Alms in the name of a blind horse

A Postcolonial reading
of Gurdial Singh’s
“Alms in the Name of a
Blind Horse”

About Gurdial Singh
● He was born on 10 January in Bhaini Fateh in British Punjab.
● He started his literary career in 1957 with a short-story, ‘Bhaganwale’.
● His works has been widely translated into into several Indian languages, in English, Russian
and other foreign languages.
● His works include “Marhi Da Deeva” (The Last Flicker), “Anhoye” (The Survivors), “Anhe Ghore
Da Daan” (Alms in the Name of a Blind Horse ), “Addh Chanini Raat” (Night of the Half-Moon)
and many other novels.
● Awards and Honors : Padma Shri (1998), Jnanpith Award (1999), Sahitya Akademi Award
(1976), Sovient Land Nehru Award (1986), Bhai Veer Singh Fiction Award (1992)

● He was one of the greatest writers of Punjabi Literature and had focused on the economically
and socially marginalized people in rural Punjab in his works.
● Singh was the first writer to give Punjabi literature its first Dalit hero “Jagseer” in his debut
novel “The Last Flicker”.
● He was considered “the last ones in the Munshi Premchand tradition of writing about the
downtrodden” by the president of Punjabi Sahit Akademi.
● His works are mostly set around the 1960s when feudalism was been mutated into capitalism
in Punjab, as a result, there appeared a change in the social structure, the economy as well as
the Punjabi mindset.
● Singh’s writings has sought to encapsulate the dialectics of tradition and modernity, has even
tried to attain a synthesis between the two wherever possible.
● He is seen as an exponent of the regional novel, like R. K. Narayan, in his novels he has
recreated a fictional replica of the enclosed world of Malwa region, where he has lived all his
life.

The Tradition of Punjabi Literature
● It had its early beginnings in poetry with a Sufi strain in the compositions of Baba Farid, a
twelfth century saint, an early practitioner of Punjabi poetry.
● After almost 300 years, until the advent of Guru Nanak Dev, Punjab went through a
nightmarish phase of foreign invasions, bringing its literary/cultural march to a sudden,
temporary halt.
● However, the Guru’s bani found a rightful place in the Guru Granth Sahab, a repository of the
collective wisdom of the Sikh gurus and other proponents of the Bhakti movement.
● The novel appeared in the the later half of the nineteenth century, largely developing in the
shadows of its European counterpart. Bhai Vir Singh, an early practitioner, sought inspiration
in the works of Walter Scott.
● Nanak Singh, under the influence of Singh Sabha movement sought to break away from the
imitating efforts, rooting the novel in the very soil of Punjab. Nanak gave the Punjabi novel a
distinct local habitation as it managed to reclaim its vital link with the oral tradition

The Title
● The title is significant because it is associated with the myth that the modern day Dalits are the
descendants of the demons. During “samudra manthan” or the “Churning of the Ocean”, the
demons were at the receiving end of lord Vishnu’s lack of generosity. The demons received an
unfair amount of amrit.
● This novel underlines that just as the demons were dependent on the uninformed allowance
of lord Vishnu, in the same way the modern Dalits have to depend on the mercy and
compassion of the village overlords.
● On the day of lunar and solar eclipse, the Dalits go around and ask for alms in the name of a
blind horse. This novel revolves around one such lunar eclipse day and shows the chaos that
unfolds in the lives of people.

Alms in the Name of a Blind Horse : A
Postcolonial reading
● Originally written in Punjabi as “Anhe Ghore Da Daan” in the year 1976 and was translated in
English in 2016 by Rana Nayar. A National award winning film has also been made based on
the novel in 2011 by Gurvinder Singh.
● The novel is set in the times of transition, when the paternalistic model of rural, agrarian
economy in Punjab was being threatened with collapse and technology was slowly entering
into urban life.
● He has created a small story of several small men thrown together in similar situations by fate
and circumstance, micro-narratives within the frame of a single macro-narrative.
● The novel describes the caste atrocities on Dalits in a village that ruptures their sense of
identity and belonging to a community.

● It takes us to the interiors of Punjab and lends an insightful glimpse into its feudal system and
hierarchy enjoyed by the rich landlords.
● The novel emphasises on the plight of the socio-economically exploited people in rural Punjab.
● The novel begins with the demolition of Dharma’s house by the local landlords who have sold
their piece of land, as well as Dharma’s, for setting up a factory. When Dharma and the
members of his landless Dalit Sikh community approach the sarpanch to intervene, they are
asked to go to the courts. The sarpanch, who is a representative of the landlords evade the
group. Later, Dharma is arrested and his community id scared off.
● The protagonist of the novel is Melu. a Dalit, and his family, Dharma’s neighbour. Through
showing the problems in the live of Melu and his family, Singh focuses on the several other
Dalit lives, shuttling hopelessly between the two worlds, urban and rural.

● Gurdial shows nothing monumental in the lives of his characters, just their daily struggle to
stay alive and survive against all odds. Melu’s mother is forced to beg for few mustard stalks
from the landlord for whom she works.
● On the other hand, Melu works as a migrant rickshaw puller, striving hard to make ends
meet.as marker of modernity, the battery operated rickshaws are preferred by people, making
life miserable for people like Melu.
● Singh has managed to strike a balance between ‘silence’ and ‘language’. Most of the major
characters, including Melu, his bapu, his bebe and his sister, Dyalo hardly speak, they just
observe the world around them silently and helplessly. Their silence become a judgement on
our indifference to their plight.
● Class-consciousness and caste conflicts, problems arising on account of the inequitable
distribution of power, money and land from the main dialectics of personal and social tensions
in the novel.

● The ideas of injustice, the coercive power of the state, the need for land reforms, the shift in
agrarian or urban economy and the utter marginalization of Dalits in both the rural and urban
milieus are examined.
● On seeing the condition Melu’s bahu lives in, Melu’s brother in law asks her sister “But sister,
if you have been in such a dire straits here, why didn’t you go back to your village?” to which
she replies “Labour is what we do here, and that’s what we are condemned to do there...how
can anyone live off their daily wages?...Now, we are nowhere, neither here nor there”. It
shows the liminal state that the people are in.
● The last section of the novel is significant as Melu is shown to take a train back to the village as
his father takes the opposite direction. The characters in the family are driven from the village
to the town, and from the town to the village, running in a circles, unable to find peace.

Alms in the name of a blind horse

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Alms in the name of a blind horse