Lūṇā
Lūṇā (1965) is Shiv Kumar Batalvi’s Panjabi verse-drama and the work most often called his masterpiece. It takes up the premodern legend of Puran Bhagat, best known from Qadar Yar’s nineteenth-century qissa, and turns its moral inside out. In the old tale Lūṇā is the villain: a low-born girl married to the aged king Salwan, she desires her stepson Puran, is refused, and has him maimed and exiled on a false charge. Batalvi makes her the tragedy’s center instead, asking what guilt can belong to a woman sold into a loveless marriage, and putting on trial not her but desire itself and the order of caste and honor that condemns it. Batalvi, whom Panjabi readers call the sultan of birhā, the poetry of longing and separation, wrote it in a language dense with folk song; it won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1967, made him the youngest writer to receive it, and stands today as a modern classic of Panjabi literature.
This is an interactive reading edition, made not to replace the original with English but to open a way into it. The poem appears in aligned tracks: the Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi scripts, a Roman transliteration, and a fresh English translation set line by line against the verse. Underlined words open a glossary in whichever script you are reading; a Study mode adds scholarly commentary in three lenses; and colored Trace threads let you follow the poem’s recurring images (desire, fire, water, blood, the serpent, doom, and the mother) across the act. Where earlier English versions offered Lūṇā as a poem to be read in translation, this edition keeps the original in view and treats the translation and apparatus as a bridge to reading Batalvi himself. Further acts will be added here as they are completed.
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