ਲੂਣਾਲੂਣਾ

About the book

Loona (ਲੂਣਾ), published in 1965, is the masterpiece of Shiv Kumar Batalvi and one of the towering achievements of modern Punjabi literature. A verse play, an epic in dramatic form, it retells the ancient legend of Puran Bhagat from a revolutionary angle: through the eyes of Loona, the young stepmother whom the folk tradition remembers as a villain. In 1967 it won the Sahitya Akademi Award, making the thirty-year-old Batalvi the youngest recipient of the honour. Critics credit it with creating a new genre altogether: the modern Punjabi kissa.

The legend, in its traditional form, is simple. Puran is a prince, devout and pious. His aging father, King Salwan, marries a girl named Loona, far younger than himself. Loona is drawn to her stepson Puran and declares her feelings; Puran, devoted to God and unwilling to betray his father, refuses her. Humiliated, Loona takes revenge by persuading her husband to exile, in some versions, to mutilate and abandon, Puran. In the folk telling, she is the vengeful villain and he the righteous victim-saint.

Batalvi's genius was to ask a different question: what made Loona a villain? His Loona is a teenage girl of low caste, married off against her will to a man old enough to be her grandfather, and then renounced by the one man she desired. Her 'villainy' becomes, in Batalvi's hands, the tragedy of a woman whom society gave no will of her own, no choice in marriage, no outlet for desire, no language for her pain, and then condemned her for the choices she made without choices. It is one of the great feminist reinterpretations in Indian literature, a full decade before such readings became fashionable.

Plot and themes

The play unfolds through poetic monologues and dialogues rather than conventional scenes, blending free verse with traditional Punjabi forms like the kafi and the dohra. We meet Loona as a girl sacrificed to a royal marriage she never wanted; we hear her first bewildered, then burning awareness of Puran, the stepson near her own age, beautiful, unattainable, forbidden. Her desire is rendered with an honesty that must have shocked 1965: this is a woman's erotic and emotional life, claimed in her own voice, without apology.

Puran's refusal is the play's hinge. He is not a villain either, merely a young man locked inside his own piety, unable to see the human catastrophe in front of him. Loona's humiliation curdles into the revenge the legend records, but Batalvi makes us feel the cost of every step: the exile she engineers is also her own exile, from sympathy, from grace, from herself. The play's final movement is desolation, a woman who wanted love and got legend instead, remembered for centuries as a monster.

The themes are large and modern. Forbidden desire and the violence of its repression; caste and class as determinants of who may want whom; the patriarchal bargain that marries girls to old men and calls it order; and above all, the question of narrative justice, who gets to tell the story, and what the story does to those it names villains. Batalvi's Loona is also, unmistakably, a self-portrait of the poet's own obsessions: impossible love, suffering as a mode of knowledge, the romantic agony (birha) that earned him the title 'Birha Da Sultan', the Sultan of Separation.

Stylistically, the play is Batalvi at full stretch: pure, musical Punjabi; images drawn from the village world of his childhood, forests, rivers, birds; and a lyric intensity that carries long dramatic passages without flagging. It demands much of the reader, but it repays everything.

ਲੇਖਕ

Shiv Kumar Batalvi (1936–1973), born Shiv Kumar on 23 July 1936 in Bara Pind Lohtian, Shakargarh tehsil, Sialkot district (now in Pakistan), is the most beloved romantic poet in modern Punjabi, often called the 'Keats of Punjab'. When Partition came in 1947, his family moved to Batala in Gurdaspur district, where his father worked as a patwari and the dreamy boy vanished for days into the countryside that would fill his verse.

He became famous for poetry of heightened passion, pathos, separation and lovers' agony: collections like Peeran Da Paraga, Lajwanti, Aate Dian Chirian, Mainu Vida Karo, Birha Toon Sultan and Main Te Main made him a youth icon on both sides of the Punjab border. Loona (1965) was his bid for permanence, and it succeeded beyond any contemporary's. He died on 6 May 1973 at Kiri Mangyal, aged only thirty-six, and the early death sealed the legend: the poet of separation, separated finally from life itself.

Reception and legacy

The Sahitya Akademi Award in 1967, to a thirty-year-old, the youngest ever, announced that Punjabi literature had a new classic. Loona has never left the stage since: it is constantly reprinted, constantly staged, constantly taught, and its heroine has become a cultural archetype, the wronged woman behind the 'villain', the figure Punjabi feminists return to again and again.

Critics regard it as the work that proved Punjabi could sustain the verse drama, a form with almost no native tradition, at the highest level, and as the founding text of the modern Punjabi kissa, the old tale retold with modern consciousness. Its influence runs through decades of Punjabi poetry, theatre and song; its lines are quoted the way Shakespeare is quoted in English.

For Batalvi's own legacy, Loona is the counterweight to the love lyrics. The lyrics made him beloved; Loona made him great. It is the book that lets us see past the romantic myth to the serious artist: a poet who took a misogynist folktale and, with nothing but language, turned it inside out.

Read it if

Read it if you love tragic drama, this is Punjabi's answer to the great verse tragedies. Read it if the idea of retelling a legend from the villain's point of view excites you; Batalvi did it before it was a trend, and did it in verse. And read it if you know Shiv Kumar only as the poet of separation songs and want to meet the playwright: Loona is where his suffering found its largest, most disciplined form.