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About the book

Man Pardesi is a Punjabi novel by Kartar Singh Duggal (1917 to 2012), a writer whose name is bound up with the literature of Partition. The title is usually given in English as Alienated Heart, and the novel reached English readers as Alien Heart, in a translation by Jai Ratan made in close collaboration with the author and catalogued from 1981. A survey of Punjabi literature, describing a writer haunted by the Partition of Punjab, calls Man Pardesi a beautiful novel about the plight of the Muslims in India. That one line sets the book apart from most Partition fiction. Its subject is not the crossing of the new border in 1947, but the life that had to be lived after it, by the people who stayed.

Most famous Partition stories are about departure: trains, camps and homes left behind. Man Pardesi turns the camera around. It asks what Partition did to the families who did not leave, whose home was suddenly inside a new country that had to decide whether it still had room for them, while they had to answer the same question about the country.

What is Man Pardesi about?

Man Pardesi is about a family of nationalist Muslims in India in the years following Partition, and its events are seen through the eyes of Zeba, the daughter of Sheikh Haseeb. The family belongs to the India promised in 1947: one country, holding many faiths. The novel follows what that promise felt like from inside a single household, as the dust of Partition settled and everyday life, work and neighbourhood had to be rebuilt on top of it.

Zeba carries the argument of the book. She begins from a belief in the separateness of Muslims, the idea that her community's safety and future must lie apart. She moves, step by step, to a firm conviction that her own fate, and the fate of her community, lies in India: that her roots are here, and that her future is linked with the future of the country itself. To deny that, in the words used to describe the translation, would be to make hers an alien heart, one that belongs nowhere and knows no peace.

An alien heart, and the question of home

The title holds the whole novel in two words. Man, in Punjabi, is the heart and mind together. Pardesi is a stranger, a person away from their own land. The loss the title names is therefore an inward one. A person can become a pardesi in the street where she was born, without crossing any border at all. In this novel the border runs through the heart first, and through the map second.

That is why the book still reads as more than a period piece. Belonging, in Man Pardesi, is not a document or a slogan. It is a practice, renewed or refused in daily dealings between neighbours, and Zeba's journey is the story of a young woman learning to claim a home that history had told her, in Partition's own logic, might no longer be hers. Her father's household stands for the larger house of the nation, and what is decided inside it is decided, quietly, for the country too.

ਲੇਖਕ

Kartar Singh Duggal was born on 1 March 1917 at Dhamal in Rawalpindi district, now in Pakistan, took his M.A. in English at Forman Christian College, Lahore, and worked at All India Radio from 1942 to 1966, rising to station director. He then led the National Book Trust of India from 1966 to 1973. Writing in Punjabi, Urdu, Hindi and English with equal ease, he produced, in a career of over four decades, 24 collections of short stories, ten novels, seven plays, two collections of poems and an autobiography. He is counted a pioneer of modern Punjabi fiction, and as a chronicler of Partition he earned a reputation as a naturalistic writer.

Partition had been his subject before. His novel Nahun te Mas (Nails and Flesh, 1950) dealt with Muslim and Sikh unity in the bad days of 1947, and he later folded it into a trilogy of life in Punjab before and after Partition. Man Pardesi returns to the same wound from the other side of the border, and from the far side of a life: it is the work of a writer in his sixties, asking not how Punjab broke, but how the people left inside the break were to live. Duggal's own Sahitya Akademi Award had come in 1965, for his story collection Ik Chhit Chanan Di, which also has an entry in this Kosh. He received the Padma Bhushan in 1988 and the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship, the Akademi's highest honour, in 2007, and died on 26 January 2012, aged 94.

Reception and legacy

The English translation's own description calls Man Pardesi Duggal's classic Punjabi novel, and surveys of Punjabi literature keep a place for it for a simple reason: it fills the gap in the Partition shelf. Beside the novels of those who crossed the border, and of those who were carried across it against their will, Man Pardesi stands for the third fate, the people who remained and had to make a home inside the question mark Partition left over them.

Its question has not closed. What does a country owe citizens whose belonging is doubted, and what do those citizens owe the country? Zeba's answer, that her roots are here and her future is bound with the country's future, is spoken by one young woman in one household. Duggal's achievement is to make that answer feel, at the same time, like a family's private decision and a nation's unfinished business.