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Sant Singh Sekhon:
Selected Writings.
Tejwant Singh Gill has done a great service in bringing Sekhon’s wide-ranging literary works together in a volume. Some of the poems and articles were originally written in English, others have been translated by Gill himself. The nearly 600-page volume brings together writings from the 1930s to the end of the century. Born in 1908, Sekhon was a contemporary of Mulk Raj Anand and Premchand. Like them, he was influenced by Marxist ideology, but unlike them, he went a step ahead and contested an election. Gill’s Introduction is a carefully written piece and connects Sekhon’s critical work with his writings on history, language and politics. It also throws light on his early struggles, his creative writing, autobiography and Sekhon’s translations. A man of many talents, Sekhon’s creativity found expression in almost every genre—poetry, short story, novel and drama—but his real forte, to my mind, remains the short story, and it is the critical articles that have a lasting value both for literary history and literary aesthetics. Few of this generation would know that he also wrote in English, especially in his early years. The collection contains both—Sekhon’s English writings and translations of selections from Punjabi (done by the editor). Sekhon’s readings of Sikh history are valuable for the fresh insights we get from these. Sekhon the writer was an actor in the history of our times, and a fearless one at that, a person with a secular mind and the courage to break conventions, willing to pay the price of being a rebel, and above all a son of the soil. The work is divided into eight sections: poetry, short stories, excerpts from novels, autobiography, articles, literary criticism and translations (by Sekhon from Punjabi into English). Genre divisions do make sense, but the division into articles and literary criticism has overlapping concerns Most of the articles, especially the ones like the Specificity of Literature, Impact of the October Revolution and Socialist Ideology on Punjabi Literature, The Writer and the State, The Jat in the Theatre, A Note on the Short Story, all have either a theoretical or an ideological base. In the section Literary Criticism, the piece on Kissas and Romances falls into the category of genre criticism. One may have some reservations on the grounds of the division, but that does not in any way detract from the value of the articles. Like many others of his generation— Faiz, Bachan and Firaq—Sekhon was a teacher of English, but chose to write in his mother-tongue. This bilingualism was the asset of that generation, which we seem to have lost on the way. Punjabi was not only the language of his emotions, but also the language of his intellectual conceptualisation. His early poems in English reflect his awareness and parallelism to world events, especially a poem composed in 1939: Spanish Militia Man to His Wife. His stories take up either a residual memory or an incident and builds upon it. Pemi’s Children, Kesu Flowers and The Final Farewell record sensitive moments and hold the reader’s interest. The plays also reveal a sharp awareness of the dramatic, as events are unveiled through fast moving dialogues, disagreements and conflicts. Sekhon’s translations again range from the scriptural to the very contemporary, from Guru Nanak’s compositions to Shiv Batalvi’s Luna. Free of essentialisms, his work provides the reader with a fresh insight into history, literature and aesthetics. In the new context of a globalised world, translations acquire an added importance. There is a need to build up a history of critical discourse across languages, one that has emerged out of Indian culture and epistemologies. |
THE Sahitya Akademi
edition of Sant Singh Sekhon’s Selected Writings is, in itself,
a validation of the act of translation. It brings to the non-Punjabi
reader some of the best writings of a writer who deserves to be known
across boundaries and be part of literary culture and history across
languages. Sant Singh Sekhon, like Kartar Singh Duggal, is one of tall
figures of Punjabi literature. These are men who connect the
pre-Partition India with the post-Partition one.