ਪਾਲੀਪਾਲੀ

About the book

Pali is the second novel of Jaswant Singh Kanwal, published in 1946. His first novel, Sach Nu Phansi, had appeared two years earlier, in 1944, and his third, Puranmashi, followed in 1949. Pali sits at the very start of a career that would run for more than sixty years and produce over thirty novels, yet it is the book that first told Punjab a new novelist had arrived.

Kanwal was in his late twenties when Pali appeared, working as a clerk in the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee office in Amritsar and spending his spare hours in the committee's library, reading the best novels and stories of the world. He had begun writing in the jungles of Malaya, where he had gone as a young man, and his first book of prose, Jeevan Kaniyan, had appeared in 1941-42. Pali was the young writer's second attempt at the novel form, and the one that made his name.

What did Nanak Singh say about Pali?

The story Kanwal himself liked to tell about Pali is the story of a visit. Nanak Singh, the writer Punjabis call the father of the Punjabi novel, read Pali and came to meet its author. Kanwal was sitting in his office in Amritsar when he felt two hands on his shoulders from behind. He turned, startled, to find Nanak Singh standing there.

Kanwal jumped up and said Nanak Singh should have sent word, and he would have come to him instead. Nanak Singh answered that he had come only to say one thing: 'You write very well, don't stop writing.' For a young clerk who had taught himself to write in Malaya, praise from the master of the Punjabi novel was the beginning of a career. Kanwal told the story for the rest of his life.

Love, pain and suffering

Punjabi Wikipedia describes Pali as a novel that stands for love, pain, suffering and heartfelt emotion. The title is a woman's name, and the book belongs to Kanwal's early period, before the political novels of his middle years. What Pali's readers took from it, in Kanwal's own telling, was feeling itself: a novel that wears its heart on its sleeve and asks the reader to feel with its people.

ਲੇਖਕ

Jaswant Singh Kanwal (27 June 1919 to 1 February 2020) was born in Dhudike, in Moga district, and lived there most of his hundred years. He did not pass his tenth class, worked as a watchman in Malaya, farmed his family's fields with his younger brother, and found a clerk's job with the Shiromani Committee in Amritsar, where the library fed his reading. He wrote more than thirty novels, ten story collections, four essay collections and a book of poems, and he received the Punjabi Sahit Shiromani award in 2007.

His best-known novels came later: Lahu Di Lo (1975), the story of the Naxalite movement in Punjab that no publisher would touch during the Emergency until it was printed in Singapore, and Taushali Di Hanso (1993), which won the Sahitya Akademi Award and which Kanwal called his favourite of his own books. Pali is where that long road began.

Reception and legacy

Pali's place in Punjabi literature rests on a single meeting as much as on the book itself. Nanak Singh's visit to a clerk's office in Amritsar was a public blessing: the old master telling the young writer to keep going. Kanwal did, for another six decades, and the readers who waited for each new Kanwal novel, buying them hand to hand, began with Pali.

The novel also marks the start of Kanwal's long conversation with the Punjabi village. Puranmashi (1949) showed village life and Punjabi culture, Raat Baaki Hai (1954) was written when the Communist Party was at its peak, and Lahu Di Lo took up revolution itself. Pali, the second novel, is the quiet beginning of all of it: a young man's book about love and suffering, written before its author knew he would become one of Punjab's most loved novelists.

Where can I read Pali?

Pali is a 1946 book, so it survives in reprints and in the collected editions of Kanwal's novels: a four-volume set of his novels appeared in 1997. Look for it through Punjabi booksellers, second-hand shops and the libraries that keep Punjabi classics. No English translation is listed, so the Punjabi original is the way to read it.