Shiv Kumar Batalvi · Lūṇā (1965)
Lūṇā · the prologue in the hills
Before the legend begins, two figures from classical theater, a stage-manager and his actress, look down from the night hills on the mortal world. Choose a script (Gurmukhi, Shahmukhi, or Roman); the underlined words open a gloss in whichever script you read. Reading mode gives the poem with tappable vocabulary; Study mode adds the glossaries and opens the commentary. The English translation can be switched off, to read the original on its own.
Lūṇā retells one of the Panjab's most popular legends, the qissa of Pūran Bhagat, whose best-known verse form was fixed by the nineteenth-century poet Qadar Yār. In the inherited story King Salwān of Sialkot has a son, Pūran, kept in isolation for years on an astrologer's warning; the king then marries Lūṇā, a young low-caste woman of the Chamār (leather-worker) caste, of an age with the son she is now stepmother to. Pūran refuses her, she accuses him, and Salwān has the boy's hands and feet cut off and cast in a well. The folk tradition remembers Lūṇā only as the wicked stepmother.
Batalvi keeps the frame and changes what it means. He names the play for the woman rather than the son. He ages Pūran from twelve to eighteen, because, as the preface puts it, no charge of a soiled gaze can be laid against a boy of twelve. He sends the first queen Ichhrān back to her father's house, since no self-respecting wife, he writes, stays to watch her portion of love handed to another. He opens the tale with the Naṭī and the Sūtradhār, invents the minor figures the story needed, and stops at the mutilation, past which the inherited tale seemed to him fabricated. The plot, he insists, is Qadar Yār's and the characters too; the only difference is the thinking of today.
Even Lūṇā's homeland is an editorial act. Some placed her at Roṛas in Sialkot district, others in the village of Chamiārī near Ajnālā; Batalvi follows a Pahari folk song instead, and Qadar Yār for her caste:
ਇੱਸੇ ਦੇਸਾ ਦੀ ਲੂਣਾ ਚਮਾਰੀ / ਰਾਜੇ ਵਿਆਹੇ ਖੜੀFrom this very land, Lūṇā the Chamārī, stands wedded to the king.
And her very name carries salt (lūṇ). In Qadar Yār's image of rock salt broken in a treasured metal tray, Najm Hosain Syed hears the pun: the salt Lūṇā set against the heirloom order she cracks. The tale's oldest imagery already holds her name.
Batalvi's preface, "My Characters, My Story" (ਮੇਰੇ ਪਾਤਰ ਮੇਰੀ ਕਥਾ), is the license for this edition's whole reading, so it deserves his own words rather than a summary. All translations here are the editor's. On the literary tradition he inherits:
"Poets who lived on the crumbs of kings, when they sat down to write, abandoned the truth and proved the kings stainless. By calling their queens and their children soiled, they fed their patrons' pride. The courage to breach the prevailing moral code was simply not in them; whatever groove one poet cut, the rest walked in it."
On why the old tale must be told anew: "Life has no final halting place; beyond every stage lies another, and not always in the same line. In literature a new path means letting go of tradition to a degree, drawing new meanings out of the accepted meanings of the old tales. To call the qissa of Pūran the qissa of Lūṇā is itself to set new meanings in place."
On the girls the Brahmanical tradition damned: "But were they truly the sinners? I think not. To be beautiful while poor was their sin; to be daughters of the weak and the unhonored was their fault. Like the rest of the earth's wealth, kings and princelings held title over them too... I have laid poultices of sympathy on that pain, pressed down and smothered for centuries, and blown upon it to draw the hurt. Whether my breath has eased their pain or deepened it, who can say; but there is no doubt I have blown it from those folds of my heart where"
ਮੇਰੇ ਅੰਦਰ ਦੀ ਔਰਤ ਸੁਤੀ ਪਈ ਹੈ, ਮੇਰੇ ਅੰਦਰ ਦਾ ਮਰਦ ਸੁਤਾ ਪਿਆ ਹੈthe woman inside me lies asleep, the man inside me lies asleep.
On desire itself: "Kām, rising above bodies, seeks the contentment of the soul as well. Between jaivī kām and manukhī kām, animal desire and human desire, the difference is only this: the animal's is seasonal, a momentary and mindless need; the human's is aesthetic and of the spirit, and man has given it so many forms that it has become the need of every instant." And of the old kings: "Stale blood cannot give fresh blood the soul's lift; only the first clean touch of fresh blood can complete fresh blood, and make life worth living."
"The Salwāns are not finished even today," he warns, "and Lūṇā is still not held innocent; only the names and the days have changed." And the credo he closes on: "I have stood every character of this book naked before you, and I cannot see myself apart from my characters... To people bound in settled values every word may seem soiled; but it is my belief that soiled words alone can strain clean the threadbare customs, the rank delusions and the ugly notions of societies, religions and nations." He signs it from Prem Nagar, Batala, in the July of 1965.
Present as voices: the Sūtradhār and Naṭī, a stage-manager and his actress borrowed from Sanskrit drama, who look down on the mortal world as lovers. The play’s own appendix seats them in Indra’s court: he the gandharva who opens every play with his beloved at his side, she that beloved, called by some his wife, though on this, Batalvi notes, opinion is divided. With them, the women of Chamba, a village chorus.
Named but not yet seen: King Varman and Queen Kunt of Chamba; and King Salwān of Koṭ Siāl (Sialkot), the old king who will marry Lūṇā, introduced here only through the blood of his sacrifice.
Inherited from the legend (Salwān, Pūran, Lūṇā, Ichhrān, and Ichhrān's father Chaudhal, king of Udhe-nagar) as against Batalvi's own inventions, which the preface lists exactly: Varman, king of Chamba, and his queen Kunt; Lūṇā's friends Īrā and Mathrī; her father Bārū; and one Gelī. The difference matters, because the invented figures are where the poet does his real reshaping of the tale.
The commentary traces recurrent images (fire, water, blood, the serpent, the devouring mother) the length of the Act, and the Trace controls above let a reader follow one thread at a time. The method is not imported: it follows the close reading of Panjabi poetry practiced by Najm Hosain Syed in Recurrent Patterns in Punjabi Poetry, who reads a poem through its recurrent images and the folk inheritance underneath them. His essay “Puran of Sialkot,” which reads Qadar Yār's image of Lūṇā breaking rock salt in a metal tray, her name punning on lūṇ, salt, is the model this edition's Trace tool follows; the Chamba work-song that turns out to carry the whole tragedy in little is the same lesson at act length. Glosses that cite the play’s own appendix draw on the ਅੰਤਿਕਾ, the act-by-act notes Batalvi printed at the back of the book.
On translation and glossing: the English keeps Panjabi names for what English can only gesture at, the fragrances, the ornaments, and the untranslatable emotion-words (birhā, nashā, bhaṭakṇā, pāp). In Study mode a glossed word can carry, beyond its short sense, up to two small chips: a register chip in saffron (Perso-Arabic, Sanskritic, folk, refrain) and a domain chip in green (fragrance, ornament, instrument, sacred, and the like), and where it earns one, a longer note on etymology, an open pun, or a live metaphor the English has had to flatten. The chips are an argument you can check by eye: scan Movement V and the poem's two word-worlds, Salwān's Perso-Arabic court and the goddess-country of the Chamba women, separate of their own accord.
Two recent readings are worth carrying forward. Vivek Sachdeva and Parvinder Dhariwal both argue that Batalvi gives Lūṇā a voice the old qissa denied her, yet stops short of freeing her: by ending at the mutilation he never lets her confront the returning ascetic, so her rebellion is spoken but not won, and the play closes with her silenced over Pūran's body. Act One matters precisely because it loads the sympathy, and the metaphysics, in her favor before the story that will defeat her has begun. The critic Bajaj, quoted by Dhariwal, catches the shape of the defeat: Lūṇā "burns as fire must", and in burning consumes the one she loves and at last herself.