ਮੜ੍ਹੀ ਦਾ ਦੀਵਾਮੜ੍ਹੀ ਦਾ ਦੀਵਾ

Marhi Da Diva, in English The Lamp on the Memorial, is a Punjabi novel by Gurdial Singh (1933 to 2016), published in 1964. It tells the story of Jagseer, a landless Dalit labourer in a village in the Malwa region of Punjab, and the small plot of land, the love and the dignity that are all taken from him. It is widely regarded as a modern classic of Punjabi fiction, the first major Punjabi novel to put a Dalit labourer at its centre, and it was translated into English as The Last Flicker.

What is Marhi Da Diva about?

The novel is set in a farming village in Malwa, where life runs on land, caste and old debts of gratitude. Dharam Singh is a farmer of standing. Years earlier, his father had brought Thola, a landless labourer, to the village, treated him as a brother and gifted him four bighas of land. After Thola dies, Dharam Singh looks after Thola's son Jagseer and his mother Nandi as his own family.

Then Dharam Singh grows old and his position in his own family weakens. His son Bhanta has always resented his father's affection for Jagseer. Bhanta takes back the land his grandfather had gifted to Thola and razes to the ground the marhi, the small memorial mound, that Jagseer built in his father's memory. The shock kills the ageing Nandi. Jagseer, who has lost land, mother and standing in one stroke, is left with nothing.

The other wound in Jagseer's life is love. He loves Bhani, the wife of his friend Nikka, the village barber. It is a quiet, unspoken love that can never become a marriage, and it eats away at him. Lonely and broken, Jagseer turns to opium, and the drug hastens his death. The novel follows this slow unravelling with patience, never rushing Jagseer toward tragedy, and never looking away from it either.

A love that could not be spoken

Bhani is one of the most quietly drawn characters in Punjabi fiction. She is married to Nikka, and her life with him is hard. She cares for Jagseer, and the feeling between them is real, but the village, caste and marriage leave it no room. Gurdial Singh does not make their love a rebellion. He shows it as it is: tender, hopeless and entirely human, and that restraint is what makes it linger.

Around them stand the other villagers: Dhanno, Dharam Singh's wife, and Raunki, the waterman, whose wife left him without warning and who takes refuge in opium. Each of them is struggling to make ends meet and to find meaning in a life that offers little of either. The novel's power comes from this chorus of small, thwarted lives, not from any single villain.

Why the lamp matters

Marhi means a memorial mound raised over a grave, and diva means a lamp. The title holds the whole novel. At the end, after Jagseer's death, Bhani lights a lamp on his marhi. It is a small act, done in the open, by a woman who could never speak her love while he lived.

The lamp is the novel's answer to everything that came before it. It says that a life the village counted as worthless still deserves light, and that the poor and the downtrodden are not forgotten when someone remembers them. Readers and critics have read the ending as a note of hope: the light on the grave stands for better times waiting to reward hard-working people, and for the dignity that no landlord can seize.

A new kind of hero for Punjabi fiction

Before Marhi Da Diva, the heroes of Punjabi novels were usually men of standing: landowners, soldiers, men with names that carried weight. Gurdial Singh broke with that tradition and put a landless Dalit labourer at the centre of a novel. Jagseer owns almost nothing, marries no one and wins no battle, yet the whole book turns on him. The novel introduced Punjabi literature's first Dalit hero, and it opened the door for a generation of writing about people who had been left out of fiction.

The book is written in the Malwai dialect of the Malwa region, and it was praised as one of the best novels written in a regional dialect. Its characters were drawn from real people Gurdial Singh had known, woven into a story he invented. He worked on the novel for four years and wrote four different versions before he was satisfied with the fourth, which was published in 1964. The book won a literary award from the Language Department in Patiala.

ਲੇਖਕ

Gurdial Singh was born on 10 January 1933 in Bhaini Fateh, a village near Jaitu in what is now Faridkot district. His father was a carpenter, and the young Gurdial worked alongside him from the age of twelve, making wheels for bullock carts and shaping metal sheets for water tanks. A school headmaster persuaded his father to let him study, and he went on to become a schoolteacher while he educated himself, taking a BA and then an MA in 1967.

He began writing in 1957 with the short story Bhaganwale, and Marhi Da Diva, his first novel, made his name. He went on to write novels including Anhoe (1966), Adh Chanani Raat (1972), which won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1975, Anhe Ghore Da Daan (1976) and Parsa (1991), along with short stories, plays, children's books and a two-part autobiography. He received the Padma Shri in 1998 and the Jnanpith Award, India's highest literary honour, in 1999. He died on 16 August 2016 in Bathinda, aged 83.

Reception and legacy

Marhi Da Diva was translated into English by Ajmer Rode as The Last Flicker, first published by the Sahitya Akademi in 1991, with a revised edition from the National Book Trust in 2010. The novel was also made into a Punjabi film, Marhi Da Deeva, in 1989, directed by Surinder Singh. Gurdial Singh's later novel Anhe Ghore Da Daan was filmed in 2011 by Gurvinder Singh.

More than sixty years after it appeared, Marhi Da Diva is still read as the book that changed what a Punjabi novel could be about. It showed that the life of a landless labourer, told in the language of his own region, could carry a whole novel, and that a lamp lit on a forgotten grave could be an ending worth remembering. For readers coming to Punjabi fiction for the first time, it remains one of the best places to start.