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About the book

Anhoe is a Punjabi novel by Gurdial Singh, published in 1966, two years after Marhi Da Deeva made his name. Where the first novel followed a farm servant bound to a landowning family, Anhoe turns to another figure the changing village was leaving behind: the skilled carpenter, the craftsman whose hands made the carts, ploughs and door frames a Malwa village ran on. It is the second novel of the writer who would become the most celebrated Punjabi novelist of his generation, and it sets down the pattern of his life's work: the socio-economic struggle of Punjab's poor, told with sympathy, in the Malwai dialect of his own region.

The title is usually glossed in English as The Non-Living, and the book is also read in scholarship as Unhoye, The Survivors. Both renderings point to the same question: what happens to people whose way of life the new order treats as already finished, and what do the survivors of the old world carry with them into the new one? Singh asks it not about kings or landlords but about a working man with a trade.

What is Anhoe about?

Anhoe depicts the life of a carpenter, a skilled artisan who cannot adjust himself to the changing conditions around him at the cost of his values. The trade that once gave him a settled place in the village, serving its farmers season after season, is losing its ground, and the easier paths open to him all ask him to become someone he is not. He holds on. In that holding on, the novel finds what one history of Punjabi literature calls the heroic strength and high dignity of a common man rooted in his soil, which it names a major theme of all of Gurdial Singh's fiction.

The carpenter at the centre

Singh did not research this world from outside. He was a carpenter's son. His father Jagat Singh was a carpenter in Bhaini Fateh village near Jaitu, and the young Gurdial began working beside him at the age of twelve, in days he later remembered as sixteen hours long, making wheels for bullock carts and shaping metal sheets for water tanks, the two of them together earning about twenty rupees a day. When Anhoe writes about a craftsman's pride in his skill and his fear of a world that no longer prices that skill honestly, it writes from inside the workshop.

Themes: craft, change and dignity

Across Gurdial Singh's novels the ground is always Malwa, and the people at the centre are the poor and the downtrodden, whose economic and social struggle he presents, in the words of the Sikh Encyclopedia, with sentiment and understanding. Anhoe adds a theme the farm novels could not carry in the same way: the dignity of skilled handwork. Its carpenter is not poor in the manner of a landless labourer; he owns a craft, a reputation and a code. The novel asks what a man is worth when the market stops valuing the thing he does best, and refuses to answer that his worth falls with the price.

ਲੇਖਕ

Gurdial Singh was born on 10 January 1933 in Bhaini Fateh village near Jaitu. A school headmaster, Madan Mohan Sharma, persuaded his father to let the boy study; he passed his matriculation while working day jobs, became a school teacher in 1962 on sixty rupees a month, and took his M.A. in 1967. His first story, Bhaganwale, appeared in the magazine Panj Darya in 1957. Marhi Da Deeva, rewritten four times before he published it in 1964, established him as a novelist. He went on to write ten novels, among them Adh Chanani Raat, which won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1975, Anhe Ghore Da Daan and Parsa. He received the Padma Shri in 1998 and the Jnanpith Award in 1999, shared with the Hindi writer Nirmal Verma. He died at Bathinda on 16 August 2016.

From page to screen

Anhoe reached a second audience on television: it was adapted as the serial Anhoyee by DD Punjabi, the Punjabi service of India's public broadcaster Doordarshan. The adaptation sits in a line of screen versions of Singh's work, from the 1989 film of Marhi Da Deeva to Gurvinder Singh's 2011 film Anhe Ghore Da Daan, which took the later novel to international festivals.

Why does Anhoe still matter?

Because it is the novel where Gurdial Singh's great subject first widens: not only the landless poor of Marhi Da Deeva, but every working person whose skill a changing economy quietly declares worthless. Students of Punjabi literature meet it as the second panel of the sequence that redefined the Punjabi novel, written by a carpenter's son about a carpenter, in the dialect of the villages it describes. Its question has not aged: what does a person owe their craft when the world stops paying for it?