ਦਾਸਤਾਨਦਾਸਤਾਨ

About the book

Dastaan is the autobiography of Lal Singh Dil, published by Chetna Prakashan of Ludhiana in 1998, a year after his third poetry collection Satthar and nine years before his death. The Punjabi original runs to 169 pages. It is the only prose book of a writer known first as a poet, and readers of Punjabi Dalit literature treat it as one of the founding life stories of that tradition: an account, in the scholar Raj Kumar Hans's words, of a life lived as a Dalit, as a revolutionary, and as a person on the margins of every part of life.

The book opens with a sentence its translators kept at the front of the English edition: "I have endured the ordeal by fire time and again in my life, and it is a miracle that I have been able to emerge unscathed." The pages that follow test that sentence against a childhood of caste humiliation, a brief and violent season of armed revolution, prison and torture, years of exile and manual work in Uttar Pradesh, and a return to Samrala that brought no security with it.

What does Dastaan cover?

Dastaan covers the whole arc of Dil's life from his birth on 11 April 1943 in Ghungrali Sikhan, near Samrala in Ludhiana district, to his years back in Samrala. He was born into a landless Ramdasia Chamar family of tanners; his father worked as an agricultural labourer, and Dil was the first in his clan to pass the tenth standard, which he did at Government School, Samrala, in 1960-61 while working as a wage labourer himself. A year at A.S. College, Khanna, and an unfinished junior teachers training course at Bahilolpur followed, paid for by labouring, herding and giving tuitions.

As a small boy he was dragged away and whipped for bathing at an upper caste farmer's well, an early lesson the memoir returns to in spirit throughout: the everyday machinery of caste, applied to a child. Hans notes that Dil's Dalit consciousness, formed in these years, carried no hatred or wish for revenge, and that quality runs through the book's telling of its own worst injuries.

Revolution, prison and flight

In 1968 Comrade Jagjit Singh Baghi of Samrala introduced Dil to Marxist ideas, and the Naxalite movement drew him in. He took part in the Birla Seed Farm agitation at Ropar and in a raid on Chamkaur police station, dated to April 1969 in his biographical account (The Caravan dates the attack to 1970). Arrested soon after, he faced severe torture on a long police remand, was tried, and was sentenced to six months imprisonment with hard labour. Reviewers of the English translation single out this stretch of Dastaan, the raid, the custody and the sentence, as the best written part of the book, carried across almost untouched.

Released in 1971, fearing further persecution and disillusioned with the movement, he fled to Uttar Pradesh. The memoir's Uttar Pradesh years are a catalogue of the work of the landless: caretaker of a mango orchard at Muzaffarnagar, watchman, cook, gardener, farm hand, and a cloth seller going from village to village. In 1972 he converted to Islam, taking the name Mohammad Bushra, though he went on publishing under the name Lal Singh Dil. He returned to Samrala in 1983, and in his last years ran a tea stall near the town, built as a wooden shack with money sent by well wishers in England. He died in 2007.

ਲੇਖਕ

Lal Singh Dil (1943 to 2007) is counted among the major Punjabi poets of the twentieth century, a judgement Surjit Patar made in print during Dil's lifetime and after. His three poetry collections, Satluj Di Hawa (1971), Bahut Saare Suraj (1982) and Satthar (1997), together with Dastaan, hold what Nirupama Dutt called an exalted place in Punjabi letters. In his own years he was hailed as the bard of the Naxalite movement in Punjab, because the poverty and injustice in his writing were lived, not studied.

Dastaan is where that life explains itself. The filmmaker Ajay Bhardwaj opened his 2005 documentary Kitte Mil Ve Mahi in Dil's Samrala room, with the poet reciting, and critics have called Dil the beating heart of that film. The memoir gives the same room, the same poverty and the same voice a history, in prose that Hans describes as almost poetic, the work of a poet writing his own life.

The English translation

Nirupama Dutt translated Dastaan into English as Poet of the Revolution: The Memoirs and Poems of Lal Singh Dil, published by Penguin Viking in 2012 with a selection of his poems alongside the memoir. It was the first time Dil's work appeared in English in book form. The translation is shortened: the reviewer Trilok Ghai calculated that nearly 40 pages of the Punjabi original were cut, the childhood chapters and the Uttar Pradesh section reduced, and the final pages on life after the return to Samrala left out, a loss he regretted even while welcoming the book.

For readers who come to Dil through the English edition, Dastaan in Punjabi remains the fuller record. Either way, the memoir stands in the short line of early Punjabi Dalit autobiographies that Hans sets out, after Pandit Bakshi Ram's Mera Jeevan Sangharash (1983) and before Balbir Madhopuri's Chhangiya Rukh (2003), and it is the document that turned a neglected poet of Samrala into a figure Punjabi literature now teaches.