Des raj kali’s shanti parav: novel as discourse and palimpsest

As translator of Des Raj Kali’s novel Shanti Parav, and as an inquiring mind in English literary studies my engagement with the rich context and nuances of Kali’s work has led me into yet deeper engagements with the history, ethnography and politics of the Punjabi Dalit. The dalits of Punjab are seen as a lot ‘privileged’ in comparison to dalits from other states across the Indian nation state. A significant contributing factor is the presence of indigenous spiritual traditions led by dalit sants and sufis operating from their respective deras or ashrams. The teachings of these progressive spiritual leaders are deeply rooted in the psyche of the Punjabi Dalit who continues to seek from them, spiritual strength and intellectual light, in the absence of succour through mainstream religions which function primarily on the dynamics of partisanship, privilege and caste based politics. Kali’s novel Shanti Parav, makes an extensive and an intense representation of the life conditions and political dynamics of the dalits of Punjab.

This paper surveys in brief, the history, ethnography and politics of the cause of the Punjabi Dalit, and then proceeds to examine the structural and stylistic dynamics that underlie Shanti Parav - a fourth in a row of six novels published by Desraj Kali till date. Considering that the novel runs a length of just eighty pages in print, it spans an impressive scope in terms of content, structure and experimentation. Positioned between fiction and non-fiction, the narrative employs with brilliant ingenuity, the concept of the divided page, to accommodate a parallel rendering. On the one hand, in the upper half of the page, runs the flow of autobiographical stories from the protagonist’s world, and on the other hand is the continuous, surreal (albeit intellectual) babble of three old characters in the underbelly – the lower half - of each page. Kali’s combining of fiction and non-fiction, the unique page layout, and the multi-layered polyphony that is achieved, is bold, unique and brilliant to say the least. It is mouldy as a palimpsest and creates a sense of what I would like to call, the dalit-carnivalesque.