Regional Literature: Gujarati, Punjabi, Odia and Assamese Notes

Questions on books and authors rarely stop at English and Hindi. Every SSC, Railway and state paper carries a few author-and-title pairs from the regional literatures, and the same handful of names return year after year: the poet called the first of a language, the novel that began its modern prose, the saint who created its devotional song form, and the writers who have taken its Jnanpith Award. This chapter gathers those names for four literatures, those of Gujarat, Punjab, Odisha and Assam, in the order in which an examiner meets them.

Gujarati literature

Gujarati literature begins with Narsinh Mehta of the fifteenth century, honoured as the Adi Kavi or first poet of the language and the author of the bhajan beginning Vaishnav Jan To, which Mahatma Gandhi made a daily prayer. The medieval period belongs to the akhyana, the long narrative poem recited to an audience, and its master was Premanand Bhatt of the seventeenth century, remembered for Nalakhyan. The same century produced Akho, a goldsmith turned poet whose Chhappa verses and Akhegita attacked ritual and hypocrisy, while the nineteenth century added the garbi songs of Dayaram.

Modern Gujarati opens with Narmadashankar Dave, known as Narmad, who wrote the patriotic song Jai Jai Garvi Gujarat and compiled the dictionary Narmakosh, and with his contemporary Dalpatram. The first great Gujarati novel is Saraswatichandra by Govardhanram Tripathi, published in four parts between 1887 and 1901. Kanhaiyalal Munshi wrote historical novels such as Patan ni Prabhuta and Gujarat no Nath and founded the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan. Jhaverchand Meghani, whom Gandhi called the Rashtriya Shayar or national poet, rescued the folk literature of Saurashtra in Saurashtra ni Rasdhar. Gandhi wrote his own autobiography, the Story of My Experiments with Truth, in Gujarati. The language has several Jnanpith laureates, among them Umashankar Joshi, Pannalal Patel for the novel Manvini Bhavai, Rajendra Shah and Raghuveer Chaudhari.

Punjabi literature

Punjabi literature is usually traced to Baba Farid, the thirteenth century Sufi whose verses were later included in the Guru Granth Sahib, which Guru Arjan compiled in 1604 and which also carries the Japji Sahib of Guru Nanak. The qissa, or verse romance, is the great popular form, and its most famous example is the Heer of Waris Shah, composed in 1766 and still sung; Bulleh Shah gave the language its best known Sufi kafis and Shah Muhammad wrote the Jangnama on the Anglo-Sikh war.

Modern Punjabi literature is dated from Bhai Vir Singh, called its father, whose novel Sundari and long poem Rana Surat Singh opened the way; Nanak Singh, author of Pavitar Papi and Chitta Lahu, is similarly called the father of the Punjabi novel. Amrita Pritam is the best known name of the twentieth century: her lament Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu on the Partition, her novel Pinjar, the first Sahitya Akademi Award in Punjabi given to a woman, and the Jnanpith Award in 1981 for Kagaz Te Canvas. Gurdial Singh, author of Marhi Da Deeva, took the Jnanpith in 1999, and Shiv Kumar Batalvi won the Sahitya Akademi Award very young for his verse play Loona.

Odia literature

The Panchasakha of the sixteenth century, Balarama Das, Jagannatha Das, Achyutananda Das, Ananta Das and Jasobanta Das, carried devotion into the language of ordinary people. Gopinath Mohanty received the very first Sahitya Akademi Award in Odia in 1955 for Amrutara Santana and the Jnanpith in 1973; Sachidananda Routray, Sitakant Mahapatra and Pratibha Ray, the author of Yajnaseni, are the other Odia Jnanpith laureates. Odia was recognised as a classical language of India in 2014.

Assamese literature

The earliest Assamese poet whose name survives is Hema Saraswati, author of Prahrada Charitra, and the fourteenth century Madhava Kandali made the Saptakanda Ramayana, one of the first renderings of the Ramayana into a modern Indian language. The towering figure is Srimanta Sankardeva, the fifteenth and sixteenth century Vaishnava reformer who founded the Ekasarana faith and created the devotional songs called Borgeet, the one-act plays called Ankiya Nat performed as Bhaona, and the dance tradition now known as Sattriya; his Kirtan Ghosha remains a household book, and his disciple Madhavdeva wrote the Namghosha. Assamese is also unusual in having a rich tradition of prose chronicles, the Buranjis of the Ahom court.

In the nineteenth century Hemchandra Barua compiled Hemkosh, the first Assamese dictionary to give etymologies, and the magazine Jonaki, started in 1889, opened the modern romantic era. Lakshminath Bezbaroa, called the father of modern Assamese literature, wrote the folk tale collection Burhi Aair Sadhu and the song O Mur Apunar Desh, now the state song of Assam. Birendra Kumar Bhattacharya became the first Assamese writer to win the Jnanpith Award, in 1979 for Mrityunjay; Indira Goswami, who also wrote as Mamoni Raisom Goswami, won it in 2000, and the poet Nilmani Phookan in 2021. Assamese was among the languages granted classical status by the Union Cabinet in 2024.