Gurdial has this power. However, in his recent novel Parsa, Gudial has a determined, defiant hero, a rebel who won't take things lying low, a revolutionary who doesn't buckle down even in the face of personal tragedies. Every novel of Gurdial Singh indicates his identity with the poor and the exploited, depicts the lot of the marginalized section of society. He paints life in the raw. No embellishment, no artificiality.
Every tale is true to the land, true to the ground realities.
That has weighed with the Jury of the Jnanpith Foundation now. The Jury has done right, for sure. With the death of R K Narayan, India has lost one of its literary geniuses.