Lūṇā
Lūṇā (ਲੂਣਾ, 1965), widely regarded as Shiv Kumar Batalvi's masterpiece and the work that won him the Sahitya Akademi Award, reworks the legend of Pūran Bhagat as Qadar Yār fixed it in his nineteenth-century qissa. Batalvi keeps Qadar Yār's story and its characters, as his own preface says, and changes only the thinking of today: he gives his name and his sympathy to Lūṇā, the stepmother the old telling condemned, and makes her its tragic center. This interactive scholarly edition keeps the Panjabi original primary. The authoritative Gurmukhi text and a Shahmukhi rendering stand beside a Roman transliteration and a fresh, line-by-line English translation; underlined words open position-based glosses in whichever script you read; a seven-motif Trace tool follows the play's recurring images across the acts, among them the rock salt that Qadar Yār's Lūṇā breaks in a metal tray, her name punning on lūṇ, salt; and a three-lens commentary reads each movement for its literary, cultural, and translational stakes. Reading mode gives the poem with tappable vocabulary. Study mode opens the glossaries and the commentary. Now complete in all eight acts, from the prologue over the Ravi to the mutilation in the public square.
Read the edition