Sant Singh Sekhon: Selected Writings

The volume includes selected writings of Sant Singh Sekhon, the most innovative writer of Punjabi in the 20th century. Starting his literary career as a poet of English, albeit of great promise, he shifted to Punjabi out of deep alignment with Punjab, its language, literature and culture. Though modern literary forms, short story and one-act play for example, may have originated with his predecessors, they owe their beginning to him. If criticism has come to perform a directive role in interplay with writings in Punjabi, it was largely because he devised it as a creative genre. Included here are his critical articles, covering Punjabi poets of all the eras. Sekhon was also a prolific translator, professing a distinct theory of translation. Neither literal conversion nor transliteration seemed veritable to him. Samples of his translation also figure in the volume in ample measure in which he seeks to pose a creative tension between Punjabi and English. Half the writings comprising this volume were written by Sekhon in English.