ਇੱਕ ਛਿੱਟ ਚਾਨਣ ਦੀਇੱਕ ਛਿੱਟ ਚਾਨਣ ਦੀ

About the book

Ik Chhit Chanan Di is a Punjabi short story collection by Kartar Singh Duggal, published in 1964 and honoured with the Sahitya Akademi Award for Punjabi in 1965. The title is usually rendered in English as A Drop of Light or One Drop of Light: a small measure of brightness, held up against the dark its stories move through. It is the book that first carried Duggal's name to the top rank of Indian letters, and it remains the collection by which his short fiction is best known.

Duggal was already a senior broadcaster and a prolific writer when the collection appeared. He wrote in Punjabi, Urdu, Hindi and English, and the short story was the form he returned to most often across his career: twenty four collections in all. Ik Chhit Chanan Di gathers stories written out of the Punjab he knew at first hand, the Pothohar country of his birth and the towns and cities of the years before and after Partition.

What is Ik Chhit Chanan Di about?

Ik Chhit Chanan Di is about ordinary people at the moments when their inner lives break the surface: love, loss, loneliness, hunger and the long shadow of Partition. A recent review of the collection describes stories that move between village and city, between the Punjab of the 1940s and the changed Punjab of the 1960s, and that keep returning to people on the margins: women, peasants and families displaced in 1947.

The title story has reached English readers as Night of the Full Moon. In it, as the review summarises, a woman's emotional turmoil is lit by a full moon night, her inner conflict made visible in its glow. Other stories singled out in the same review include All Alone, which uses a one sided telephone conversation to show urban isolation, and I am Hungry, a stark story of poverty and desperation. The method is consistent across the collection: a brief scene, closely observed, in which a whole life can be felt.

Themes: the inner life and Partition's shadow

Critics have long noted Duggal's interest in the psychology of his characters, and above all in the inner lives of women, which he wrote about with a directness that challenged the taboos of his time. The review of this collection praises its psychological depth and its nuanced characterisation, and notes how the brevity of each story sharpens its effect: each piece is a concise vignette of a joy or a sorrow, complete in itself.

Partition runs through the book as memory rather than spectacle. Duggal was born in the Rawalpindi district, in what is now Pakistan, and like so many Punjabi writers of his generation he carried the divided homeland with him. In these stories, displacement and fractured identity are part of the characters' inner weather, the background against which small hopes, the drops of light of the title, have to be found.

ਲੇਖਕ

Kartar Singh Duggal was born on 1 March 1917 at Dhamyal in Rawalpindi district, now in Pakistan, and took his M.A. in English at Forman Christian College, Lahore. He joined All India Radio in 1942 and worked there until 1966, rising to Station Director, writing and producing programmes in Punjabi and other languages. He then served as Secretary and Director of the National Book Trust from 1966 to 1973, and as an Information Advisor in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting from 1973 to 1976. He helped found the Raja Rammohun Roy Library Foundation, the Institute of Social and Economic Change in Bangalore and the Zakir Husain Educational Foundation, and was nominated to the Rajya Sabha in 1997.

His output was very large: twenty four collections of short stories, ten novels, seven plays, seven works of literary criticism, two collections of poetry and an autobiography, with the Library of Congress holding 118 of his works. Many of his books were adopted for graduate study at Indian universities, and his work was translated into many Indian and foreign languages. He died on 26 January 2012, aged 94.

The Sahitya Akademi Award and the book's standing

The Sahitya Akademi Award for Punjabi, given by India's national academy of letters, went to Ik Chhit Chanan Di in 1965, when Duggal was in his late forties and at the height of his broadcasting career. The award placed the collection in the line of Punjabi winners that runs from Bhai Vir Singh and Amrita Pritam to Nanak Singh and Balwant Gargi in the years just before it.

It was the first of the two great Akademi honours of his life. In 2007 the same academy gave him its Fellowship, its highest honour, for lifetime achievement, and the Government of India had already given him the Padma Bhushan in 1988. Through all of that later recognition, Ik Chhit Chanan Di stayed the book attached to his name in the award lists, the early proof of the mastery the Fellowship later confirmed.

Why does Ik Chhit Chanan Di still matter?

Because it shows the modern Punjabi short story at its most inward and humane. Where much fiction of its period worked on a large social canvas, Duggal's stories go small and deep: a phone call, a moonlit night, a hungry man's day. Readers meeting Punjabi fiction often start with the novels of Nanak Singh or the stories of Kulwant Singh Virk. Ik Chhit Chanan Di belongs on the same shelf: the award winning collection of the writer who, between the radio studio and the writing desk, did as much as anyone to carry Punjabi letters to the rest of India.