ਜਿਲਾਵਤਨਜਿਲਾਵਤਨ

About the book

Jilawatan, published in 1968, is a short novel by Amrita Pritam about exile that never leaves home. Its title comes from the Arabic jala-watan, a person who has left his own land and become a stranger in a distant one. Pritam uses the word to describe a feeling rather than a journey: her characters stay where they are, yet their hearts have become strangers to the world around them.

The book is one of Pritam's quieter novels. It has none of the scale of Pinjar, her Partition novel of 1950, and none of the public fame of Kagaz Te Canvas, the poetry collection that won her the Jnanpith Award. It is a short, reflective work, closer to a novelette, and it is best known today as one of three short novels gathered in Jalte Bujhte Log, the collection published in 2005, the year of her death, alongside Jebkatre and Kacchi Sadak.

Readers looking for a detailed plot summary will find little published about this book. It has never had the critical attention of Pinjar, and no widely known English translation exists. What the published criticism records is the book's idea, and that idea is worth sitting with: exile as a condition of the modern heart.

What does Jilawatan mean?

The word comes from Arabic. Jala means to leave or go into exile, and watan means homeland, so a jilawatan is an exile, a person cut off from his own land. In Punjabi the word carries the same weight: banishment, being cast out, living far from where you belong.

Pritam's turn is to show that the exile can happen without any journey at all. As critic Vijay Kumar Sunwani notes in his study of her work, a reading of the novel shows there is no character who really lives abroad. Instead, the characters' hearts have become alien, because the experiences they gather in this strange new world scourge and singe them. The distance is inside.

Sunwani points to one image in the book: two statues stand in a room, one of a man made of white silken earth and one of a woman the colour of earth itself. Both are beautiful, and the difference between them is only the colour of the clay. It is a quiet picture of how alike people are, and how easily they become strangers to each other.

Themes: exile without leaving home

The book's people live in the modern world Pritam saw forming around her: a world of careers, competition and the race to succeed. Sunwani's reading stresses how sharply she judges that race. Success, she suggests, is little more than sleight of hand, and the faster a person learns the trick, the greater the success. Behaviour and career, in her account, come down to skill in taking money from the other person's pocket, and those who do it best are called the most successful.

Under that pressure the present itself goes missing. Pritam writes of a present that should be alive but has been lost somewhere, a ravine that swallows people one by one. The book's answer is stubborn and simple: to live, and not to leave, whatever the cost. Staying, paying attention, refusing to be driven out of your own life: that is the resistance Jilawatan offers.

The theme sets the book apart from Pritam's Partition fiction. In Pinjar, exile was literal: a girl carried across a border, a family that would not take her back. In Jilawatan the border runs through the middle of ordinary life, between people who share a home and still cannot reach each other.

ਲੇਖਕ

Amrita Pritam (1919-2005) was born Amrit Kaur in Gujranwala, in the Punjab that is now in Pakistan. Her first collection of poems appeared in 1936, when she was sixteen. She moved to Delhi at Partition in 1947, worked in the Punjabi service of All India Radio until 1961, and edited the monthly literary magazine Nagmani for 33 years with her partner, the artist Imroz.

She wrote more than a hundred books in a career of six decades: 28 novels, poetry, short stories, essays and autobiography. Her long poem Sunehade won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1956, the first time the award went to a woman writing in Punjabi. Kagaz Te Canvas won her the Jnanpith Award. She received the Padma Shri in 1969 and the Padma Vibhushan in 2004, and sat in the Rajya Sabha from 1986 to 1992. Her best known novel remains Pinjar, filmed in 2003. Jilawatan belongs to the quieter middle of that large body of work, a short novel written at the height of her powers.

Why read Jilawatan today?

For Punjabi readers in the diaspora, the book's idea lands twice over. Many live far from Punjab and know literal exile well. Pritam's version speaks to the second exile, the one that happens inside a life: the feeling of being a stranger at your own table, in your own city, among your own people. That is a modern feeling, and it has only grown more common since 1968.

The book also rewards readers who know Pritam only through Pinjar and her famous poem to Waris Shah. It shows a different side of her: less concerned with history's great wounds than with the small daily ways people lose themselves, and the stubborn choice to stay. It is short, it is plainly written, and it asks a question that has not dated: what does it cost to live in a world that keeps telling you to leave yourself behind?

Jilawatan is not an easy book to find. It survives mainly through Jalte Bujhte Log, the 2005 collection that gathered it with Jebkatre and Kacchi Sadak, and through the critics who have written about it. That scarcity is part of why it belongs in the Kosh: a notable novel by Punjab's best known woman writer should not be the one book of hers that readers cannot find.