A Memoir, A Hometown, and a Khatri Way of Life

Abstract

At the age of fifty, and a little over a decade after Punjab’s Partition and Indian independence, Prakash Tandon published his popular memoir Punjabi Century in 1961.The iconic status of this life-writing comes from the manner in which Tandon was able to capture his family history, amalgamating it with the nostalgia of the dislocated Punjabis for a lost world. The nostalgia was skillfully built by Tandon through a loving depiction of his hometown Gujrat, irrevocably lost to Pakistan, evoking the loss of other hometowns mentioned in multiple life-narratives that were published around the middle of the twentieth century. Tandon also assiduously described the customs, rituals, and the ways of life of the Khatris like him, auto-ethnographically, to show a way of living that was no longer feasible due to territorial displacement, but also changing social norms. While he celebrated modernity and the Khatri propensity to embrace it, his writing also indexed that the cost of ‘progress’ and ‘improvement’ was sometimes unbearable, a loss of bearing, belonging and language.