Gurdial Singh
The novelist of Jaitu and the Malwa poor, whose Marhi da Deeva is the great Punjabi village novel.
Gurdial Singh was born in Jaitu in Faridkot district into a carpenter's family and left school at twelve to work in his father's shop. He taught himself, became a schoolteacher and finally a university professor, but he never left the dusty Malwa country he wrote about.
His first novel, Marhi da Deeva, 'The Lamp at the Tomb', published in 1964, tells the story of Jagseer, the son of a Dalit farm servant, in a village where the old bonds between landlord and labourer are breaking down. Its plain, exact prose and its dignity in the face of poverty made it a landmark; it was filmed in 1989. Anhoe, Addh Chanani Raat and Parsa followed.
He won the Jnanpith, India's highest literary honour, in 1999, the second Punjabi writer to do so after Amrita Pritam. His novels are the best record we have of how the Green Revolution, the tractor and the canal reshaped the lives of the people at the bottom of the village.
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