ABSTRACT
This chapter considers Sikh participation in the practice of modern Punjabi literature, and the way this has provided a domain for the articulation of progressive interests and secular aspirations. It centers on the work of two prominent writers from the first generation of modern writers: Gurbakhsh Singh Prītlaṛī (1885–1977) and, more extensively, Kartar Singh Duggal (1917–2012), to consider the ways modern Punjabi literature has allowed for the expression of political and social possibilities that have been occluded in the domain of conventional politics. The aspirational ethos of Punjabi literature, coupled with a commitment to progressive politics and the portrayal of the everyday and the disenfranchised, has allowed for the production of a literature of hope characterized by a complexity that cannot be reduced to one political program. The chapter seeks to capture this sense of aspiration and link it to Sikh engagements with life in the broadest terms, to invite consideration of Sikh participation in modern Punjabi literature as a working through of the possibility of a multi-valent and contingent secular, articulated as a work-in-progress beyond the reach of the state, grounded in the social concerns at the center of Sikh engagement with the world and operating both within and beyond the call of identity.
