Loona: The telling of it here (Opening Notes)

Loona is so multi-layered and nuanced that I have been wondering for sometime how to organize the material as I begin unfolding this story for myself (and for the few readers following this blog). I have not read the original in Punjabi so I cannot do a direct translation. What I am attempting here is simply a partial re-telling buttressed by a commentary. For a commentator there are many beguiling ways of presenting Loona, so for a while I was confused. But finally I have decided to stick to a direct and linear approach. Loona is written in eight parts – we’ll just take them sequentially one by one. To do anything else would be at the cost of the main story. Also although I have begun today I don’t know at what pace I will continue and over how many months this particular journey will be completed – in the circumstances it is best that the parts follow each other systematically.

For this discussion on Loona I draw upon two principal sources. Segments of the play have been rendered in song by Bhupinder and Mitalee Singh. I will be posting original transcreations of these, along with the audio tracks. For the rest of the commentary I draw upon Dr. B M Bhalla’s English translation of the work. Here and there, I have taken very minor liberties with Dr. Bhalla’s version only to make it more accessible to myself. For instance, in Dr. Bhalla’s version Loona is spelt as Luna. It is only a matter of spelling but Luna is close in spelling to the word ‘lunar’ and conjures up in my mind the vision of an ethereal moon maiden. ‘Loona’ on the other hand, due to its proximity with the Punjabi term for salt, loond, captures better the earthiness and vitality of Shiv's heroine.

Loona: A New Look At An Old Story (Opening Notes)

Loona, an epic play written in verse form, is perhaps Shiv Batalvi’s single most significant work. It won him the Sahitya Akademi award for literature at the age of twenty eight. The story of Loona was not a new one. It had been around forever, an integral part of the kathas and kissas of Punjabi folklore. Only it wasn’t the story of Loona – it was the story of Puran Bhagat, a prince turned yogi. In the story of Puran, Loona is the vamp, the beautiful and evil young step mother who attempts to seduce him and who when thwarted wreaks terrible revenge.

Shiv’s motivation for re-telling an oft told story was to cast it in a new light, to remove what he identified as the distorting prisms of gender and class discrimination. He writes in his Introduction to the play that stories written by court poets in the pay of the ancient rulers should not be taken without question. Aging kings unable to satisfy the young wives they brought home were likely to be victims of doubt and suspicion, while the multiplicity of progeny from different wives was also likely to lead to intrigue over property and inheritance. And in all these histories and stories it was inevitable, that the king be rendered in the most favourable light by the court poet. “How” asks Shiv “can a modern poet follow that tradition blindly when there is no finality about any issue? There is always another aspect....”

Not only does Shiv question Salwan, the elderly king’s right to treat the beautiful but low born Loona as his property and appropriate her as his wife, he also questions why in popular tradition yogis were always high born and their temptresses of the lower castes. He elaborates, “The condition of high birth was needed even by Rama, Buddha, Charpat and Puran. Not only this, in order to prove that they were really great, lower caste women like Loona were depicted as the embodiment of lust......to deceive the high born righteous followers off the spiritual path.” It is this two-fold discrimination against women and against the depressed classes that Batalvi takes on in his version of the epic.

In many senses Loona is a feminist recasting of the old story. In it we see not only Loona making a bold case for the right of the young woman to make her own choices and express her sexuality, but we see the different women characters whether it is Loona’s girlfriends, the old queen Ichran’s maid, Queen Ichran herself explore the many ways in which women were disenfranchised in the old orders (That their songs and words resonate still in less choate ways in the psyche of the modern day woman are another story). Loona is more wonderful for having been written by a man, for while the feminist point of view is strongly put across Shiv Batalvi retains complete empathy with the male characters in the drama. In Shiv's words, “I have tried to assuage the pain from the deep recesses of my soul where my feminism lay dormant. Also my manhood.”