ਸੱਚ ਨੂੰ ਫਾਂਸੀਸੱਚ ਨੂੰ ਫਾਂਸੀ

About the book

Sach Nu Phansi is a Punjabi novel by Jaswant Singh Kanwal, published in 1944, and it is the first novel of one of the longest writing lives in modern Punjabi literature. Kanwal was twenty-five, a farmer in his home village of Dhudike in the Malwa region, and he went on writing for more than seven decades after it: reference lists put his output at over a hundred books, and his publishing period runs from this novel in 1944 to 2017.

The book's standing is easy to measure. When Kanwal died at home in Dhudike on 1 February 2020, aged 100, the obituary reports reached for his famous titles and put Sach Nu Phansi at the head of the list. His bibliography does the same: among the notable works, the 1944 novel comes first, before Puranmashi, Raat Baaki Hai, Haani and the Emergency-era Lahu Di Lo. Every later Kanwal, the novelist of the Muzara movement, of Partition's long shadow and of village Punjab's caste and gender orders, starts here.

What does Sach Nu Phansi mean?

Sach Nu Phansi means the hanging of truth: sach is truth, nu marks it as the one acted on, and phansi is the gallows. English renderings in the reference lists vary between Death to the Truth and The Execution of Truth, and the variation is instructive, because the Punjabi title holds both: truth is not merely denied, it is publicly executed, with ceremony, the way a state hangs a condemned man.

For a first novel, the title is a programme. A young writer who had left school, worked in Malaya and come home to farm announced, in three words, that his subject would be what a society does to the truth when the truth accuses it. Readers meeting Kanwal for the first time in this book meet the position he never really left.

Themes: truth, custom and the Malwa village

Accounts of Kanwal's fiction describe a consistent world, and Sach Nu Phansi is its first room. The Sikh Encyclopedia's entry on Kanwal calls him a novelist of realistic, rural and rustic life in the Malwa region, writing with the Malwai dialect for local colour, who satirises the misdeeds of unscrupulous rich men, urges the downtrodden to rise in strength and unity, and argues for a fairer, socialist pattern of society. The same entry judges that in many respects he is the real successor of Nanak Singh, the founding novelist of modern Punjabi fiction.

His wider record points the same way: the novels question firmly held social customs and beliefs, and they champion social and gender equality from an openly left position. A debut called Death to the Truth belongs to that line by its title alone. The village, in Kanwal, is not scenery. It is the courtroom where custom sits in judgement, where the poor and women pay for other people's honour, and where one person deciding to speak plainly can be treated as a crime worth hanging.

ਲੇਖਕ

Jaswant Singh Kanwal was born on 27 June 1919 in Dhudike, now in Moga district, and died there on 1 February 2020, aged 100. He did not complete his schooling: as a teenager he went to Malaya, stayed about three years in employment, and returned with the developed literary taste his biographers credit to those years. He took up his family's farming at Dhudike, gained, in the encyclopedia's phrase, wide experience of life, and wrote from the village for the rest of his life.

From the 1944 debut the shelf grew quickly: Puranmashi, Raat Baaki Hai (1954), Haani (1961) and Civil Lines among the early landmarks, then Lahu Di Lo, the novel of the Naxalite years that no Punjab publisher would print during the Emergency, so that Kanwal had it published in Singapore and copies were brought into India quietly before a Punjab edition followed the Emergency's end. Taushali Di Hanso brought him the Sahitya Akademi Award, recorded in the Akademi list under 1997. The state honours of his old age, the Punjabi Sahit Shiromani Award in 2007, an honorary D.Litt from Guru Nanak Dev University in 2008 and a Punjab Kala Parishad lifetime achievement award in 2018, recognised the whole arc, which this first novel opened.

Reception and legacy

Kanwal's cremation at Dhudike drew thousands, with Punjab cabinet ministers laying wreaths: a measure of how completely the farmer-novelist had become a public institution. The reports of that day list his famous books with Sach Nu Fansi first, a small, telling order. The debut had become the headline of the life.

Why does Sach Nu Phansi still matter? Because first novels by writers of this scale are documents of intention. Before the movements and the controversies, before Lahu Di Lo was smuggled and Taushali Di Hanso was crowned, there is a twenty-five-year-old in Dhudike in 1944, three years before Partition, putting truth on the gallows in his title and spending the next seventy-five years refusing to take it down. A reader who wants to understand where modern Punjabi fiction's conscience came from can start exactly here.