Dharampal Sahil

Hoshiarpur, Punjab, India

‘Khora’ (‘Erosion’) is a richly textured chronicle of the Kandhi belt, the low-lying hill region of Punjab, tracing five decades of ecological, social, and psychological change. Sahil writes with an insider's intimacy. He puts this linguistic knowledge to skilful use, animating the speech, idiom, and everyday textures of remote village life in a way that few writers could achieve without lived experience of the region.

The novel unfolds through Birju, who returns to his native village after almost forty years, only to find that the place he carries in memory no longer exists in any recognizable form. Through carefully woven flashbacks, Sahil moves between Birju's recollections and the altered present, building a narrative structure that conveys, with quiet ache, the sense of an era irrevocably lost. At its core, ‘Khora’ is a reflection on erosion in its many senses: not merely the physical wearing away of land and terrain that gives the novel its title. It also delivers on the slower, more insidious erosion of human spirit, values, relationships, and ways of life under the pressure of rapid, city-driven development.