The Survivors by Gurdail Singh (translated by Rana Nayar)

The beginnings of the Punjabi language go as far back as the 10^th century. Its emergence in the Indo- Gangetic plain, strangely enough, coincided with the growth and development of the English language in a far- off island inhabited by the Anglo-Saxons. Gurdial Singh, the Jnanpith Award Winner radicalized Punjabi novels or re-inscribed its ideological by infusing into it the new consciousness about the underprivileged and the oppressed. An inveterate progressive, he subscribes to the Darwinian notion of continuous, uninterrupted struggle with the circumstances as also to the principle of positivism- of evolution minus its ruthless competitiveness- as much as his characters often do.

The Survivors (originally published in 1966 as Unhoye in Punjabi), is his second major novel. This novel revolves around Bhisna, a man of rare courage and deep, passionate convictions, who stands committed to and incessantly strives for the assertion of essential human dignity by choosing the path of confrontation over that of abject orthodoxy in thoughts and belief prevalent in the society. Author depicted Bhisna as a stubborn, seemingly irrational character who revolts against the defunct societal values. He believes the entire system is poised for a severely destructive social change. The novel itself begins with an act of protest by Bhisna and his wife Daya Kaur against the tyranny of a hierarchical social system that works on suppressing the subaltern. Author starves to draw our mind to the fact that many such anonymous figures lived among us who fought bravely against the evils prevalent in the society but are erased from the memory of people among whom they might have once lived.

The novel is set in the administering of the colonial system that is the pre – independence India. However, as the novel proceeds it changes its phase almost quasi statically into the post – independence India, when the neo- colonial practices have secretly replaced the colonial ones.

Unhoye (The Survivors) is like an unframed tale, depicting the multi-layered complexity of life through the lives of two brothers Bhisna and Bhagta and their confrontation with the harsh colonial society filled with corrupt thanedars and the constables. The story opens with the latter trying to catch hold of Bhisna which he resists, supported by his wife Daya Kaur. The relation between the two brothers is restrained with the entry of Bhagta’s wife, Kartari. What rises is the author’s powerful attempt of imperceptibly depicting the breakdown of whole network of personal and social relations under the corrosive influence of modernization. On being dispossessed, Bhisna is abandoned by his younger brother Bhagta, whom he and his wife, Daya Kaur had literally brought up like his own son. Author exposes the hollowness of the social relations in the society by the prospect of brother turning against a brother. The novel is set in a township named Mandi which is portrayed realistically along with the entire geographical location of the houses of the marginalized. There is a proper division with the affluent and wealthy at the centre of the township and underprivileged pushed to the margins. As is seen from its descriptions, “By choosing to live in a house on the periphery of this township, Bhisna confirms his status as a proverbial outsider, an outcaste in a state of wilful self - retreat,”.     Such description creates an impression as one is not only simply looking at one of the towns in Malwa region of Punjab but instead is seen throughout in the Indian society, with all its falsehoods still in place. The book is full of realistic characters like Bhudha which help us relate to section of people in Punjab unaffected by urbanisation.

The narrative style used by Gurdial Singh in the novel is typical Malwai a dialect of Punjabi, with all its lexical and syntactical idiosyncrasies intact. The translation is smooth while some elements have been kept unaltered like “ kaure”  (representing a girl) , “peo”  (father) and others like “Weh, Deya, Henh, Paire Paune” in the translated version which create an feel of presence of  Punjabi touch in the novel. Even within the dialect , each character is identified by virtue of his/her idiolect, which is further compounded with the use of Bhagri, popular In a backward region of Rajasthan, which is done in the case of Bhisna’s friend, Hetiya. Thus due to the use of different voices the novel has an ambience of “polyphonic discourse”. In translators own words, “excessive reliance upon the spoken word, definite preference for the dramatic mode of narration (authorial intrusions are always kept to the bare minimum in his narratives) make chaotic demands upon the translator’s resourcefulness. “

The multi-layered reality unfolds itself in the novel through a layered structuring of the events, meticulously arranged with a view to maximise the effect of slow disclosure which both the character and situation demand. The story eventually shows how the urbanisation and modernization threaten to engulf and destroy completely a man like Bhisna first leading to the death of his wife Daya Kaur then following his retarded behaviour towards society and story ends with his abrupt death walking on a road alone. Bhisna’s fate is vaguely resonant of the undocumented, unsung of the lives of countless millions who suffered deprivation and dispossession interrogating our naïve, inane notions of modernity.