Sakoon Singh
Chandigarh
author/academic/english literature
'In the Land of the Lovers'
(Rupa) 2020
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Articles by Sakoon Singh
Mem da pind: How Norah Richards set up an artist village at Andretta
Lahore days, 1911-20 Norah and I went to… Ramayana theatre on Friday… What sensitive, gentle and delicate faces! Look at that boy in olive velvet frock-coat, white trousers and pink turban. How beautiful is the dark tint of his skin against the pale pink turban!... We have not seen such fine human porcelain in England... — Philip Ernest Richards in a letter to his mother.
Book: Fourteen Springs of Separation
The novel begins as Rani Jindan Kaur speaks: “I had broken out of prison, but I wasn’t free yet”, a statement that echoes the collective anxiety of all Punjabis as the British relentlessly expanded their empire. In Fourteen Springs of Separation, Sakoon Singh delivers a brilliant story that serves as both an intimate reclamation of history and a gripping postcolonial narrative.
Fiction: Mehr, a graphic novelist, stumbles upon Queen Jind Kaur and is immediately taken in by her
In those days, going to Lahore was a major event for us girls – for my many friends and sisters and cousins and cousins of cousins! Once, in the month of Maagh, a village elder, Bapu, took us to the city to see the basant mela but he ended up losing his way in the labyrinthine streets of Lahore. The inner alleys were undulating, going in circles, sometimes hitting a sudden dead end. Rows and rows of alluring shops lined the streets, selling cloth, cattle feed, seeds and a variety of provisions.
Book review of Gangrene: Punjabi Dalit Short Stories
When it comes to the question of caste, Punjab is a unique case. While the caste hierarchy prevalent in other parts of India does not exist in toto in Punjab, it is not to say that caste does not have a hold here. A theoretical understanding of Sikhism at the level of doctrine would lead to the assumption that Punjab under its pervasive influence is largely immune from the scourge of caste.
History of Punjab Re-imagined Through the Lives of Women
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Flirting With Fire: Nanak Singh’s Cautionary Tale About Partition Hatred Resounds Even Today
Yet another translation of a novel by a stalwart of Punjabi letters, done by his grandson Navdeep Suri. A refugee special train at Ambala Station. The carriages are full and the refugees seek room on top. Credit: Wikimedia Commons Just like the holocaust seems inexhaustible in its (re) interpretation in literary and cinematic spaces, Partition, the evil twin of Indian independence keeps rearing its head in various genres from time to time.
Book Review: GJV Prasad’s ‘A Woman Burnt’ Keeps Spirit Of Original Tamil Text Alive
To me, a good translation consists of two cardinal qualities. Firstly, it seems effortless, no matter how much effort goes into it. This seeming effortlessness arises out of years of practice and a natural flair for languages, additionally an implicit understanding of the cultural landscape of the original. Secondly, the translation works not only at the level of language but also at the level of the ‘spirit’ of the original text. This book certainly measures up to these counts.
Chasing Dignity: Exploring a Dalit Protagonist’s Life in Contemporary Punjab
Books Caste Fiction 27 minutes ago Rachhpal Sahota’s Chasing Dignity is self avowedly a novel but also a detailed social document on one of the most obdurate pan-Indian practices, that of caste. Here, the context is that of Punjab which makes the circumstances somewhat peculiar. The fact that Punjab has been home to the influence of the egalitarian Sikh faith since the 15th century has altered but certainly not vanquished caste, as this book bears out quite unequivocally.
Memories of Old Hurts and Grudges That We Carry for Years on End
There is a sweet melancholy that pervades The Anatomy of Loss – a suspended pain of childhood, an indescribable dull hammering that fetters the protagonist, Himmat Singh, for years on end. The book opens with an intimate portrait of his nana-nani (maternal grandparents) who live on a secluded farm near Amritsar. The grandfather is a retired professor and a celebrated Punjabi poet whose books Himmat unexpectedly finds years later in a London bookstore.
Lost And Gained In Translation
Translation is a delicate matter. To iterate that it involves knowledge of two languages is a no-brainer. What’s more important is that this obvious “qualification” of “knowledge of two languages” is clearly not enough. Especially when it involves what is designated as a “literary” text. Meaning of a text is constructed at two levels: the connotative and denotative.
Love Story: Condition Of The Heart
They went back to the club to pick up the bike. Through a clearing, they stepped into a wild grove at the back of the club deck. You could not suspect from the outside, what full forests those depths enclosed. He put a finger on his lips and with a movement of his hand, asked her to come along. One minute you are in a manicured garden, sipping tea and the other, you are discovering a cavernous fantasy.
Love Is A Many-Splendoured Thing
We are asleep until we fall in love.
Books of the week: From Sakoon Singh's In the Land of Lovers to PV Sindhu’s biography, our picks
Living Aarushi Agrawal Apr 27, 2020 09:43:20 IST We love stories, and even in the age of Netflix-and-chill, there's nothing like a good book that promises a couple of hours of absorption — whether curled up in bed, in your favourite coffeehouse, or that long (and tiresome) commute to work. Every Sunday, we'll have a succinct pick of books, across diverse genres, that have been newly made available for your reading pleasure.
How an Irish woman revitalised theatre in Punjab
Norah Richards (1876) came to Lahore in 1911 when her husband Philips Earnest Richards joined as professor of English at the Dyal Singh College. The college was founded in 1910 by philanthropist, educationist Dyal Singh Majithia who also founded the newspaper The Tribune in 1881. He was an ardent follower of Brahmo Samaj, which in turn was affiliated with Unitarian Christianity and therefore saw the entry of the Richards couple.
Inscribing new cartographies: Translating poem
Prof Rajesh Sharma is mindful of all these hazards of translation Maps of the Impossible Share Source DNA Updated: Aug 11, 2019, 07:10 AM IST Every act of translation is rooted in a tangible cultural context. Apart from that holy grail, the element of authenticity, there is an aspiration for the credibility of sound, dhvani, more especially if it involves poetic texts. Unless the spirit and sound are carried over into the translation, poetic translations suffer from awkwardness and pedantry.
Arif’s story restores humanity where it’s most needed
Everyone, meet Arif! Arif is an ordinary boy. Such is his ordinariness that you will pass him by on the road or in the local market without blinking an eye. And that is precisely why you ought to meet him. He is the protagonist of Abdullah Khan’s ‘Patna Blues’ (Juggernaut, 2018) Further, he belongs to Bihar: from a low middle-class family — his father is a subaltern police official — an honest sub-inspector struggling to make ends meet.
O brave new world: Shakespeare in colonial Lahore
The genre of theatre encloses a multitude of voices and being a performative art, lends an eclecticism that can move it from mimicry to more authentic depictions. Shakespeare Tercentenary Pic: Sakoon Singh Share “Suit the action to the word, the word to the action…” Hamlet. Mimesis is a key element in classical Greek theory.
Longing, Thou Art King: Baba Farid- Poet, Sufi, Mystic
Birha birha aakhiye, birha tu sultanJis tan birha na upje, so tan jaan massanLonging, longing, we sing of, longing- thou art kingThe body without longing is, but a corpse Baba Farid symbolises the deeprooted syncretic spirit that has existed in the cultural space of Punjab. One of the four prominent spiritual masters of the Chisti order of the Sufis, he was born in 1179 at a village called Kothewal (Multan) in the Punjab region of what is now Pakistan.
What the Body Remembers: Mahasweta Devi’s Standayini
A significant part of the story is circumscribed by women’s bodies. Mahasweta Devi Mahasweta Devi Share “Her plentiful breasts now became a gaping wound.” Mahasweta Devi’s, by now canonical “Standayini,” or The Breastgiver, (1997), one of the three Breast Stories is an exploration of the constructed nature of gender and more specifically the mother figure, a symbolism that flows out of the protagonist’s proffered role as a wet nurse.
The liberating spirit in Sufi saint Bulleh Shah’s poetry
Three centuries after the Punjabi Sufi poet Bulleh Shah (d. 1758) lived, he continues to speak to people. His poetry is part of a strong performative culture still alive around Sufi poetry, immortalised, among others by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Pathane Khan, Abida Parveen, Rabbi Shergill and others. It continues to find new renditions in the entrenched traditional forms like qawalli to more experimental western forms like rock.
The circle of reason and the mimicry of western knowledge
Circle of Reason Share The Hindu system of thought considers Goddesses Lakshmi and Saraswati as representing the domains of material wealth and learning respectively and presiding over two distinct spheres, kept apart for all intents and purposes. In fact, they scarce step into each other’s territory. It is frowned upon. While in the western world view, knowledge is seen as inevitably translating into material power.
Beauty and terror of science in romantic imagination
Mary Shelley Share The metaphor of Frankenstein’s monster endures. With the world stepping into a real dialogue with AI on a domestic scale, it was a germ of an idea, no more than fantasy in the 19th century. The gnawing possibility of technology overtaking human provenance has always been a subterranean fear. Sometimes discarded temporarily in the sanguine exultation of new promises of a brave new world, it invariably rears its head again.
Cohen’s many quests: (To) lovers in all degrees of anguish
Inner directed adolescents, lovers in all degrees of anguish, disappointed Platonists, pornography peepers…(Cohen quoted by David Remnick) These were some categories of people he considered to be his ideal readership, Leonard Cohen is said to have affirmed to his publisher in what was a rather poetic pitch. With Plato and pornography becoming neighbours at all, let alone cordial or not, is a peek into Cohen’s range.
Museum: A ‘way of seeing’ that evolved through the ages
“For many Europeans, India was a vast museum, its countryside filled with ruins, its people representing past ages... a source of collectibles and curiosities, to fill European museums, botanical gardens and zoos and country houses.” — Bernard S Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge. Taking off from where John Berger left, a museum is, at the end of the day, a way of seeing.
Margaret Atwood and that peculiar Canadian-ness
Margaret Atwood Share Sometimes you look for a little foothold. A resting place to slip in your feet while you climb up the precipice of a literary text. Especially when the spatial and temporal space is distant. But then, one of the more powerful rationale of literature is, that in its natural polyphony, it reveals also a glint of the, of the? What’s that old fashioned word? Humanity. Which, in the radical literary theory laden classrooms, has become a bit of liability.
Anees Salim and the swansong of a quaint small town
“…(her) breath like dead moths, fell on me at regular intervals.” Pace. What does pace do to a narrative? The Russian formalists advanced the key insight that literature defamiliarises the ordinary, and by some alchemy, makes it appear like a discovery.
‘Everyone lives in a story’: Amitav Ghosh’s myriad lives
Amitav Ghosh Share Everyone lives in a story…because stories are all there are to live in…” Amitav Ghosh is known to be a compulsive journal keeper. One can see where the immaculate and sometimes quirky detailing comes from in his writing. It stems from his solid old habit as an anthropology student at Oxford, given that journal-keeping is a classic methodology in Anthropology.
‘Negative Capability’ & in praise of poetry’s fine excesses
A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe. ~Dylan Thomas Western literature has had an unbroken tradition of poet-philosophers and a developed continuum of critique that has led to a robust literary culture. So when the much loved Keating (Dead Poets Society) tells his class, “We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion.
Guru Nanak saw nature as the all-pervasive intelligence
Barah Maah/ Twelve Seasons in Raag Tukhari (circa 15th century) by Guru Nanak is a composition replete with poetic splendour and a deeper recognition of nature as a guide/guru. Guru Nanak describes the twelve Indian seasons and against the changing landscape, foregrounds a woman lover, who suffers in birha/separation. The ancients in India had been practicing the genre of Barah Maah; Guru Nanak, however, adapted it allegorically towards a defined spiritual purpose.
A tale of two Kiplings and a hybrid cultural identity
“He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam-Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Ghar – the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore museum. Who hold Zam-Zammah, that ‘fire-breathing dragon’, hold the Punjab, for the great green-bronze piece is always first of the conqueror’s loot.” The opening lines of Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim bring together disparate strands of fact and fiction. The urchins of Lahore roughhouse around the monumental canon installation.
The trope of botanical painting in Amitav Ghosh’s fiction
In the 1790s, William Carey laid out a five-acre garden and herbarium at Serampore, North of Calcutta. He experimented with plants like the hedgerows that somewhat placated his nostalgia for his native Northamptonshire. According to Arnold, the Company servants derived pleasure from detailed renditions of plants and flowers. Additionally, they began investing in botanical drawings for the purposes of documentation and disseminating plant data.
Agha Shahid Ali, Kashmiriyat and the metaphors of loss
At a certain point I lost track of you Agha Shahid Ali was a connoisseur when it came to food. It is said that his pad in Brooklyn was a pit stop for poets and students and researchers poring over a matla and radif, while their senses immersed in the whiff of biryani and korma simmering in his ever bustling kitchen. The guests could always hope to be fed.
Jugni: The roving, rebelling Everywoman who has seen it all
Jugni ohde muhn ton fabbe/ Jihnu satt ishq di lagge (To sing Jugni behoves the one/ Who has endured the ravages of love — “Jugni” Alam Lohar (translation: mine) Jugni has intermittently reverberated in the skies of Punjab. The fluid folk character has been part of the collective consciousness. She materializes off and on from thin air to offer her dispassionate commentary on the goings-on.
Looking at women scientists through Amitav Ghosh’s eyes
It was as if a flaming sword had descended from heaven to shut her out of Eden, forever depriving her of the chance to inscribe her name in the annals of botanical exploration.”— The River of Smoke The binaries employed to inject a schism in man-woman symbolism have been pretty much carried over to the domain of science. The watershed moments in the linear continuum of scientific discoveries are all but male dominated.
Amrita Pritam’s world of a lover, rebel and a writer
It is the 99th birth anniversary of Amrita Pritam. Her distinctive place in the world of Punjabi letters is reaffirmed every year with a renewed gusto. She is considered the first prominent woman writer in modern Punjabi literature, with a formidable oeuvre that includes 16 poetry anthologies, 28 novels and several anthologies of non-fiction.
Madness & violence in growing contours of Partition writing
Madness entails breakdown of a given, in the way “eccentric” presupposes a centre, a fixity, a point of departure. A psychiatrist employs this benchmark to diagnose maladies of the mind, but intuitively acknowledges its tacit caprice. Like in times when the centre/fixity itself comes undone. Foucault, in a sense, problematises madness and its institutionalisation in philosophic and political terms. And it does lend itself to the event of Partition, given its absolute black hole of absurdity.
Emily Brontë: The enduring enigma of Wuthering Heights
"Whatever our souls are made out of, his and mine are the same." It is her 200 years, Emily Brontë is in the news, and the current commentaries on her lone novel Wuthering Heights, continue to alternately occupy the two distinct poles of adulation and condemnation.
Spice of life: Introducing Faiz to a classroom of millennials
The curriculum of Masters in English literature is one arena that has undergone such tectonic shifts that for the most part it does not even remotely meet the bare outsider expectations about it. From being preeminently a vehicle of dispersing colonial cultural hegemony to today transforming into a representational space preoccupied with recovering lost and powerless voices, it has indeed come a long way.
Exploring the territory and influences on today’s modern artist
Your memory gets in the way of my memory Agha Shahid Ali/ Begum AkhtarWoh jo hum mein tum mein qaraar tha Tumheyaad ho ke na yaad ho(Whether you remember it or not,Oh, the bliss that once was ours) The territory of an artist’s influences is a beguiling one. At times, a benign presence in early years crystallizes as a lasting influence on the artist’s oeuvre. At other times, a muse comes crashing through the roof, causing a trail of destruction, only years later sublimating into a work of art.
The teachings of the wild: Nanak in Forest, Nanak on Foot
In these times when intolerance towards a different narrative, idea or opinion is becoming endemic, it serves one well to go back to Guru Nanak’s spirit of interrogating dogma itself. It might not seem evident at the face of it, but like fanaticism and blind faith, tolerance and questioning too go hand in hand. While for Nanak, if Talwandi, his birthplace was where arcane customs and rituals were made and enforced, the surrounding forest of Nilianwali was where they were unmade and questioned.
Enigma of her Arrival: From Rebellion to Commentary in the Jugni Narrative
By Sakoon N Singh Jugni, the ubiquitous everywoman of Punjabi lore, refuses to die down. The eponymous protagonist of the Jugni folk song continues to be reinvented in every epoch. She is not content being a signpost in the past and hovers instead over the skies of today’s Punjab, swooping effortlessly down on towns and villages whenever something consequential happens.
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