Chronicler of the language

Jaspal Singh

Dr Mohan Singh Diwana, the doyen of Punjabi literature in the first half of 20th century, was born at Devi village in district Rawalpindi of West Punjab. After graduating in English Honours from the famous Government College, Lahore, he did his post-graduation in English from Calcutta University in 1924.

In 1931, he completed his Ph. D in Urdu literature from the same university. Then in 1933, he was awarded a D. Litt by Panjab University for his first-ever systematic history of Punjabi literature. Earlier, there was hardly any framework to trace the history of Punjabi language and literature from the beginning of the second millennium of CE.

No doubt, Mir Kiramatula, Bawa Budh Singh and Maula Bakhsh Kushta had made some efforts to identify the contours of Punjabi literature from the time when modern Indian languages in north of the Vindhya range had started acquiring a structure. But, Diwana’s contribution was arranging it in a systematic chronological order and collecting the texts of earlier Punjabi writers and composers.

It was not an easy task to write about the life and works of Mohan Singh Diwana, a complex personality, riddled with glaring contradictions. National Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, invited Harbhajan Singh Bhatia, a senior professor at Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, to take up this challenging task as a part of their series on Makers of Indian literature. Bhatia is a dedicated scholar and a very successful seminarian. He rose to the occasion to present a dispassionate account, without any prejudices.

Diwana was appointed a lecturer of Punjabi at Panjab University, Lahore in 1928, and was promoted as a Reader only in 1944, when he was made the head of the Punjabi department, the post that he held till his retirement in 1959. He was one of the most qualified teachers and a profound scholar, yet the university administration never thought of promoting him as a professor, perhaps, because of his unpredictable behaviour and abundant ego problems.

After his retirement, Diwana got engrossed in spirituality and yoga. He almost became an international celebrity in these related fields and would often travel to the West to deliver lectures and exchange views with experts from other countries. From 1975, for most of the times, he lived in Chandigarh, flocked by his followers and admirers from abroad.

Most of the Punjab literati avoided him or he would keep away from them, touting them as intolerably mediocre. Consequently, Punjabi intellectuals and university dons enjoyed criticising him. As a non-conformist, Diwana displayed many ‘weaknesses’ that the traditional scholars of Punjabi detested. For instance, he was fond of ‘stimulating yogic substances’ of sadhus and would openly smoke cigarettes, while sporting a flowing white beard and white turban.

Thus, for the Punjabi world of letters, he became a recluse, wallowing in his mystic spiritualism with a few white boys and girls around him, who visited him to listen to his discourses. Besides being a scholar, he was an excellent speaker in chaste English. Whatever field he studied, or researched, he did it with the utter devotion of a yogi. But for the conventionalists, he was a ‘perverted genius’.

Diwana’s literary output has been really impressive. From 1930 onwards, he published seven collections of poems, four collections of short stories, a collection of plays and a dozen volumes of Punjabi literary historiography and critical commentaries on literary and linguistic aspects of Punjabi writing since the Middle Ages. Quite a few of his books were transliterated in Shahmukhi (Persian) script and are popular with Pakistani Punjabi scholars.

He was the first scholar to give a proper scientific orientation to Punjabi studies, which, before him, was absolutely chaotic and not moving beyond folklorism. Despite a boycott by his contemporaries, he went on his own course and lived life on his own terms. His personal family life was a disaster, though his son JPS Uberoi became a well-known sociologist of India. He had to invent his own ‘family’ of weird disciples and admirers.

Punjabi scholarship can hardly afford to ignore this literary giant despite their bias. Once in a while, unconventional intellectuals must appear on the horizon to break the monotony of intellectuals’ sloth and priggish complacency.

In most of the university departments of Punjabi Studies, Dr Mohan Singh Diwana is rarely mentioned. On the basis of his research, many a scholar has written history of Punjabi literature. Some of them are more comprehensive and equally systematic. Diwana’s contribution has been eclipsed by these later developments. But, the foundation that he laid is so solid, that it can withstand any structural edifice over it. Herein lies his seminal contribution to Punjabi literary studies.

Harbhajan Singh Bhatia and the publishers National Sahitya Akademi deserve some acclaim for bringing out this detailed monograph about this lost and forgotten ‘maker of Punjabi literature’.