ਨਵੇਂ ਲੋਕਨਵੇਂ ਲੋਕ

About the book

Nave Lok, New Folks, is a Punjabi short story collection by Kulwant Singh Virk, published in 1967. A year later it won the Sahitya Akademi Award for Punjabi, India's national literary award, for 1968, placing Virk in the line of Punjabi winners that runs from Bhai Vir Singh and Amrita Pritam through Nanak Singh and Shiv Kumar Batalvi. It was not his first prize: a decade earlier, in 1958, his collection Dudh Da Chhappar, A Pond of Milk, had won him his first award, and Nave Lok confirmed what that earlier book had promised.

The collection came late in a long run of story books. Virk had been publishing collections since Chhah Vela in 1950, through Dhartee te Akash, Toorhi di Pand, Ekas Ke Hum Barik, Dudh Da Chhappar, Gola and Virk Dian Kahanian in 1966. Nave Lok was the book the national jury picked out from that body of work, and it remains the title his name is attached to first: reference works, award lists and his own Kosh biography all lead with it.

What does the title Nave Lok mean?

Nave Lok means New Folks, or the new people. It is a story writer's title rather than a programme: Virk's fiction is known for turning its attention on ordinary Punjabis, the villagers, soldiers, clerks and families he had known as a soldier, a civil servant and a press officer, and watching them meet a changing Punjab. Readers looking for the flavour of that world in his work can also find his stories gathered later in Merian Sarian Kahanian, All My Stories, in 1986, and in the Sahitya Akademi monograph on him by Ajeet Cour.

ਲੇਖਕ

Kulwant Singh Virk (20 May 1921 to 24 December 1987) was born in Phularwan village, Sheikhupura district, in the Punjab that is now Pakistan. He served as a second lieutenant in the British Army during the Second World War, then joined the Punjab civil services as a public relations officer in 1949, edited the magazines Advance and Jagriti, and later worked in the Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting and as press secretary to the Punjab premier, alongside a senior communications post at Punjab Agricultural University. He wrote in Punjabi and English, and he translated Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms into Punjabi.

That double life, official by day and story writer throughout, gave Virk his material and his angle: he knew the village from inside and the government office from inside, and his stories move between the two. After retirement he spent time in Canada, returned to Punjab, suffered a stroke in 1987, and died in Toronto on 24 December 1987 while there for medical care.

Virk's other collections

Nave Lok sits in the middle of a shelf that maps the post Partition Punjabi short story. The early collections, Chhah Vela (1950), Dhartee te Akash (1951) and Toorhi di Pand (1954), were followed by Ekas Ke Hum Barik (1955) and the prize winning Dudh Da Chhappar (1958). Gola came in 1961 and Virk Dian Kahanian in 1966, a year before Nave Lok. The later books, Duadashi, Astbaazi (1984) and Merian Sarian Kahanian (1986), gathered and extended the work of four decades. His single most retold story outside the collections is Khabbal, and stories including Dudh Da Chappar and Khabbal were dramatised for television.

Reception and legacy

The Sahitya Akademi Award of 1968 was the centre of a wider recognition: an award from the Language Department, Punjab, in 1959, honour as Shiromani Sahityakar in 1985, acclaim from the Punjab Sahitya Academy in 1986, and recognition from the Literary Forum of Canada in 1984. His stories travelled: they were translated into Russian, by Natasha Tolstoy, a granddaughter of Leo Tolstoy, and into Japanese by Dr Tomio Mizokami of Osaka University, among other languages, and a book of his stories appeared in Russia under the title Dharti Hethla Balad. Scholars kept writing about him: Ajeet Cour's monograph Kulwant Singh Virk appeared in the Sahitya Akademi's Makers of Indian Literature series in 2003, and studies by Waryam Singh Sandhu, Randhir Singh Chand, Bikram Singh Ghuman and T. R. Vinod are listed among the books on his story world.

Why does Nave Lok still matter?

Because it is the book that carried the Punjabi short story to a national jury and won. For readers coming to Virk for the first time, Nave Lok is the natural door: it is the collection his own reference entries lead with, the one tied to the 1968 award, and the one that shows why his stories were translated and televised. Read with Dudh Da Chhappar before it and Merian Sarian Kahanian after it, it gives a short course in how the Punjabi kahani grew up in the decades after Partition.