Preet Nagar: Punjab’s answer to Santiniketan

Close your eyes and imagine driving down the Grand Trunk Road between Amritsar and Lahore, that ancient vein of commerce and conquest. The air hums with chaos: car horns screech, tonga bells clang, hawkers hawk their wares — a cacophonous ode to life’s unruliness. Then, as if by magic, the din softens. You veer off the highway, and the world seems to shift. Golden wheat stalks sway, mustard fields ripple under a wide Punjabi sky, and there, tucked away like a forgotten poem, lies Preet Nagar — the Abode of Love. This isn’t just a village; it’s a radical dream, a stubborn act of defiance against divisiveness and polarisation, a living testament to inclusiveness and hope.

In 1918, a bespectacled civil engineer named Gurbaksh Singh — known to all as Darji — returned to India with fire in his soul. He had wandered the streets of Moscow, drunk on the words of Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Their ideas of self-reliance, individualism and a life stripped to its essentials was what he aspired for.

But Gurbaksh Singh wasn’t content to merely dream. He was a man possessed by what he called the “art of the impossible”. On a patch of Punjabi soil, once a hunting ground for Emperor Jahangir’s begum and hallowed by the Sufi peer Shah Bakhtiar, he dared to draw lines in the sand — not for division, but for a utopia where love, not caste or creed, would be the foundation.

Thus, Preet Nagar was born: Punjab’s answer to Santiniketan, but rawer, hungrier, closer to the earth. This wasn’t a place for polite ideals or fluff, but a place where Gurbaksh Singh envisioned a community where artists, thinkers and dreamers could live, create and breathe as equals.

His first act was to establish a community kitchen, where everyone — Brahmins, Dalits, Sikhs, Muslims and Christians — cooked and ate together. This was no mere gesture; it was a sledgehammer to the walls of caste and class. The conservatives bristled with outrage, conveniently forgetting the Sikh tradition of langar, where all sit as equals before a shared meal!

But Gurbaksh Singh was undeterred and snipped at everything moribund, every tradition that reeked of stagnation. Preet Nagar became a crucible for rebellion, a haven where artists like Sahir Ludhianvi, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Amrita Pritam and Balraj Sahni gathered to create art that didn’t just challenge, but shattered entrenched systems.

The heart of this experiment was ‘Preet Lari’, a magazine Gurbaksh Singh launched in 1933. It wasn’t just a publication; it was a literary Molotov cocktail lobbed at the status quo. ‘Preet Lari’ tackled caste oppression, gender norms, and the suffocating weight of superstition. Its pages brimmed with the voices of Punjab’s intellectual giants: Nanak Singh, Amrita, Sahir, and later, Gurbaksh Singh’s son Navtej Singh, who was a short story writer and co-edited the magazine until his death in 1981.

Each issue was a tightrope walk past censorship, a bold declaration of progressive ideals that laid the foundation for a cultural revolution. To read ‘Preet Lari’ was to feel the pulse of a new Punjab — one that dared to imagine a world beyond communal divisions and prejudices.

Then came 1947, and with it, Partition’s brutal cleaver. Preet Nagar sat precariously on the edge of the new India-Pakistan border, trembling as violence tore through the land. Families were ripped apart, villages burned, and trust dissolved into suspicion. Yet Gurbaksh Singh held fast to his dream.

While hate was being propagated, Preet Nagar welcomed Muslims, offering shelter and kinship in a time of blood and brutality. Was he a communist? A Marxist in disguise? The whispers followed him like shadows. He was familiar with the Soviet Union’s cooperative experiments, yes, but what he brought back wasn’t dogma — it was the rhythm of collective life. A shared chulha. Dignity for the worker.

With women and men standing shoulder to shoulder, he wove threads of socialism, Tagore’s universalism, Thoreau’s solitude, and Whitman’s humanism into something uniquely Punjabi: earthy, stubborn, tender. He didn’t wave a red flag; he called it Preet. Love. But dreams like these come with scars. The orthodoxy branded him — an atheist, communist, traitor — because he dared to build a community that embraced rather than excluded.

In the 1980s, as militancy ravaged Punjab, tragedy struck closer: Gurbaksh’s grandson Shammi Singh was killed for speaking out against violence. Yet the spirit of Preet Nagar endured. Today, Samia Singh, Gurbaksh’s great-granddaughter, has breathed new life into this fading utopia, wrestling it back onto the map of Punjab. Poonam Singh, Gurbaksh Singh’s grand daughter-in-law and her husband, Rati, have kept ‘Preet Lari’ alive, its printing press still clicking on land steeped in history. Plays are staged, artists gather and Preet Nagar remains a defiant oasis, scarred but battling ahead.

I was 10 years old when Preet Nagar became an extension of my parental home. With my siblings and parents, we would squeeze into our pale blue Fiat, my father at the wheel, and drive from Amritsar to this magical enclave. Gurbaksh Singh — Darji to us — was a towering figure, his intellectual rigour filling our home whenever he and his family visited Amritsar.

He and my father, a regular contributor to ‘Preet Lari’, shared a bond forged in ideas and ink. Once a month, we’d arrive at Preet Nagar, greeted by the scent of aloo paranthas sizzling in their surprisingly western-style kitchen. I’d steal glances at Anu, Gurbaksh Singh’s daughter, a petite, moon-faced enchantress, who seemed to carry the weight of myth. She was the muse of Shiv Kumar Batalvi, Punjab’s poet of longing, whose unrequited love for her gave us memorable poems that left a sigh in our young, seditious hearts.

Close your eyes once again and picture an evening in Preet Nagar’s open-air theatre. A cool breeze rustles the ripe wheat, golden under the fading sun, with children running barefoot through the fields, their laughter mingling with the scent of spices from the community kitchen. Over it all, Gurbaksh Singh’s voice rings out, steady and unyielding — we will live as equals, we will live in kinship.

Jawaharlal Nehru, during his visit in 1942, inscribed in the township’s visitor book that Preet Nagar was “a promise against conflict and harmony”. He wasn’t wrong. This was a place where Sobha Singh painted, Norah Richards staged plays, and artists found solace in a world tearing itself apart.

But Preet Nagar’s story isn’t just sepia-toned nostalgia. It’s a living challenge. Gurbaksh Singh wasn’t a man of labels — leftist, communist, or even “father of modern Punjabi prose”. Those are lazy boxes. He was an audacious experimenter, a weaver of dreams who stood on the precipice of Partition’s fractures and dared to imagine wholeness. He saw a world breaking and said, “I will build it anew — with love.”

Preet Nagar still stands as a question: can we dare to build communities rooted not in exclusion, but in shared imagination? Gurbaksh Singh asked it. Perhaps we must answer. Maybe that’s what Gurbaksh Singh left us: not just stories, but a challenge — to keep imagining wholeness, even when the map insists on fracture.

— The writer is a Chandigarh-based theatre director