City Improbable- Writings on Delhi

by Khuswant Singh

  My father had to start from scratch. His friend Dr M.S. Randhawa, Deputy Commissioner of Delhi, helped him to acquire office premises in Chandni Chowk, where he set up the first Punjabi printing press. Later, he established his publishing house, Navyug Publishers, which continues to produce an impressive list of books in Punjabi. In 1958 he launched what would become one of the most prestigious Punjabi literary magazines, Arsee (Mirror). This monthly magazine became a symbol of Punjabi self-reflection.

  As a result of the work my father did, what I grew up in was the epicentre of the Punjabi literary world in Delhi. Many of the Punjabi writers in Delhi at that time had moved to the city only after Partition. Since then Punjabi literature has become largely urban and Delhi-based.

  Arsee was a powerful forum for the Punjabi community in Delhi and Punjab, and published the works of many who later became stalwart literary figures. Many of the authors of the day knew my father from his Preet Nagar days. Along with short fiction, poetry and reviews, the magazine also published the occasional political commentary. It first published writers like Devender Sathyarthi, Amrita Pritam, Kulwant Singh Virk and K.S. Duggal. Other established writers included Bhai Vir Singh, Puran Singh, Gurbaksh Singh, Nanak Singh, Mohan Singh, Sant Singh Sekhon and Dhani Ram Chatrak. There were some who were unknown then but are now household names, like Balwant Gargi, Sukhbir, P.S. Sehrai, Gulzar Sandhu, Mohinder Singh Sarna, Dr Neki, Balraj Sahni, Dr Harbhajan Singh, Gurdial Singh, Ajeet Cour and Dr Sutinder Noor.

  My father closed down Arsee in 2000. He was eighty-six and fatigue had set in. But the tradition started by Arsee was so strong that now there are many other Punjabi literary journals published in the city, such as Samdarshi, Nagmani, Punjabi Digest and Aks. There are also daily newspapers which have a core literary section, including serialized novels. In spite of that, people still tell my father how much they miss his journal.

  Among the books Navyug published in the initial days were Nanak Singh’s Chitta Lahu, critically acclaimed for its idealized characters, Devender Sathyarthi’s Gidda, Amrita Pritam’s two famous collections of poetry Sunehre and Kagaz te Kanvas, K.S. Duggal’s Gauraj and Phul Torna Mana Hai, which both deal with the trauma of Partition, Mohan Singh’s Save Pather, Balwant Gargi’s famous play Loha Kut and Shiv Kumar’s Atte Diyan Chirian. Year after year, not only did my father’s authors bag the coveted Sahitya Akademi and Gyanpeeth awards, but he too was showered with prizes from the state and central government for excellence in printing and publishing from amongst all the Indian languages. I grew up hearing about his legendary role in the development of Punjabi publishing and promotion of the language and literature.

  Our house was a meeting place for many generations of poets, novelists, journalists, actors, filmmakers, bureaucrats, ideologues, politicians and artists. I learnt different things from each of them, not merely about literature but also about life and living. Devender Sathyarthi, in his nineties now, collected folklore from all the nooks and corners of India. He would make endless revisions of his manuscripts. He showed me how he wrote and rewrote on slips of paper and then pasted them on top of each other until he managed to produce a manuscript that flowed to his satisfaction. He was an ardent admirer of Rabindranath Tagore and I once asked him about his encounter with him in Shantiniketan. Gurudev had advised him, he said, to write for four hours every day. Such an offering to Saraswati would take care of his future and guarantee success in life.

  The people who came to our house were memorable not merely for their writing but also for their lifestyles which were radically different. Amrita Pritam, the queen of Punjabi literature, now in her eighties, used to live with her partner, the artist Inderjeet or Imroz. They seemed like Sartre and Simone Beauvoir to me. Her sonorous voice still resounds in my ears. She would hold literary evenings at her place. We were family friends and backdoor neighbours, and so we kids, especially my elder sister, were often summoned to help her with the cooking and drinks as she did not relish having domestic help around. She possessed the ability to both attract and repel people depending on her whims and fancies. I eventually learned to contend with her vacillations between deep affection and complete indifference. Imroz, a caring and devoted person, was known for the softness of his brush strokes, and did most of the designing work for my father till my younger sister, inspired by Imroz, started working on it. Imroz encouraged me to paint as well but after a while I changed tracks.

  The artist Sobha Singh, famous for his paintings of Sikh gurus and the legendary lovers Sohini Mahiwal, finished one of his paintings in our house. For want of suitable lighting, he actually converted one of our bathrooms into his studio. It is difficult to forget his gentleness and sense of humour. One day he brought The Pleasures of Philosophy by Will Durant and said, ‘This is for wise Rane, to make her still wiser.’ For me, it was the beginning of a lifelong love of the subject.

  Dr M.S. Randhawa, author-bureaucrat, known for his books on Kangra art, was an epitome of efficiency and discipline. He was an instant decision-maker, who really knew how to exercise his authority. He came to our new house one day and planned our garden for us. Before we knew, the roses were in full bloom and the garden perfectly manicured. The superior man, he once told me, always excels in whatever he undertakes.

  Another person I remember vividly is Shiv Kumar, creator of Luna and the beloved poet of Punjabis, who died in the prime of his life. Luna is based on history, on the story of Puran, son of King Salwan, and how his fate unfolds when he refuses to respond to the advances of his beautiful stepmother, Queen Luna. Shiv Kumar was very lyrical, sang beautifully and brought out the pathos of human suffering. His emotional intensity, born of the pain of unrequited love, and his exquisite expressions reminded me of Goethe’s Sufferings of Young Werther.

  The renowned Punjabi playwright Balwant Gargi led a colourful and dramatic life both in India and abroad. Even the process of writing was a drama being enacted. Others were indispensable for his creativity. Like Dostoyevsky, he never wrote but always dictated to his secretary or assistants. Whenever he picked up conversations with his friends over endless cups of tea, he would suddenly appear younger. With my father, his sole publisher, he enjoyed a very meaningful relationship.

  The sense of community was so strong that after some years, my father and some of his writers all moved into Hauz Khas Enclave to be closer to one another. When I was ten we moved into our newly constructed house. This household was to my youthful mind a little Delphi in Delhi, difficult to sustain and yet very fruitful as a creative crucible.

  My mother was a social worker and the first Indian woman to receive the World Peace Prize for her signature campaign for the peace movement after World War II. She provided a warm and stimulating home for friends and relatives. She succeeded in containing the constantly changing circumstances of our household. The Punjabi emotional world was like the Delhi weather—rushing torrents of rain and the sun scorching with the heat. My mother’s work for the downtrodden and, in particular, distressed women who came to our house with their problems, resulted in my own interest and research in the area of gender studies.

  The greatest gift I received from my father’s world of words was to experience the mystery of language, the power of the word and coming in contact with the energy of the writer/speaker.

  One of the things which gave unity to this group of writers was the recurrent theme of loss and suffering. It was as if the division of Punjab had permanently affected their psyche. In the 1950s, my father published works that dealt with Partition. The books of the 1960s and ’70s dealt more with the pangs of development and human relationships in the context of social and cultural constraints. The impact of western thought was clearly discernable in these works. During the 1980s and ’90s, a new phenomenon was the expatriate Punjabi writer—such as Sati Kumar, Dev, Amarjit Chandan, Kailash Puri, Avtar Johal, Ranjit Dhir, Iqbal Mahal, Iqbal Ramoowalia and Veena Verma—who highlighted his alienation in the capitalist world and wrote about his search for roots a
nd identity. The urban context has contributed to the development of the language in the sense that it has produced literature written in standardized and sophisticated Punjabi, whereas in Punjab the local dialect and vocabulary, for instance, in the Malwa region distinguishes if from the rest.

  The genres favoured have also changed over the decades. Earlier, poetry was the main form of expression. Now short stories too are very popular. Also, there are more women writers now—Amrita Pritam was followed by Prabhjot Kaur, Ajeet Cour, Dilip Kaur Tiwana, Bachint Kaur, Manjit Tiwana, Chandan Negi, Mohinder Kaur, Sheila Gujral and Vinita. The prominent writers have been easily accessible to the lay reader and are distinguished by their elegant and crisp style.

  But it is not that Punjabi literature has none of the problems that other regional literatures face. Lack of serious readership, an unsatisfactory distribution system and sales, and only an occasional arising of younger stars has not deterred my father from pursuing this love and carrying out the task of resurrecting the realm of Punjabi literature. It seems that this literature helps the community strengthen their identity in terms of being an aesthetic response to socio-cultural crises and also because it generates unconventional images of the community with regional variations.

  Punjabis are by nature brave, hard working, generous, compassionate and religious, yet this-worldly people who like to live well. A reflection of the increasingly global outlook of the Punjabi community in Delhi is that translations sell better than original Punjabi works. My father commissioned translations of many world classics into Punjabi: Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Hardy, Hugo, Balzac, Emerson, Marx and Freud. Even Khushwant Singh’s work had to be translated. My father’s interaction with the cultural sections of various embassies encouraged him to undertake these translations. Generally, a thousand copies of a popular translation would sell over a period of three years, whereas for other books, it usually took five to ten years.

  Today, Punjabi is being taught as the third language in Delhi schools. In fact, the government has funded this project and the Punjabi Academy actually provides teachers for promotion of the language in various institutions. But Punjabi children in Delhi seem to have adopted Hindi or English rather than Punjabi as the language of choice. Their familiarity with Punjabi ironically comes from Hindi film songs which are often based on Punjabi folk tunes or are replete with Punjabi phrases.

  My father is now the Chairman of the Punjabi Sahit Sabha (PSS) and brings out a quarterly magazine of contemporary literature that disseminates the regional literature of India in Punjabi. Punjabi Bhavan that houses PSS at Rouse Avenue is an active centre for art and literature. Perhaps there’s still hope; something of the Delhi that I knew might yet survive.

  Number Seven, Civil Lines

  SHEILA DHAR

  This extract is taken from Raga’n Josh: Stories from a Musical Life.

  The family dining room was the place where the final judgement on the state of the universe was available to both the adults and children of our family. It was the centre of the real world and there was no question that this real world was in the absolute control of my grandfather. He habitually surveyed his brood of sixty-odd people from his exalted position at the head of the table with a sharp but benevolent eye. If he smiled everyone knew that all was well with the world and life would soon shower exciting gifts on us. When he frowned, the women looked funereal and the children apprehensive. The cue on how one should feel and what one should think came from him and was received with the utmost respect and willingness, at least for the entire period of my childhood.

  We were used to incredulous exclamations about the size of our joint family from schoolmates and prided ourselves on both our numbers and our closeness. My grandfather had three sons whose wives and children were his responsibility as head of the household, and five daughters who though suitably married kept returning to the ancestral home on extended stays for one reason or another. Life was undoubtedly easier and pleasanter in their father’s comfortable house in Delhi than in the smaller towns and humbler circumstances in which their husbands were placed. But the overwhelming official reason why Delhi tended to become their family headquarters was that the schools were much better in the capital city. In addition to the families of my aunts and uncles, we always had house guests and three or four children of distant relatives or friends living with us. This is how our household came to have more than sixty members at any given time, including the children whose number usually exceeded thirty.

  Any visitor to the house was welcomed with great warmth and cheer by all. This came to be talked about as a wonderful trait of our family. We were very pleased with such praise and deliberately tried to outdo ourselves in devising little attentions and services for the comfort of our guests as this was sure to win the approval of all the adults. Another reason why we loved having people from outside was that even the smallest difference in dress, look or intonation was an interesting novelty that lit up the comfortable sameness of our lives.

  In the nineteen-twenties, my grandfather, a barrister-at-law, spearheaded the move of three main branches of the extended family from the congested lanes of Chailpuri in the old city of Delhi to the Civil Lines, where a sizeable piece of land had been gifted by the British government to an ancestor, presumably for services rendered. There were subsequent family partitions and about twenty-four colonial-style houses surrounded by lawns and gardens came up in the spacious and elegant area, where highly-placed civil servants of the British government lived. Almost all the houses nestled among tall trees and were connected by winding lanes. It was an imposing and attractive neighbourhood. The relatives who still lived in the walled city and visited these houses occasionally were awed by the new Anglicized life style that was the ideal of each of these units, and talked amongst themselves for weeks afterwards about the grandeur of the life they had seen.

  It was noted with envy and admiration that breakfast in these households consisted of eggs, toast and jam, instead of vegetable bhujia with paratha, and that even the women had begun to use spoons, though only little ones, to eat. There were many other amazing things. Guests to tea were served cakes and sandwiches instead of samosas and barfi. In the evenings there was Scotch whisky and soda in the living rooms instead of keora sharbat. The men played tennis, billiards and bridge in clubs instead of chess and ganjufa in the courtyard. These were big changes and intimidating ones, specially for the women who lived there. They had been grappling with their improved, Westernized style of life for almost ten years when I was born.

  We came of a long line of British loyalists. The title of Rai Bahadur conferred on my grandfather was a highly prized possession of the family and was used even more than his real name, Raj Narain, to identify him. His first son, born before this elevation could have been foreseen, was named Brij Narain, but the younger two had ‘Bahadur’ attached to their names, undoubtedly so that the advantage of the association could travel with them through life and ensure preferential treatment at every stage.

  The refined but somewhat high-strung middle son was my father who remained a forbidding figure to me for most of my life. As a child I was much more comfortable with his elder brother, my uncle whom we called Tauji. Through my school years, Tauji had been a steady source of love and warmth, even though he did not live in Delhi for most of his working life. He was an engineer in government service and in his prime occupied various elevated positions in Bihar and Orissa but he and his family spent every vacation visiting the family headquarters in Delhi. This time was like a joyful celebration that went on for the entire duration of his stay. It was understood by all that, of his three sons, my grandfather loved him the most and considered him more upright, generous and able than all his other children. My grandparents dotingly called him Chaand. Strangely, none of my grandfather’s other children seemed to qualify for a pet name. Sometimes I felt that he was the one with whom they had the strongest bond. It was almost something visceral that did not seem to enter their relations
hips with my other aunts and uncles. Tauji was like an extension of my grandfather and his very presence commanded the same kind of authority.

  He always came loaded with gifts for everyone in the large joint family, specially the children. More than anyone else, he made us feel like individuals by trying to communicate with each child separately. This was a rare treat. The other grownups regarded all the children of the house as a collective entity, layered into several age groups. Tauji’s personal and imaginative gifts were sharply aimed and did much to propel each child towards a sense of identity.

  As a teenager, I was notorious for my lack of grace and beauty and therefore became a natural target for snide remarks from my father’s sisters and my cousins. ‘Whenever there is a loud bang and crash, it means that she has collided with something’, they would say of me; or ‘She should really have been a boy’, or ‘Who will ever marry this ragamuffin?’, or ‘Can anyone believe she is a daughter of this house!’ When I was going through this stage, Tauji brought me a pair of extremely delicate silver filigree earrings from Orissa. I had never seen, let alone owned, anything so exquisite. It awakened something within me which helped me to cope with my physical awkwardness. My older brother got a train engine which his enquiring mind could study, take apart and put together again. My younger brother who wanted to be a strong man got a toy gun that went ‘bang bang’ and sent the younger children scurrying away to his great delight. For each one of us, such reminders of Tauji’s visits became landmarks which we associated with some important phase of growing up.