ਸੰਤ ਸਿੰਘ ਸੇਖੋਂਸੰਤ ਸਿੰਘ ਸੇਖੋਂ

ਮੁੱਢਲਾ ਜੀਵਨ

Sant Singh Sekhon was born in 1908 in Lyallpur, in the Punjab of British India, a city that today lies in Pakistan. He was raised mainly in Dakha, his father's village near Ludhiana in the Malwa belt, and the village world of fields, landlords and tenant farmers stayed with him for life: it became the ground on which nearly all his fiction stands. His father was a quiet idealist who kept his thoughts to himself. His mother was the practical one of the household, a devout Sikh shaped by the Singh Sabha reform movement. The friction between the two of them, remembered from childhood, returns again and again in his stories as a study of marriages under strain.

Sekhon studied to a high level at a time when few village boys did. He completed master's degrees in both Economics and English, and in 1931 he joined Khalsa College, Amritsar, as a lecturer. Teaching remained his profession for decades, with posts that included Gurusar Sudhar, Fatehgarh Sahib and Jandiala, and the classroom gave his writing its habits: clear argument, close reading, and a belief that literature should be judged by evidence rather than by reverence.

Why did Sant Singh Sekhon switch from English to Punjabi?

He began, in the 1930s, as an English-language poet, and some of his early poems appeared in shared publications alongside W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender. Like several South Asian writers of his generation, he taught English for a living. But the readers he most wanted to reach, the Punjabi-speaking farmers, teachers and students of his own countryside, could not read him in English. So he changed languages, and Punjabi gained the writer who would rebuild its criticism. His first Punjabi successes came in drama, and the switch also fixed his subjects: village life, marriage, faith and power, treated without sentimentality.

Plays: from Chhe Ghar to Mittarpiara

His first collection of one-act plays, Chhe Ghar (Six Homes, 1941), was a critical success. Its best known piece, Bhavi, builds a tragedy out of a tangled cross-relationship between a king and his son. More one-act collections followed: Tapia Kyon Khapia (1950), Natsunehe (1954) and Sundrepad (1956), along with the verse plays Wiaholi and Baba Bohar. In all, his drama runs to ten full-length plays and four collections of one-act plays, a body of work that helped move Punjabi theatre from verse romance toward modern prose drama.

Among the full-length plays, Kalakar (Artist, 1945) and Nal-Damayanti (1960) take up the relationship between men and women, while Narki (Denizens of Hell, 1953) began life in English as Eve at Bay. A second group re-reads Sikh history: Moian Sar Na Kai and Bera Bandh Na Sakio, both from 1954, Waris (1955), which weaves a love story around the poet Waris Shah as Sikh power rises, Banda Bahadur (1985) and Vada Ghalughara (1986). Mittarpiara (Beloved Friend, 1971) is the most discussed of them all: it imagines Indian and Sikh patriots forming an ideological friendship with Lenin in a bid to free India from British rule, and it won him the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1972. Critics have noted that his plays, rich in ideas, often worked better on the page than on the stage, where their philosophical debates could slow the action.

Novels and short stories

Sekhon published two novels, a quarter century apart. Lahu Mitti (Blood and Soil, 1948) follows a poor peasant family in early twentieth-century Punjab and reads, in part, like a social survey of the village economy: debt, land hunger and dependence press on the characters from every side. Scholars of Punjabi literature have praised its realism while noting that its people sometimes serve the argument more than the story. Baba Asman (Grandfather Sky, 1973) turns to the Ghadar movement, following a poor peasant who migrates to America, meets racial discrimination there, and is drawn into the Ghadar Party's armed challenge to British rule. It is counted among the most important Punjabi novels on the Ghadar theme.

His five short story collections include the widely praised Tija Pahar. The stories return to the world he knew best: rural households, strained marriages, small ambitions and quiet defeats, observed with a sociologist's eye and a reformer's impatience. Many of the stories have been translated into other languages, which carried his version of the Punjabi village far beyond its own readership.

Criticism and the history of the Punjabi language

It is as a critic, above all, that Sekhon changed Punjabi letters. Before him, appreciation in Punjabi was largely a matter of praise and biography. In five books of criticism he argued for method: a work should be read against its society, its economics and its moment in history. Sahityarth sets out his theory of literature, while Punjabi Boli da Itihas, his history of the Punjabi language, was a pioneering attempt to trace how the language itself developed. He also wrote two volumes evaluating the history of Punjabi literature, and he translated poetry between Punjabi and English, including Sufi and Kissa verse, with long commentaries on romances such as Heer Ranjha and Mirza Sahiban. For this founding role he is called the father of modern Punjabi literary criticism, and in academic circles he is fondly known as Baba Bohar, the old oak tree.

Politics, honours and later life

Sekhon belonged to the generation formed by the Progressive Writers' Movement, and his Marxism was a matter of practice as well as print. He joined the Communist Party of India, though he later let his membership lapse, and he tested his politics at the ballot box four times, three times for the Punjab legislature and once for Parliament, without ever winning a seat. His convictions also cost him a job: in 1951 he left Khalsa College, Amritsar, after sharp ideological differences.

Honours came steadily in his later years. He was named Shiromani Sahitkar in 1965, won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1972 for Mittarpiara, and received the Padma Shri in 1987. Punjabi University, Patiala, appointed him a Professor of Eminence, and after his death in 1997 the university established a chair in his name, so that the study of the literature he helped to modernise continues under his name.

Legacy

Sekhon's generation carried Punjabi writing across Partition and into independent India, and few of them left so complete a record: plays, novels, stories, poetry, criticism, literary history and translation. His limitation and his strength were the same habit of mind: he wanted every story to explain its society. When the explanation works, as in the best of the stories and in Mittarpiara, Punjabi literature gains a kind of writing it had not had before, fiction and drama that argue. Students still meet him first as a name in the history of criticism, but the plays and the two novels, rooted in Dakha's soil, are where his Punjab survives most vividly.