Gurdial Singh, Voice ofthe Voiceless

[...]Punjabiyat was not merely a quest for exclusive Sikh identity, but represented a far more complex notion of identity, with a kind of intermingling of faiths as diverse as Sikhism, Hinduism and Islam, something to which Guru Granth Sahib is a living testimony. [...]the times of Gurdial Singh, two diametrically opposed ideologies, namely, a brand of naive romanticism (associated with Bhai Vir Singh and Nanak Singh) and an indigenous form of realism (associated with Sant Singh Sekhon, Surinder Singh Narula and Amrita Pritam) had continued to exert pressures and counter-pressures upon the content and/or form of the Punjabi novel. When the novel was a dying art-form in Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century, it was Tolstoy's War and Peace that resurrected faith in the novel as a form. Though he earned his plaudits as a novelist and a storyteller extraordinaire, he has written and experimented with diverse literary forms such as children's literature, plays, essays, autobiography, travelogues, and journalistic writing.