ਪੂਰਨਮਾਸ਼ੀਪੂਰਨਮਾਸ਼ੀ

About the book

Puranmashi, The Night of Full Moon, is a Punjabi novel by Jaswant Singh Kanwal, published in 1954. It belongs to the early phase of the most prolific novelist modern Punjab produced, a writer who went on to publish more than a hundred books. The Sikh Encyclopedia names Puranmashi first in its list of his important novels, ahead of Raat Baaki Hai, Civil Lines and Haani, and when Kanwal died at the age of 100 in 2020, the obituaries still named Puranmashi among the famous books by which Punjab would remember him.

The novel comes from the first generation of Punjabi fiction after Nanak Singh, the reformer who founded the modern Punjabi novel. Where Nanak Singh mostly wrote the urban Punjab he knew, Kanwal, a farmer's son from the Malwa village of Dhudike, moved the Punjabi novel into the village and kept it there. Puranmashi is where that move is first fully made: a rural world rendered from inside, by a writer who had ploughed its fields.

What is Puranmashi about?

Puranmashi depicts village life in an exquisite manner, combining the elements of romance, mystery and beauty. Its heroes and heroines are village people, and their love stories unfold inside the real economy of a Malwa village: its fields, its hierarchies, its watching neighbours. Histories of the Punjabi novel note that Kanwal attempted to invest a charm in the rural life of Punjab, and this early novel is the clearest example: the full moon of the title is not decoration but the light by which a whole village, its beauty and its constraints together, is seen.

An early novel, before the politics

Readers who know Kanwal as Punjab's great political novelist, the committed Marxist of Lahu Di Lo and Taushali Di Hanso, sometimes miss what Puranmashi shows: the storyteller before the polemicist. In his later novels he became more and more political, setting discussion of Marxist ideology alongside Indian religious philosophy, and only in Civil Lines, two years after Puranmashi, did the histories judge that he again sustained the same fictional interest with a picture of modern culture. Puranmashi holds the balance differently. The young Kanwal's progressive sympathy is already there, in whose lives the novel chooses to centre, but it works through romance and atmosphere rather than argument.

Themes: the village, romance and the Malwa soil

The method on display here became Kanwal's signature. The Sikh Encyclopedia describes it plainly: he specialised in the delineation of realistic, rural and rustic life of the Malwa region, with sufficient use of Malwai dialect, which brings an element of local colour in abundance. He satirised the misdeeds of unscrupulous rich people and inspired the downtrodden to rise in strength and unity, and he propagated a socialistic pattern of society with a fair use of sentimentality. In Puranmashi the sentiment leads and the satire stays gentle, which is exactly why the book charmed its first readers: it let a Malwa village be beautiful without pretending it was just.

ਲੇਖਕ

Jaswant Singh Kanwal was born on 27 June 1919 in Dhudike village, in what was then Ferozepur district and is now Moga district, the son of Mahia Singh. He did not complete his schooling. He went to Malaysia, stayed three years in employment, and returned to India with a developed literary taste, then took to his parental profession of farming and gained the wide experience of life that fills his fiction. He wrote short stories but excelled in the novel. He was a committed Marxist with a progressive point of view, and he is considered in many respects the real successor of Nanak Singh. He died at his home in Dhudike in 2020, aged 100, survived by his son Sarabjit Singh and daughter Roopinderjit Kaur, and was cremated in his village on 1 February 2020, before thousands of mourners.

Why does Puranmashi still matter?

Because it is the doorway into Kanwal. The hundred books that followed, the political novels, the stories, the histories, all grow from the ground this early novel stakes out: the Malwa village, told in its own dialect, with its romances taken as seriously as its injustices. A reader who starts here understands at once why the histories of the Punjabi novel give Puranmashi its own sentence, and why, sixty six years after it appeared, the writers and ministers who gathered at Dhudike in 2020 still reached for its name when they summed up the old man's life.