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In the school of Punjabi studies
at Panjab University, Chandigarh, new young scholars were also
trying to grapple with such ideas and Jagjit Singh, now a
professor in the Punjabi Department, was foremost among them.
Recently he has published a collection of his research papers, Paath
Uttar-Paath (text, meta-text)—Essays Towards Semiotics of
Criticism and Punjabi Poetry (Shabadlok Parkashan,
Ludhiana).
About a hundred
pages in this collection are devoted to Haribhajan Singh’s
critical ideas carried in his autobiographical writing,
monographs and research papers such as Chola Takkian Wala,
Dhuppe Balda Diva, Sahiv Shastar, Sahit te Sidhant, Rupki, and
Sistami. As one of the most decorated writers of Punjabi,
Haribhajan Singh is a phenomenon that has happened in the world
of Punjabi letters, avers Jagjit. Very few Punjabi critics are
"discourse conscious" like him. He could use any
analytical method—psychoanalysis, Marxism,formalism,
structuralism, spiritual-metaphysicalism, etc., to explain a
literary text. He makes no bones about adopting this eclectic
approach. He holds that his purpose is to understand, interpret
and explain a literary discourse, whatever the method. He could
use any strategy to dig out the semantic layers that make
literary criticism itself a creative activity. The consequent
product is called a ‘meta-discourse’ that is a discourse
about a discourse, which can be equally illuminating as the
original text.
But it has been
found that like many other Punjabi critics, he has usually been
carried away by smart phrases and in his theoretical work.
Ultimately,
Haribhajan Singh as a critic can safely be labelled as a
formalist-structuralist, though as a poet or as a writer of
creative prose and as an interpreter of Gurbani, he is
one of the best in Punjabi. Jagjit’s assessment of Haribhajan
Singh as a critic is panegyric rather than objective. There are
two analytical pieces in this collection, about Sant Singh
Sekhon’s papers on Bhai Vir Singh and His Age and Sensation
and Perception in Ancient Poetry. Sekhon, according to
Jagjit, adopts a satirical tone about Bhai Vir Singh and while
tracing his ancestry links him with Diwan Kaurha Mall, an
adviser of Mir Manu, a sworn enemy of the Sikhs in the 18th
century. This Sekhon does to present Bhai Vir Singh as a
representative of the rising Sikh bourgeoisie and his prose
writings have been labelled as "historical romances".
Sekhon believes that this class of Sikhs had a schizoid psyche.
They were nostalgic about the lost Sikh Raj and at the same time
they were keen votaries of the English and wanted to see the
Sikhs making progress under them.
The second part of
this volume deals with semiotics of poetry, semiology of Nanak
Bani, poetics of Punjabi qissa poetry, Heer Waris and its
meta-text, nostalgia in Punjabi folksongs and the state of
modern Punjabi poetry.
The paper on
"nostalgia in Punjabi folksongs" makes an interesting
reading. The Punjabi, like many other communities, being a
diasporic community, have always been nostalgic about their
original ‘home’ which may not exist anywhere except in the
deep recesses of their psyche. More often than not, nostalgia is
a longing for the ‘past’ since the present is not as
sanguine as it was imagined. When the song touches the nerve,
tear buds are loosened and man feels a little lighter. The
write-up on ‘Heer Waris’ does not go beyond the superficial
formalistic structure of this important text of composite
Punjabi culture. Nevertheless, by presenting a critique of
critique, Jagjit has added a new dimension to literary studies,
though he needs more sustained work to consolidate his
achievements.
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LITERARY
criticism in Punjabi has undergone many changes in the past
century. In the first half of the 20th century it was mostly
biographical, eulogistic and didactic. However, the first
notable event in critical discourse in Punjabi was the
publication of Sant Singh Sekhon’s Sahitiarth, which
leaned heavily on Christopher Candwell’s Illusion and
Reality and some other texts of Marxist literature.
