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ABSTRACT
This paper undertakes a detailed reading of BVS’ novel Sundarī. Commenting on the as yet uncertain and experimental form of the modernist novel, the essay demonstrates how fiction and history, genealogy and folksong, contribute to the heteroglossia and polysemy of this much read and analyzed book. Through characters like Lakhpat Rai and his own ancestor Kaura Mal, BVS explores the relations between Hindus and Sikhs. Through Sundari, her multiple abductions and escapades, he constructs notions of Muslimness, but also of purity of Sikhness, besides creating a character representing an ideal Sikh woman, invested in her own chastity.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 The title of the novel Sundarī will appear in italics, the name of the character Sundari in plain text. All translations from Punjabi are mine.
2 See the excellent discussion on history in Murphy (Citation2012b, 135). On the blurring of the historical and fictional, Fair (Citation2010).
3 On the two lives of BVS’ novels, one at the time of their publication and then again after the 1980s in the Diaspora see Fair (Citation2010).
4 On difference in nationalist imagination see Chatterjee (Citation1993, 5).
5 On Nazir Ahmad see Ibid. Also Devji (Citation1994).
6 See the discussion on novels like Ānandmath and Debī Chaudhrānī in Mukherjee (Citation1994, 47–58).
7 For an excellent political account of the eighteenth century in Punjab see Dhavan (Citation2011).
8 See the comments of Man Singh in the Afterword of the novel where he mourns the loss of power of the Sikhs. Man Singh, ‘Antakā – 1,’ Sundarī, 119–137.
9 Dhavan has discussed the significance of this myth of Khalsa genesis, and the reality of politics in which varied Sikh misals indulged in realpolitik of alliances and engagements with all the political players in Punjab. When Sparrows.
10 On the rahitnāmā literature see McLeod (Citation2003).
11 Gurpreet Bal refers to Kaura Mal as Machiavellian. See her (Citation2006).
12 The reference here is to McLeod (Citation1989). On Ditt Singh and his ambivalence towards caste see Malhotra (Citation2017b).
13 Throughout his Char-Bagh-i-Panjab Ganesh Das not only speaks of his own Khatri ancestors, but also of many prominent Khatri, and sometimes Arora families.
14 BVS’s ancestors carried high caste suffixes to their names like Mal, Chand, Nand and Ram with only one Singh mentioned before Kahn Singh. For a genealogical chart of BVS see Singh (Citation1972, 114).
15 On genealogical story and biomythography see Smith and Watson (Citation2010, 263, 271).
16 The song is available in Sundarī, Antakā, 119–121. It was present in the 1898 edition as well.
17 There could be a tenuous link between the song of the abduction of the girl and the legend of Dulla Bhatti, a popular brigand of the sixteenth century who apparently rescued a girl called Sundari from the clutches of a Mughal officer. Did BVS have this legend in mind when he called his character Sundari? It is difficult to say, but the differences between the Brahman’s daughter Sundari of the legend and the Khatri’s daughter Sundari of the novel who turns Sikh are significant. Sundari of the Bhatti legend is rescued by Dulla, also a Muslim, who rebelled against the new revenue impositions of the Mughals under Akbar. For a discussion of the legend and the ballads based on it see Singh (Citation2008, 90–111) and Singh and Gaur (Citation2008).
18 On essential characteristics of certain castes and religions as developed in colonial ethnographies see Malhotra (Citation2002, 24–34). She has used the various colonial government documents produced by officials like Denzil Ibbetson, H. A. Rose and S. S. Thorburn to show how the Sikhs and the Muslims were produced as manly races, and Hindus as weak and effeminate, but cunning and manipulative. Jats were viewed as industrious, and the Hindu urban castes were characterized as unmanly, cowardly and parasitical.
19 The crow commonly appears in songs and stories. It can be both auspicious and inauspicious.
20 On women’s folksongs see Raheja and Gold (Citation1994). On their repetitious nature see p. xxv.
21 The practice of sati was common in Punjab, and was occasionally performed with, besides a dead husband, other dead male kin. It was also an act held in high esteem. See the respectful reference to a sati in Ganesh Das’s Char Bagh-i-Panjab. Grewal and Banga (Citation1975, 95). More famously four wives of Ranjit Singh and seven of his slave girls performed sati on his death.
22 See Malhotra (Citation2017a, 55–91).
23 Historians have discussed how the theme of Hindu women’s abduction was played up during communal tensions. See Datta (Citation1999, 148–237). On love jihad see Gupta (Citation2016, 291–316). Also, Gupta (Citation2001, 243–258).
24 For a discussion of Tegh Bahadur’s and Piro’s case see Malhotra, Piro and the Gulabdasis, 95–106. On Tegh Bahadur also see Murphy (Citation2012b, 93–115).
25 Bhai Mani Singh, a scribe of the tenth guru and a compiler of the Dasam Granth was executed in 1737 at the behest of the Lahore governor Zakariya Khan.
26 For a discussion of vigilance over a daughter’s sexuality through Punjabi proverbs see Malhotra (Citation2002, 76–77).
27 Doris Jakobsh notes that the Sikh women in the Canadian diaspora continue to look at honor (izzat) as defining their being Sikh and female. Jakobsh and Nesbitt (Citation2010, 8).
28 The trope of disguise in Sundarī is discussed by Sunar (Citation2016).
29 See Bal (Citation2006, 3532–3533); and Fair (Citation2010, 120).
30 The reference here is to the Dasam Granth and the depiction of women in Charitropākhiyān as sexually aggressive. See Rinehart (Citation2011, 113–149).
31 See the discussion in Jones (Citation1989, 129–135, 207–215).
32 There was unease within the Singh Sabha over goddess worship in Sikhism, particularly its presence in the Dasam Granth. Rinehart (Citation2011, 69).