ਤ੍ਰਿੰਝਣਤ੍ਰਿੰਝਣ

Trinjan is the first book of Punjabi poetry by Ahmad Rahi (1923 to 2002), published in Lahore in 1952. A trinjan is the gathering of village women and girls who sit together at their spinning wheels, singing as they work, and Rahi took that women's gathering as the frame for a book of Partition: its poems speak again and again in the voice of a young Punjabi girl, and the laments of its last section mourn the lives lost in 1947 and the cruelty shown by every community, Muslim, Hindu and Sikh alike. Written in the diction of Punjabi folk song, the book was a pioneering effort in the Lahore of the early 1950s, it became a landmark of West Punjabi literature, and it won the Adamjee Literary Award.

About the book

To understand what Trinjan did, start with its moment. In the new Pakistan of 1952, Urdu stood over Punjabi, and an open question hung over the language of the majority: could Punjabi produce literature to match the other languages at all? Rahi, who had made his name as an Urdu poet and edited the progressive journal Sawera, chose to answer in Punjabi. Dr Afzal Mirza, writing in The News, records that the book left literary circles flabbergasted by its pathos and by diction reminiscent of Punjab's folk tradition, and that it touched the reader directly. Rekhta's profile adds the commercial fact: under its spellings Tarinjan and Trinjan, the collection remained a bestselling title for decades, a first book of poems that readers kept buying long after the film songs had made its author famous for something else.

What is a trinjan?

A trinjan is a spinning gathering: the women and girls of a village sitting in a circle at their charkhas, spinning thread together and singing, the traditional school of Punjabi folk song, where Heer and the other old stories were kept alive by voice. Rahi's title announces both his method and his subject. The method is the folk voice itself, the idiom and imagery of the songs women sang at the wheel. The subject is women: as Mirza puts it, the pathos of Rahi's poetry is derived from the condition of the common Punjabi girl, who in the feudal order of the time was treated no better than an animal, and even the girl of his Partition poems is a poor, common girl. The title poem travelled on its own. Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi wrote that he did not know how it reached the villages, but he saw young girls there singing it to the beat of the dholki, and singing until their voices choked on the lines about a bride's procession that never came and a sister taken away by force.

Themes: Partition, women's voices and the folk heroines

Three things give Trinjan its character. The first is Partition seen from the spinning circle. Where the prose writers of 1947, Manto above all, recorded the horror in stories, Rahi did it in lyric poems, and in a woman's voice: the abducted girl, the girl refused by her own family, the girl whose wedding procession never arrived. The lament poems that close the book, as Rekhta describes them, mourn the loss of life and the barbaric cruelty displayed by all three communities at the division of British India. The second is the folk inheritance. The heroines of the old qissas, Heer, Sahiban and Sohni, walk through the book as living characters, symbols of the typical Punjabi girl. In one poem, Je Tu Mirza Hondion Ranjha, Heer herself complains that if her Ranjha had been a Mirza, bold and ready to act, she would never have had to take poison, and the old love story is turned into a judgement on passive men. In another, the poet calls out advice to Sohni as she steps into the river on her unbaked pitcher. The third is the language: proof, offered in 1952, that the spoken Punjabi of village women could carry the full weight of a nation's grief.

ਲੇਖਕ

Ahmad Rahi was born Ghulam Ahmad on 12 November 1923 in Amritsar and migrated to Lahore in 1947, where he edited Sawera and moved in the Pak Tea House circle of Manto, Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Saifuddin Saif, the heart of the Progressive Writers' Movement in Pakistan. Trinjan was his first book, and a second collection on the Partition wound, Nimi Nimi Hawa, followed it; a later collection is Rag-e-Jaan. Poetry, though, was soon sharing his desk with cinema. He wrote songs for 51 films, 42 in Punjabi and 9 in Urdu, and reports credit him with more than 1,900 songs in all. His film work peaked in 1970 with all the songs of Heer Ranjha, the Punjabi classic, but readers of Punjabi poetry have always pointed back to the slim book of 1952. He received the Pride of Performance in 1997 and died in Lahore on 2 September 2002. His life is told in full in his people entry in this Kosh.

Reception and legacy

The Adamjee Literary Award made Trinjan officially what readers had already decided it was: the founding book of modern West Punjabi poetry. Qasmi's tribute gives the measure of its first impact: after reading and hearing Rahi, people said their Punjabi language was sweet and flexible after all, and they wiped the dust from the books of Bulleh Shah, Waris Shah, Ali Haider and Khwaja Farid and began to read them again. A poem like Amrita Pritam's Ajj Aakhan Waris Shah Nu had shown the same grief from the Indian side of the new border; Trinjan was its West Punjabi counterpart, the same wound sung in the same folk voice. The title has outlived the book's first life: Trinjan is today the name of a well known Punjabi bookshop and cultural space in Lahore, and of a welfare organisation founded by the poet Tahira Sra. In this Kosh the book stands on the shelf with Heer, Sassi Punnun and Qissa Sohni Mahiwal, the old romances whose heroines Rahi brought back to life in a modern girl's voice.