Anyone who is not familiar with Balwant Gargi (1916-2003) and his works cannot be taken as a serious reader of Punjabi literature.
Gargi was a Punjabi language playwright, theatre director, short story writer, novelist and intellectual. His name and fame mainly rest on his plays. It can be asserted that Gargi is the greatest dramatist of our language. In terms of vision and technique he has no rival. His fascinating book Punjab De Mahaan Kalakaar (The Great Artists of Punjab), transliterated by Maqsood Saqib and Faiza Ranaa into Shahmukhi script has recently been published by Suchet Kitab Ghar, Lahore. But first about the author.
Gargi was born in Bathinda in a house close to the Sirhind canal that is known and famous for being the place where Queen Razia Sultan was imprisoned. He did his graduation from the Government College, Lahore aka GC and had master’s from F.C. College, Lahore. Some of his plays are Loha Kutt, Kanak di Balli, Kesro, Sultan Razia, Dhooni di Agg, Mirza Sahiban, Saukan, Saelpathar, Navan Mudh and Ghugi. His plays have been translated into more than a dozen languages and staged across the globe including UK, USA, and Russia.
His very first play Loha Kutt (Blacksmith) created a huge controversy as it was both highly evocative and provocative in a society that was in a habit of ignoring the unignorable in the name of values and thus sacrificed reality at the altar of tradition. With the passage of time, Gargi’s preoccupation with sex, violence and death became overwhelming to the chagrin of custodians of culture and morality.
In his play Saukan (Rival Woman) drawing on mythopoeia he glorifies intimacy and sexual union which some find explicit and offending. His plays create social and cultural milieu in which elements of folklore, history and mythology intermingle hinting at enduring human predicament.
Gargi also published his gripping short stories. Apart from his dramatic corpus he wrote a scholarly book Folk Theatre of India which was published in the United States of America showing his lifelong passion with the longstanding tradition of people’s theatre. What inspired him was classical Sanskrit drama, Lorca’s poetic plays and Brecht’s epic theatre. He also wrote two semi-autobiographical novels in Punjabi and English namely The Naked Triangle (Nangi Dhup) and The Purple Moonlight(Kashni Vehra).
As far as playwriting in Punjabi is concerned, Gargi was a trailblazer and among the pioneers who raised it to a level where it could be employed as a vehicle of serious creative expression in modern times.
Now his Punjab de Mahaan Kalakaar. The book is simply a gem whose splendor one cannot miss. It comprises the write-ups on the Punjab’s great artists who preserved and promoted not only the cultural heritage of the Punjab but also immensely added to its creative richness employing different genres and forms. Nobody can imagine the cultural and aesthetic landscape of the 20th century Punjab without the creative individuals Gargi chooses to write about with a subtle feel and artistic care. The list can simply floor you. The first artist we meet is Amrita Sher Gil (1913-1941), a great young avant-garde painter, who looked, in the words of Gargi, as “beautiful as a painting”. She ushered in modern era of fine art in India. Born to a European lady and a Sikh aristocrat, Amrita had an aura of richness but what fascinated her were not the rich and the famous as an artist. With her discerning eye she discovered the richness of the poor i.e. ordinary mortals and thus she was polar opposite of traditional Indian visual artists who living off kings and rajas’ largesse portrayed the luxurious indolence and excessive indulgence of a dying class in ornate colours.
“Sad faces, swarthy and dark-skinned women, made-up brides, elephants, fakirs, musicians, beggars and naked females in her paintings have added a new vocabulary and images to our contemporary artistic heritage”, writes Gargi.
Other artists included in the list are K.L. Saigal, Bade Ghulam Ali Khan, Sobha Singh, Prithvi Raj Kapoor, Bhai Sumand Singh, Satish Gujral, Gurcharan Singh, Thakur Singh, Balraj Sahni and Surendar Kaur. One feels a little disappointed at what has been neglected or excluded; prominent artists from the West Punjab. May be the divide between the East and the West Punjab subconsciously impacted his orientation that forced him to forgo creative assets that seemed to be beyond reach in the conditions of animosity that existed between Pakistan and India. Still one wonders how he could forget Lahore where he studied as a young man. May be it was the excoriating pain of the Partition that forced him to flee Lahore. Fortunately we find one inimitable artist Bade Ghulam Ali Khan touched on who migrated to India some years after the Partition. About his deep knowledge of Ragas Gargi quotes Khan Sahab’s son Munnawar Ali Khan: “In his childhood my father was as familiar with ragas as a woman is familiar with the kitchenware of her house. As a carpenter’s son knows what is a saw, an axe, a drill and a gimlet, so knew my father the ragas Bhairvin and Darbari.”
Gargi narrates an interesting anecdote. Music director Vesant Desai praised the Indian film music to the skies at a music festival and ridiculed classical music and likened it to gargles. In response Khan sahab talked about the intricacies of ragas in this gathering and said: “…Our classical singing is a discipline, a continuous practice, a form of worship. Vesant Desai talks of film music and the situation is such that there is a scene of death in a film and the heroine sings up in the raga Meg Malhar. (This raga is associated with the feisty moods of rainy season). There is another a scene of spring and hero sings a love song composed in Asa raga. (The Raga portrays the moods of courage and determination). They (people from the film industry)) have neither sense of time nor the awareness of effect. They don’t realise the significance of time and occasion. These things are known even to the women in our villages…” Gargi adds: “He sang for one hour and sent us all into a deep trance. Some people were so enthused by his singing that they wanted to thrash Vesant Desai but he had already slunk away.”
The book is a must read as it not only introduces the artists but is also full of illuminating insights about the workings of creative minds which have shaped our arts and literature in the 20th century. — soofi01@hotmail.com
Published in Dawn, August 21st, 2023