Dard, Hira Singh, an eminent story writer, wrote with a reformatory attitude. He indirectly preached certain reforms keeping in view the realistic side of life. His story \’Rakhri\’1 is of this nature. The character, of the quarrelsome, rude and unlettered Rukmani—the heroine—making her home a hell and over hen-pecked nature of Daroga Prem Nath—the hero—are god realistic i portrayals but at the same time there is a implied suggestion of needed reform in both of them. His famous story \’Pir Gahlur Shah\’ is a fine satire on the religious but blind faith of those people who, being uneducated, repose full faith in the hypocritical preachers.
The author very wisely ridicules the entire hypocracy in the end before the very eyes of one (the heroine) who had by that time assumed full faith in the tomb of that so-called prophet. The reformatory attitude of the author for reforming our social and religious aspects of life respectively in the above two stories is obvious. Since the author has been a politician of a revolutionary nature and has been undergoing political imprisonment—during the British rule in the Punjab—a mention of these two colours is also to be found in the stories. He wrote many stories while he was the editor of Phulwari. But one drawback in most of his stories, as admitted by the author himself, (1) is the surfeit of preaching that we find in them.
The perusal of his stories (2) from the technique point of view indicates that most of them look like short novels. In each story the plot is made of such a large number of incidents, that with their elaborations, it can be easily turned into a novel or a novelette, the number of characters being already large.
References :
1. Kohli, S.S., Punjabi Sahit da Itihas, Ludhiana, 1955.
2. Mohan Singh, A History of Punjabi Literature, Amritsar, 1956.
