Tassi Dharti (Thirsty Land), Zahid Hasan’s fourth novel, published recently by Pakistan Punjabi Adbi Board, Lahore, is a chronicle of struggle and despair.

It explores indirectly and at times directly the cataclysmic happenings that happened from the 19th to mid-20th century changing the politico-economic and socio-cultural landscape of Punjab for all times to come.

Locale or setting of the novel is “Bar”, Sandal Bar, to be exact. What is this Bar? The word is all Greek to the most of our city dwellers as they stand totally alienated from their geography, history, culture and language.

The roots of the malaise called alienation lie buried in the 19th century when colonialism with its hideous tentacles grabbed the sovereign Punjab. So it won’t be out of place to say a few words about the Bar.

The area stretching from the river Sutlej to river Chenab to the confluence of river Jhelum and Chenab had the generic name ‘Bar’. Bar in Punjabi means a threshold, an outer space, an area away from the human settlement, a barrier between populated area and wild forest, a natural jungle.

This Punjabi word having Indo-Aryan origins is not unconnected with the English word ‘bar’. Some of the meanings of ‘bar’ in the Oxford English Dictionary are: a barrier or a gate closing the entrance into a city, a material structure of any shape forming a barrier etc. So the area between two rivers that formed a natural barrier between two different settlements on their banks was called Bar in Punjabi.

Zahid’s novel has no protagonist(s) in the conventional sense. Lack of heroes and heroines offers a human spectacle without apparent heroics. At the centre of the story is a family or a group of families that becomes a microcosm of society. Historical conditions force the family to be constant combat gear in order to ensure its bare survival.

The family has to fight at multiple fronts; social economic and political. Ominously powerful forces it has to deal with are local as well as foreign in an unlikely place that is far-flung and a mere strip of jungle.

The man who later becomes head of the family has to leave his ancestral home because he falls in love with a woman of another tribe he cannot marry.

Elopement is the way out for them to be man and life if they don’t want to get killed for violating the traditional honour code. What could be a safer hideout than the Bar to start a new life.

The Bar though offering a shelter poses a daunting challenge with its wild growth, poisonous insects, deadly reptiles, wind storms, extreme weather, hungry predators and above all the absence of human presence. And if and when there is human presence, it‘s usually not benign. Raiders/robbers appear out of nowhere to plunder anything and everything with absolute impunity. Arable land, cattle and woman are there for grab in the lawless wild.

The biggest challenge is access to water essential for sustaining life. The family with the help of all its members starts building a tiny human settlement.

The moment they feel they can manage with their hard work to scrape out a living, they are pushed out of their fragile nest by a local bigwig who covets the land settled by the peasant family. They are forced to find another place in order to survive.

It gradually becomes a tiny community which includes a Sikh family. They make a fresh start. By now Punjab has been occupied by British colonialists and things seem to be changing fast at administrative, political and economic level.

The community hears the news of resistance spearheaded by a grand old man, Rai Ahmed Khan, who has appealed to all the tribes and clans of the Bar to rise against the occupation force. It loves to join the resistance movement but fears the consequences. But suffering is no something they are not familiar with.

It’s their lot in a system based on socio-economic stratification. They know they are nobodies and cannot make the difference in terms of outcome but choose to be on the side of freedom fighters to retain a sense of human dignity for which they are made to pay an unbearably heavy price.

The next big thing that happens is the colonial project of building of a complex and intricate canal network to bring a very large swathe of Bar under cultivation to boost agricultural production in order to extract maximum surplus needed back home.

Permanent land tiles are awarded not the peasants but to local toadies, quislings and settlers from eastern part of Punjab. The peasant family with the advent of colonisation of the Bar is again diddled out of their share of land by a ruthless settler through a stratagem in collaboration with the revenue officials.

The novel is a tale of a brave peasant family spread over three generations told by a novelist who happens to be an insider in the sense that he takes his material from the rich oral tradition of the Bar which he is a part of. The end of the story makes you cry.

A brave peasant woman after the irretrievable loss of her family, community and property taking her child leaves her hamlet which is no longer her home. She and her child are mere waifs and strays in a space that is nowhere.

We see her with a child dying of thirst disappearing on the way that unbeknown to her, leads to the graves of her elders. Woman and child, who otherwise symbolise fertility and hope, turn into a metaphor of receding human presence in the wilderness of time leaving behind a barely audible whisper of life’s meaninglessness. “Tassi Dharti” is a must read if you wish to know how people suffered and what Punjab lost during the last two hundred years. — soofi01@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, July 15th, 2016