Zindaginamaज़िन्दगीनामा

About the book

Zindaginama, which means a saga of life, is Krishna Sobti's epic novel about a Punjabi village before Partition. It was first published in Hindi by Rajkamal Prakashan in 1979, as Zindaginama: Zinda Rukh, and it won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1980. The novel is set in Shahpur, a village in the Gujrat area of undivided Punjab, in the early years of the twentieth century, and it follows the village through the years when the First World War and the Ghadar movement reached its lanes and courtyards.

It is a long book, 452 pages in its English translation, and an unusual one. There is no single hero and no single plot. Instead, Sobti builds her village out of many voices: the men who debate on the Shah family's verandah, the women who run the festivals and the marriages, the songs and stories that fill the days. It is a portrait of a Punjab that lived together, Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs, in the years just before that world was broken.

Shahpur and the Shah family

Shahpur is presided over by the Shah family, moneylenders and landowners whose haveli stands at the centre of village life. The patriarch, Shahji, is a wealthy and worldly man with contacts in nearby Lahore, and he is the village's conduit for news and political events. His younger brother, Kashi Shah, is the benevolent one of the two, generous almost to a fault. Together the brothers settle the village's disputes and take responsibility for its problems. In the evenings the village elders lie on cots on Shahji's verandah, smoking hookahs and telling tall tales, while the news from the Lahore newspaper is debated.

The women's world of the village belongs to Shahji's wife, Shahni. She masterminds the year's festivals along with births, deaths and marriages, and as the senior woman of the neighbourhood she mentors the younger women. Around her are the chachis, tais and bebes, the aunts and grandmothers who carry the village's customs. Sobti gives the women the same weight as the men: the novel's life is in its kitchens and courtyards as much as in its fields.

Why is it called Zinda Rukh?

The book's full title, Zindaginama: Zinda Rukh, means a saga of life: the living tree. Sobti conceived the novel as the first part of a trilogy that would follow the people of Punjab before, during and after Partition. The tree is the novel's own image of itself: a living thing made of many small parts, each a leaf, each with its own story, growing together into one entity. The characters come and go, none of them a hero, and the village itself is the thing that lives and grows.

The trilogy was never finished. In 1984 Sobti filed a copyright suit against Amrita Pritam, whose book Hardatt Ka Zindaginama had used the word she considered her own. The case was litigated for twenty-six years and was decided in Pritam's favour in 2011, six years after Pritam's death. Sobti later said the litigation had interrupted her plan for the trilogy, and the first volume, the living tree, is the part that stands.

From Channa to Zindaginama

Zindaginama had a long road to print. Sobti first wrote it in her twenties, as a five-hundred-page manuscript called Channa, and submitted it to the Leader Press in Allahabad in 1952. The press accepted it and printed it, but when she received the proofs she found the text had been altered: her Punjabi and Urdu words had been changed to Sanskrit ones. She sent a telegram asking them to stop the printing, withdrew the book, and paid to have the printed copies destroyed.

It was more than twenty years before the book found its publisher. Sheela Sandhu of Rajkamal Prakashan persuaded her to revisit the manuscript, and after extensive rewriting it was published in 1979. The English translation took longer still: it appeared from HarperCollins India in 2016, translated by Neer Kanwal Mani with Moyna Mazumdar. The translation is a feat in itself, because the original moves between Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, Persian and Sanskrit, and the translator had to carry that mixture into a single tongue.

ਲੇਖਕ

Krishna Sobti was born in 1925 in Gujrat, in what is now Pakistan, and was educated in Delhi, Shimla and Lahore. She began publishing stories in 1944, and her novels include Daar Se Bichchuri (1958), Mitro Marjani (1966), Surajmukhi Andhere Ke (1972), Ai Ladki (1991) and Dil-o-Danish (1994). She received the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship in 1996 and the Jnanpith Award in 2017, and she died in Delhi in 2019.

Reception and legacy

Zindaginama won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1980 and has been described as a universally acclaimed part of the Hindi literary canon. The critic Nand Kishore Naval called it the most comprehensive, sympathetic and sensitive treatment of the peasants in Hindi literature since Munshi Premchand. Reviewers of the English translation praised the sweep of the book, its portrait of a self-supporting people intimately connected to their history and the natural world, and noted that its life force, as Sobti presents it, is stronger than any division imposed from outside.

The novel is also a record of a language. Sobti's Hindi is not the Hindi of the textbook: it carries the rhythms and words of Punjabi, and the novel reads like the Punjab it describes. For readers who want to know what undivided Punjab felt like before Partition, its courtyards, its festivals, its arguments and its songs, Zindaginama is the book to read first.