Something Unspoken Too: Sahitya Akademi Award-Winning Punjabi Short Stories

Something Unspoken Too Kujjh Ankeha Vi, which won Prem Parkash the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award in 1992, is now being rendered into English as Something Unspoken too. Most of the stories in this collection bear testimony to this unique facet of Prem Parkash's art and craft, through which he searches for the hidden, the unrevealed, the mysterious and the unspoken, all in an effort to understand the complexities of human motives and actions. The stories in this collection move precariously across the spectrum of words and silences, giving rise to spaces in which the unarticulated can aesthetically be located. Prem Parkash is a 'poet' of the twilight zone, a wanderer of forbidden territories and a cartographer of complex human relationships.

Prem Parkash: Born in 1932, into a Punjabi Hindu family, Prem Parkash did his post-graduation in Urdu from Panjab University. Chandigarh and worked as a career journalist for over three decades. However, he earned his plaudits as an eminent fictionist in Punjabi. In a career spanning over four decades. he has produced more than ten collections of stories. Some of his well-known collections are: Kacch Kare (Bangles of Glass, 1966). Namazi (The Devout One, 1971), Mukti (Liberation, 1982), Rangmanch De Bhikshu (The Monks of Theatre, 1995) and Gandhan (Knots, 2003). In his life as well his works. Prem Parkash embodies a true spirit of Punjabiyat in all its eclecticism and inclusiveness.
Rana Nayar (b. 1957). the Editor of this collection, is a former Professor, Department of English & Cultural Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh. His main areas of interest are: World Drama/Theatre. Translation Studies, Literary Theory and Cultural Studies. A practising translator of repute (Charles Wallace India Trust Fellow & Sahitya Akademi Award Winner), he has rendered around fourteen modem classics of Punjabi into English. Apart from this, he also has four critical books to his credit.

Prem Parkash is an eminent story-teller in Punjabi, who has, in a career spanning over four decades or more, worn many hats. He started his career as a farmer, switched over to school teaching briefly before moving into Urdu journalism. Though a career journalist for over three decades, somewhere along the way, he succumbed to the charms of story-telling, an art in which he ultimately won both public recognition and fame, even an abiding sense of identity. Though he is eighty-six now, his name continues to figure among the avant-garde of Punjabi writers, who have given a new thrust and direction to the art they practise, skillfully as well as effortlessly.
Prem Parkash is something of an enigma, someone who was born into a Punjabi Hindu family before Partition, went on to do his post-graduation in Urdu from Panjab University, Chandigarh and ultimately earned his plaudits as a Punjabi fiction writer. This is simply to say that Prem Parkash embodies a true spirit of Punjabiyat in all its eclecticism and inclusiveness. For him, Urdu and Punjabi are not merely two languages, but two deeply connected sources of a common literary inheritance, which must be owned up if we have to have a sense of who we essentially are. This kind of hybridization and eclecticism is not merely reflected in the construction of his writerly self, but is an equally enduring aspect of his worldview, his philosophy and Weltanschauung of life, too.
Unlike, most writers, who claim to have been born into the act of writing, Prem Parkash was unabashedly a late bloomer, as he didn't publish his first collection of stories Kacch Karre (Bangles of Glass) until 1966. He was already in his 34th year, then. It was this collection that set the tone for much of his later work. With this, he established his credentials as a story-teller, who was far more interested in probing the subterranean regions of human psyche than the external social milieu or the context. Though like most Punjabi writers, he too, had succumbed to the charms of Marxist thought in his younger days, it didn't take him long to outgrow it and then strike out on his own. The mysterious workings of human mind, soul and subconscious always fascinated him more than the elusive promise of an equitable social order.
Perhaps this is the reason why his Marxist friends and critics not only treated his second collection Namazi (The Devout One), published in 1971, with royal indifference but also came down rather heavily on him. Their main grouse was that Prem Parkash had swerved away from the Marxist path and had now begun to stray into hitherto unchartered territories. Little did they realize that, unknown to them, he was busy fashioning his own idiom and his own cultural tools for capturing the mind-boggling reality of Punjabi culture. It is pertinent to mention here that when Prem Parkash started writing, Punjabi life and culture were caught in a vortex of unimaginable change.
With the memories of Partition still lingering in Punjabi mindset. the cultural map of Punjab was undergoing a massive social and psychological osmosis. If on the one hand, Green Revolution was threatening to change the cultural matrix of rural Punjab, on the other, modernization and urbanization were taking their toll on the urban Punjab. Caught in the throes of tradition and modernity, Punjabi culture was seeking newer modes of articulating its tensions, dilemmas and conflicts. In such a situation, it wasn't possible for a writer to continue to practise his art in the same old traditional manner. It had become imperative to recast both the content and the form of Punjabi expression. Prem Parkash's avant-gardism lies in the fact that he is unafraid of experimenting with both form and content in his eternal quest for newer territories of imagination.