A great narrative poem of a Jallianwala Bagh massacre survivor, and lost for long, is finally translated. It retains the cadences of this historical document.
It’s a dramatic story by any standard. Nanak Singh, a virtually unlettered (“fourth grade pass or fifth grade fail”) Punjabi youth with a penchant for poetry lands up at Jallianwala Bagh with two friends on Vaisakhi day in 1919. While his two friends perish in the relentless firing by British troops under Brigadier-General Dyer, he somehow survives and a year later produces a pamphlet with a long poem titled Khooni Vaisakhi, recounting not just the horrors of the massacre but its entire historical and political context. The British authorities ban it, confiscating and destroying almost all copies. Nanak Singh goes on to write many more books and attains fame and recognition as the foremost Punjabi novelist. Khooni Vaisakhi is all but forgotten.
But fate intervenes. A Punjabi academic, K.S. Gupta, finds a copy of the poem in a gunnysack of papers of his bibliophile grandfather and writes a literary paper on it. This comes to the attention of Nanak Singh’s son, Kulwant Singh, by now a leading Punjabi publisher, who... Read full review here https://magazine.outlookindia.com/author/navtej-sarna/4457
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