ਟੌਸ਼ਾਲੀ ਦੀ ਹੰਸੋਟੌਸ਼ਾਲੀ ਦੀ ਹੰਸੋ

About the book

Taushali Di Hanso is a Punjabi novel by Jaswant Singh Kanwal, published in 1993, late in one of the longest writing lives in Punjabi literature. It won the Sahitya Akademi Award for Punjabi: the Akademi's winners list places the award in 1997, while newspaper obituaries of the author reported it in 1998. Either way, it was the national academy's salute to a novelist then in his seventies, who had been publishing since the 1940s and who still lived, as he always had, in his own village of Dhudike in Moga district.

Kanwal wrote nearly 80 books in all, by the count given in the Press Trust of India obituary carried across Indian newspapers at his death. His novels are rooted in rural Punjab, above all in the Malwa country around Dhudike, and are written in a rustic register that readers across Punjab took to at once. Taushali Di Hanso belongs to that village world: it is a Malwa novel by the writer Punjabis most associate with Malwa itself.

What is Taushali Di Hanso about?

Taushali Di Hanso is a novel of rural Punjab in Kanwal's characteristic manner: village life drawn vividly and at first hand, and the settled customs of that life questioned rather than simply celebrated. Across his fiction Kanwal championed social and gender equality and gave his sympathy to the common reader's world of farming, family and village obligation, and this late novel comes from the same ground. Detailed plot summaries of the book in English are scarce, and this page does not invent one: what the record establishes beyond doubt is the book's standing, as the award winning novel of Kanwal's old age.

That caution matters because Kanwal's reputation rests on truthfulness to his material. The Sikh Encyclopedia's account of his work describes a novelist who specialised in realistic, rural and rustic life in the Malwa region, used the Malwai dialect for local colour, satirised the misdeeds of unscrupulous rich people and encouraged the downtrodden to rise in strength and unity. A reader who knows those qualities from Lahu Di Lo or Haani will find the same writer at work in Taushali Di Hanso.

Themes: village Punjab and the common reader

The themes that run through Kanwal's novels are documented across his whole body of work: firmly held social customs and beliefs put to the question, the claims of women and of the poor set against the authority of custom, and a left leaning sympathy for the people who work the land. His settings are fields, courtyards and village lanes rather than cities, and his Punjab is the Malwa of Dhudike, the village he never left.

Punjab's Chief Minister, condoling his death in 2020, described him as a versatile writer whose books vividly portrayed the rural life of Punjab and lent a voice to the plight of the common man grappling with socio economic hardships. That description, given for the whole shelf of his work, is the surest guide to the world of Taushali Di Hanso as well.

ਲੇਖਕ

Jaswant Singh Kanwal was born on 27 June 1919 in Dhudike, Moga district. As a young teenager he left school and went to Malaya, in present day Malaysia, and it was there that he first became interested in literature. He returned to Dhudike after a few years and lived there for the rest of his life, farming and writing in the village he wrote about. His first novel, Sach Nu Phansi, appeared in 1944, and he went on writing into his late nineties.

His best known novel is Lahu Di Lo, Dawn of the Blood, about the Naxalite movement in Punjab. No publisher in India would touch it during the Emergency of the 1970s, so Kanwal had it published in Singapore and copies were smuggled into India; it was published openly in Punjab only after the Emergency was lifted, and it has been translated into English. He died at Dhudike on 1 February 2020, and was cremated in the village the same day, his family said.

The Sahitya Akademi Award and the book's standing

The Sahitya Akademi Award is India's national literary honour, given language by language each year. For Punjabi, the winners list records Taushali Di Hanso as the winning novel for 1997; the award was widely reported in 1998, the year given in the author's obituaries, a one year difference that follows the book through the reference works. What is not in doubt is the company the book keeps: the Punjabi list it joins runs from Bhai Vir Singh and Amrita Pritam through Gurdial Singh and Surjit Patar, the defining Punjabi writers of the twentieth century.

The award crowned a shelf of honours: the Punjabi Sahit Shiromani Award of the Punjab government in 2007 and an honorary Doctor of Literature from Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar in 2008. Punjabis themselves gave him a plainer title, the writer of movements, for fiction that always stood with a cause and a people. Taushali Di Hanso is the book the national academy chose to carry his name.

Why does Taushali Di Hanso still matter?

Because it is the late, honoured work of the novelist who made the Malwa village a centre of Punjabi fiction. Kanwal proved that a writer could stay in one village for the whole of a long life and still speak to the whole of Punjab. For readers tracing the Punjabi novel from Nanak Singh through Gurdial Singh, Taushali Di Hanso is a necessary stop: the Sahitya Akademi Award winning novel of Dhudike's own writer, written in his seventies, from the village he never left.