Jaswant Singh Kanwal

Punjabi writer who preserved Indigenous scripts and chronicled the forgotten Sikh diaspora in Argentina

Jaswant Singh Kanwal (1919–2020), the ‘Punjabi Steinbeck’, documented rural Punjab through 65 novels written in Gurmukhi script when Urdu-dominated publishers rejected regional languages. His 1971 epic ‘Raat Baaki Hai’ (The Night Remains) about Sikh farmers in Argentina’s Santa Fe province revealed a little-known migration—over 3,000 Punjabis settled there by 1900, earlier than Canadian Sikh communities.

Kanwal pioneered Punjabi cyber-literacy in the 1990s, developing Unicode-compliant fonts for Gurmukhi when Microsoft Windows didn’t support it. His ‘Anand Font’ (1994) became standard for digital Punjabi publishing, preventing script erosion as youth shifted to English keyboards.

His environmental novel ‘Dharti Dhan Na Apna’ (Earth Isn’t Our Property, 1989) predated eco-fiction trends, blending Sikh teachings on nature with critiques of Green Revolution pesticides. The book inspired Punjab’s first organic farming cooperative in 1992.

As a WWII veteran captured in Libya, Kanwal wrote prison camp diaries in Shahmukhi (Perso-Arabic Punjabi script)—later translating them to Gurmukhi to bridge Pakistan-India linguistic divides. These manuscripts are studied at Oxford’s Sikh Studies Center as rare bilingual war narratives.