When the land no longer belongs to you – poignant tales from rural Punjab

By Bharat Dogra 

We are all familiar with how painful it is for a farmer to lose his land, so one can imagine the inner turbulence of a farmer who has not only been forced to sell his ancestral land due to economic compulsions but, in addition, is forced by continuing economic difficulties to accept temporary work as a landless farm worker on the same plot of land.

This is the situation in which Rakha Singh finds himself on a sad day on the outskirts of his village in Punjab, as depicted in a short story by Balbir Parwana titled "Beri Wala Khet" (translated as "The Farm with the Berry Tree"). He has to finish a lot of work in the day, but he cannot help time and again thinking about the days when this was his own land and sharing memories with his friend passing by or with his wife, Manglo, who belatedly brings his lunch. Small matters reflect wider changes. Rakha and Manglo are shocked that even the berry tree on this small farm has been handed over by the new rich landowner to a contractor for harvesting its fruit, while despite their poverty they had allowed anyone passing by to eat the berries freely.

Such poignant moments of life occur repeatedly in several Punjabi short stories I read recently, even though I could read these only in Hindi translation. In fact, while reading stories of several Indian languages, including South Indian languages with which I am less familiar, frequently very moving situations and scenes have brought tears to my eyes, even though I was reading them in English or Hindi translation. 

The reason, as I understand it, is that writers in local languages are closer to socio-economic realities, particularly of villages. Hence there should be many more efforts so that people in India, with its rich diversity of languages and dialects, can read the literature of other regions in translated versions, and Hindi can be a very useful link language for this.

To come back to the subject of deeply moving Punjabi stories, we cannot of course forget "Thakavat" ("Tiredness") by Gurbachan Singh Bhullar. This is the story of Aaso, whose husband died when she was only 30, leaving her with the responsibility of bringing up her son. Since then Aaso has not known what it means to rest. Her life has become an unending story of toil and work. Other villagers ask—why don't you take some rest now that your son is growing up? But Aaso goes on relentlessly working to ensure a better future for her son. Then one day there is a tender moment, a fleeting but beautiful moment in the life of her son, and suddenly Aaso feels that she can now take all the rest she had been denying herself all these years. Now, dear reader, please hold your curiosity. I am not going to tell you here what that tender moment was, because to reveal this would be to give away the entire story. So you can guess, or better still, read the original story.

I could not hold back my tears when I read a very moving, also a very short, story by Navtej Singh titled "Bholu Ki Chithi" ("Letter of Bholu"). It is about the very deep feelings of a small child, Bholu, in a remote village of Punjab. Bholu's father was a freedom fighter who struggled in a colonial jail and died from illness. The family later loses its farmland too. Meanwhile, India becomes a free country. The economic distress of this family continues. Bholu's grandpa is ill. The doctor recommends pure cow milk to him, but the family cannot buy this every day. Bholu learns about national leaders at school and has an idea. He writes a letter to Mahatma Gandhi to kindly recommend to Jawaharlal Nehru to send his family a cow, and when he grows up he will pay for it.

Sometimes social aspects are emphasized in literature and sometimes economic aspects are emphasized. It is rarely that the socio-economic reality of a farmer's life across a generation is captured in terms of interactions and intermingling of both social and economic factors in deeply human terms. However, this has been achieved very successfully in Baljinder Nasrali's story "Agar Apni Manasthiti Kahun" ("If I Reveal My Inner Feelings"). In fact, this has been done so well that the reader feels very close to the ageing farmer, the narrator of the story.

"Jahaaz Wali Tanki" by Ajmer Sidhu is a very realist and disturbing portrayal of a Punjabi villager who pins all his hopes on finding a job in a western country but is betrayed. In his story "Bulbuliyon Ki Kheti" ("Farming Bubbles"), Kesra Ram presents a realistic portrayal of a young farmer attracted by the stock market to such an extent that he is willing to sell his farmland to invest in shares.

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The writer is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include "A Day in 2071" and "Navjeevan," containing short stories and novellas in English and Hindi. His website is bharatdogra.in and his YouTube channel is Bharat Dogra | Save Earth Campaign