Yashpalਯਸ਼ਪਾਲ

Early life

Yashpal was born on 3 December 1903 in Bhumpal, a village in the Kangra Hills, in what is now Hamirpur district of Himachal Pradesh. He was schooled in Ferozepur and Lahore, and went on to National College in Lahore, a college known for its nationalist teachers and students. There he met Bhagat Singh and Sukhdev Thapar, and the friendships of those years set the course of his life. He joined the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, the revolutionary group the two men belonged to, and gave his youth to the movement for independence.

How did a revolutionary become a novelist?

Yashpal's part in the revolutionary movement was direct and dangerous. He took part in the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association's attempt on the train of Viceroy Lord Irwin on 23 December 1929, and in January 1932 he became the association's commander-in-chief. He was arrested on 22 January 1932, sentenced to fourteen years of rigorous imprisonment, and served six years before his release on 2 March 1938 under an amnesty for political prisoners.

While in prison he married the fellow revolutionary Prakashvati Kapur in Bareilly Central Jail on 7 August 1936, in a ceremony said to be the first marriage held inside an Indian jail. After his release he was banned from entering Punjab, and he settled in Lucknow. It was there, out of politics and into print, that the novelist took over from the revolutionary. He founded the Hindi and Urdu magazine Viplav, and the publishing house Viplava Karyalaya in 1941, followed by Sathi Press in 1944. Prison had given him his subject: ordinary people caught inside great events, and the gap between what people hope for and what history gives them.

The writing years

Yashpal wrote more than fifty works in Hindi: novels, short stories, essays, a play, two travel books and an autobiography. His fiction stayed close to the politics he had lived, but it was never a pamphlet. His characters argue, love, compromise and fail, and the reader is left to judge them. His two best known novels both deal with the freedom movement and what came after it. Jhootha Sach, published in two volumes in 1958 and 1960, follows a brother and sister through Partition and the first decade of independent India. His novel Meri Teri Uski Baat was published in 1974.

He also wrote for the magazines he edited, and his essays took up the questions of his time: caste, class, the place of women, and what independence should mean for ordinary people. The magazine Viplav, whose name means revolution, carried his own writing alongside that of other Hindi writers, and the publishing houses he built kept his books and those of his friends in print. Writing was, for him, a continuation of the work he had begun as a revolutionary, carried on by other means.

Jhootha Sach

Jhootha Sach is the book that defines Yashpal's name. Its first volume, Vatan Aur Desh (Homeland and Nation), appeared in 1958, and the second, Desh Ka Bhavishya (The Future of the Nation), in 1960. Together they run to more than a thousand pages, and they tell, through one Lahore family, the story of a shared Punjab breaking apart. The novel is set first in Lahore between 1943 and August 1947, then in Jalandhar, Delhi and Lucknow up to 1957. It is long considered the most important Hindi novel on the Partition, and it has been called the War and Peace of Hindi literature for its scale. An English translation by Yashpal's son Anand, This Is Not That Dawn, was published by Penguin in 2010.

Honours and later life

Yashpal received the Padma Bhushan in 1970. In 1976 he won the Sahitya Akademi Award for Meri Teri Uski Baat, shortly before his death on 26 December 1976, at the age of seventy-three. India Post issued a commemorative stamp for him on 3 December 2003, the centenary of his birth.

Legacy

Critics have called Yashpal the most gifted Hindi writer since Premchand, and his reputation rests on the honesty of his fiction. He wrote about revolutionaries without hero-worship and about independence without easy pride, and his characters carry the contradictions of their time. For Punjabi readers he matters twice over: he was formed in Lahore, among the Punjabi revolutionaries, and his great novel is set in the Lahore that Partition took away. Jhootha Sach remains the standard against which Hindi novels of Partition are measured, and it is still read, discussed and translated more than sixty years after it first appeared.