White Women Falls For A Nihang Singh

[gsinghysingh]

there is a book about a white women who falls in love with a nihang singh does anyone one no the author or title.

[dalsingh101]

An Indian Attachment by Sarah Lloyd

[gsinghysingh]

Thank you veer ji

[Silence]

I checked out this book's summary on a few sites, just wondering is this meant to be a true story? if so what the hell??

[dalsingh101]

I checked out this book's summary on a few sites, just wondering is this meant to be a true story? if so what the hell??

Come on Silence! Don't be so closeted. lol

One thing I think can be guaranteed when women and men get together......and it is this stuff.

[dalsingh101]

I have to add. Do people just idolise other blokes because they have adopted a pseudo-nihung lifestyle?

This guy is dodgy though, I swear this is against rehat.

Truth is I want to actually read the book now.....

So memsahib got jungle fever!

[Silence]

reading the synopsis it doesn't seem to mention any thing about the 'relationship' being protested by any one, and his parents were living together unmarried? Thats unbelievable! Oh AND they lived like this under a sant?? Where the hell was this? Also obviously you have to ask where on earth this singh's dal was to give him sajaa, I'm pretty certain this would be dealt with pretty harshly to say the least.

[dalsingh101]

This review is interesting, especially the last sentence. Like the song goes - nah dey dil pardesi nu, tenu nit a rauna paa ju ga... lol

This title has that crisp, acerbic ring that characterizes the novels of Anita Brookner, and at first seems an odd choice of name for a book about a young Englishwoman who spends two years with the Punjabi villager with whom she falls in lust, if not love. The title’s restraint particularly resonates when readers consider that this adventure took place at the end of that emotionally extravagant decade, the ’70s.

Sarah Lloyd is easily seduced by beauty and the glory of a Sikh warrior’s unleashed mane of hair is too much for her. She cuts her Indian pilgrimage short, finds the village of the man who intrigues her, and moves into his family’s home. It’s an unlikely venue for a woman who loves the “chaos and electric energy” of the Calcutta streets but then there is “that hair,” plus the opportunity to enter “rural life, the real India, the one I had come to find.”

This woman knows how to travel hard and that skill serves her well in her new home. Sarah Lloyd is the kind of traveler who is happiest when staying in a gurdwara, “a large communal hall with windows all around” that is open to anyone, feeding and sheltering all who enter it without charge. If this is your idea of hell on earth, keep reading–this state of overcrowded, public bliss is where Sarah Lloyd lives for the next two years.

She is an artist and the one image of Jungli, the man whom she lives with, is a drawing she has done of his profile. This is perhaps the only clue the reader is given about the feelings Lloyd has for Jungli–he is gorgeous and her drawing of him is very reminiscent of the drawings of desert nomads done by T.E. Lawrence to embellish his Arabian classic. Like Lawrence of Arabia, Sarah Lloyd is enchanted with her idea of the country that has taken her in, and by extension with the man who has made it possible for her to live there in the way she feels is most authentic.

The beauty that nourishes Sarah is hard to pinpoint in the surroundings she has chosen but she is quite lyrical when she finds it. Delighted by a profusion of “English wildflowers” she discovers in Amritsar, she catalogs them in a tumble of poetry that evokes Midsummer Night’s Dream. “Everything was so perfect,” she writes of Jungli’s village, “the clear early morning, the smell of damp wheat, the flowers in the verges, and the sky flecked with birds.”

But Eden does not come without flaws and Lloyd is smart enough–and observant enough–to notice them and chronicle them with the same exactitude that she uses for the unexpected splashes of beauty. The lack of privacy, the dearth of sympathy, the realization that village life has no place for individuality is all noted and explained without whining or sentimentality. Understanding that she is “a guest” who during her visit ”remained an outsider,” Lloyd watches without judgment and–even more impressively–without self-consciousness. Never in her chronicle of her two years in rural India does she indulge in the wild paranoia that frequently strikes expats in Asia. What people think of her, she seems to have sensibly concluded, is none of her business. Instead, she decides, when it comes to this new life, she has “a lot to unlearn.”

As she unlearns, she describes it all on paper. She acquires language so she can have her questions answered, and when she and Jungli leave his family’s village to enter a religious community presided over by an enigmatic saint, her questions proliferate. She has a household to run, provisions to buy, dung to collect. Even though she shares a hut with another couple, she is forced to become house-proud. And she is given a new identity. Without the buffer of foster-parents and their defined place in their community, Sarah Lloyd is known by Jungli’s name–when her new neighbors talk about her, they call her “Pritam Singh’s.”

But truly this is who she never becomes–if anything or anyone possesses this woman, it is India, not the man who gave her a life there. At the end of their time together, it is Jungli who receives the reader’s sympathy as Lloyd dismisses him in the book’s final sentence, “I knew with absolute certainty that Jungli would love me until his death.”

Edited June 27, 2010 by dalsingh101

[Guest Weed]

Sarah: "I knew with absolute certainty that Jungli would love me until his death."

Jungli: "Hahahaha. I wouldn't count on it sugar-tits."

Edited June 27, 2010 by Weed

[shaheediyan]

Everyone is part of the human family, and people need to accept that relationships happen in all sorts of situations.

The book is a good read, and gives you a good insight into the 'details' of rural Punjabi thought/culture/life, as well as the real hardships faced by the Sikhs. It also gives an interesting insight into the 'workings' of the thousands of Sant-Dera (mini-cities) that now operate all over North India. Lastly, it is a romance, and shows what a real barriers culture, class, religion etc can ultimately be.

Kudos to the author, who really tried to experience the authentic lifestyle, although it is sad it was at the expense of the lives and memories of Jungli and family.