His publisher counts more than five hundred short stories in all. Among the best known collections are Ik Chhit Channan Di, Dangar, Nawan Ghar, Sonar Bangla and Tarkalan Vele, and in English, Birth of a Song and Come Back My Master.

His novels include Sarad Poonam Ki Raat and Tere Bhanhe. Readers of Punjabi historical fiction know him above all for a trilogy that follows Punjab from the freedom struggle to the general elections declared after the Emergency: Haal Mureedan Da, Ab Na Bason Eh Gaon and Jal Ki Pyaas Na Jaaye. SikhiWiki judges that he remains unmatched in Punjabi literature for fictionalising landmark events in the contemporary history of India, and the trilogy is the clearest proof.

Building institutions: the National Book Trust and Parliament

Duggal's second career ran alongside the writing. From 1966 to 1973 he was Secretary and Director of the National Book Trust of India, the body charged with taking good books to ordinary readers, and from 1973 to 1976 he served as an Advisor in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. He founded or helped to found the Raja Rammohun Roy Library Foundation, the Institute of Social and Economic Change in Bangalore and the Zakir Husain Educational Foundation, and he served as President of the Punjabi Sahitya Sabha in Delhi.

Honours in public life followed the books. He was made a Fellow of Punjabi University in 1984, and in August 1997 he was nominated to the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of India's Parliament, where his interventions in debate were still remembered years later. Few Punjabi writers have stood so close to the centre of national cultural policy, and fewer still used the position to build libraries and reading institutions rather than personal monuments.

Honours and later life

The literary honours began early and never really stopped. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1965, the Padma Bhushan from the Government of India in 1988, and in 2007 the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship, the highest honour the Akademi gives, for lifetime achievement. His obituary also lists the Ghalib Award, the Bharatiya Bhasha Parishad Award, the Bhai Mohan Singh Vaid Award and the Soviet Land Nehru Award among his prizes.

Duggal died in New Delhi on 26 January 2012, of old age related ailments, aged ninety four. He was survived by his wife Ayesha and a son. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, condoling his death, called him one of the most versatile and distinguished personalities of the Indian literary and cultural world. The Library of Congress holds about one hundred and eighteen of his works, a quiet measure of how far the boy from Dhamal travelled.

Legacy

Duggal's legacy has three parts. The first is the fiction itself: a record of Partition and of changing Punjabi society, written close to the events by a man who had lived on both sides of the line that divided Punjab. The second is the bridge he built between languages, carrying Punjabi stories into Urdu, Hindi and English and bringing world writing back the other way. The third is institutional: the National Book Trust years, the library foundation and the reading culture they served still shape how books move in India. Writers are usually remembered for one of these things. Duggal is remembered for all three.