Bhagwandass Morwal

Bhagwandass Morwal born on January 23, 1960 in Nagina, distt.Mewat, Haryana. Mewat, an area at the confluence of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajsthan, characterized by the inter mingling of Hindu and Meo Muslim culture. He born in a family of landless labourers in the countryside of Mewat,popularly known as the Black Waters (Kala Pani) of the then backward region of Haryana in Northern India .

Bhagwandass MorwalThis Mewat that had taken up cudgels against Babar,founder of the powerful Moughal Empire in the medieval era. It is the same Mewat whose last ruler Hasan Khan Mewati had received a seemingly innocuous message from Babar, according to which the tribal warlord�belonging to the same religion as Babar � ought to have fought alongside the invader in his battle against Rana Sanga, the ruler of the neighbouring state of Mewar. Hasan Khan had no qualms in rejecting Babar�s proposal of intimacy, saying,� I am an Indian first and I won�t let a foreign vanquish or enslave my country.� Bhagwandass Morwal belongs to the same Mewat which Mahatma Gandhi had eulogized in 1933, saying,� I can make India win its freedom within in 24 hours provided the whole country, grit could emulate Mewat�s Meo community in its valour and patriotic fervor.� His writings reflect a deep inside , an inherent vision of rural problems in Mewat ,which Mewat there Meos are followers of Islam, but on social occasions fervently enact and recite the poetic creation Pandoon kau Kara , based on the classical Hindu text of the Mahabharata.

His three fictional works �Kala Pahar (The Black Mountain) 1999 and Babal Tera Des Mein (O Father, In Thy Land) 2004 are located in the same Mewat, while his third new novel Ret (Sand) has an erstwhile Criminal Tribes at its centre, its plot revolving round a woman who remains unfazed amidst her grim circumstances, circumstances that get her labeled as a prostitute and a criminal. From the metropolitan angle, she would probably be nothing more than a flesh-trader, but if seen from an empathetic perspective, she offers us an image of steadfast survival. Only a first hand understanding of the precarious situation of her community can make one appreciate her own and community�s predicament.

His first novel Kala Pahar appeared in 1999 and Babal Tera Des Mein appeard in 2004 were hailed as path- breaking work and are being used in several universities as a volume for research studies. Second novel Babal Tera Des Mein deals with the problems of Muslim women. Ret, Morwal�s latest novel (2008) marks a transition � both a departure and continuity � in his narrative-aesthetic oeuvre. Though he moves away from his conventional creative turf in Ret, yet he persists with his imaginative and ideological sympathies. Ret is a story of Kanjars, a tribal community of North India, and the shifting matrix of their lives and times at the cross-section of caste, class, gender and community. It provides an anthropological peep into the psyche of a community precariously positioned at the margins of a society as the nation trudges along on its way to democratic equality, social justice and empowerment; a peep that soon implicates both the writer and readers as involved interpreters of this trajectory.