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About the book

Raat Baaki Hai, The Night Is Still Here, is a Punjabi novel by Jaswant Singh Kanwal, listed among his notable works as a novel of 1954. The Sikh Encyclopedia names it second in its list of his important novels, immediately after Puranmashi and ahead of Civil Lines, Roop Dhara and Haani. It is the Kanwal novel that scholars of Punjab's peasant movements reach for: a full length fiction of the Muzara movement, the struggle of tenant farmers against the biswedars, the big landlords who claimed a share of their land and crop.

The title carries the argument. The night is not over: the old order still stands, the struggle is unfinished, and the book's people have to decide what to do inside that darkness. A scholarly edition of the novel was still being cited by researchers in 2014, and a study of kisan protest literature in the Journal of Sikh and Punjab Studies gives Raat Baaki Hai a close reading as a central text of the Muzara movement, which is why it belongs in this Kosh next to Kanwal's better known Puranmashi, Lahu Di Lo and Taushali Di Hanso.

What is Raat Baaki Hai about?

Raat Baaki Hai tells the story of Charan, a young man whose hopes are dashed when he completes his education and fails to secure a job. At the behest of his friend, he joins the Muzara movement. Around him the novel builds the world of the tenant farmers: their meetings in Kisan Sabhas, their protests against the biswedars, and their collective work, down to the villagers gathering to repair a breach in the riverbank to stop their homes flooding, while insisting they will put up shacks if they must but never abandon their claim to the land. Through Baba Karam Singh, who passes from Ghadar activist to Akali worker to Communist revolutionary, Kanwal places the Muzara struggle in a longer line of Punjab protest movements.

Love and revolution

Woven through the movement story is the relationship of Raj and Charan. The scholars who study the novel read that love story as the book's second argument: it explores the potential and the dangers of love, through desire, distraction and sacrifice, and it puts forward the hard idea that romance sits uneasily with total devotion to a revolutionary cause, and that the victory of love is not possible unless society itself is transformed. The novel ends on an optimistic note in a one page final chapter titled Vikas Dhara: the red flags ripped apart the blue sky, and the old banyan tree was waiting for a last push to fall into the pond.

Themes: land, tenancy and the unfinished night

The novel spells out a political programme for restoring a living relationship between the land and the peasants who work it. Its strength and its weakness, the scholars note, come from the same place: Kanwal's fervent belief in a socialist answer, which at times turns dogmatic and rhetorical, with an omniscient narrative voice carrying a conscious moral purpose. Read today, that directness is also the book's historical value. It shows how a major Punjabi novelist of the 1950s understood agrarian relations in the years after independence, when the Muzara tenants of the princely state villages were fighting to become owners of the land they tilled.

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, went to Malaysia for three years of employment, and returned with a developed literary taste, then farmed and wrote. He specialised in realistic, rural life of the Malwa region in its own dialect, satirised unscrupulous rich people, and inspired the downtrodden to rise in strength and unity, and he is considered in many respects the real successor of Nanak Singh. He published more than a hundred books, received the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship honour for Pakhi in 1996 and the Sahitya Akademi Award for Taushali Di Hanso in 1998, and died at Dhudike in 2020, aged 100.

Why does Raat Baaki Hai still matter?

Because the question it asks has returned to Punjab's centre. When farmers' protests again filled the roads in 2020 and 2021, scholars tracing the literary lineage of kisan resistance put Raat Baaki Hai in that line, between the poetry of 1907 and the songs of the Delhi borders. The novel preserves, in fiction, how the Muzara movement spoke, met and argued, in the words of the tenants themselves as Kanwal recreated them. For a reader who knows Kanwal only through the romance of Puranmashi, this is the other half of the writer: the novelist of land, tenancy and collective resistance, insisting that the night is still here and the work is not finished.