Adamkhorਆਦਮਖੋਰ

Adamkhor, in English The Man-Eater, is a Punjabi novel by Nanak Singh (1897 to 1971), published in 1951 by Nanak Singh Pustakala in Amritsar. Written from a socialist point of view, it strips the mask from capitalism, corruption and vice, and through its character Bharti shows a way out of the ills of a system that feeds on people. It is one of the early landmarks of the socially conscious Punjabi novel.

What does Adamkhor mean?

The title is made of two Punjabi words: adam, meaning man or human being, and khor, meaning eater or devourer. An adamkhor is a man-eater. Nanak Singh takes a word that belongs to folk tales and turns it on modern life: in this novel, the man-eater is not a beast in the forest but a system, capitalism, that grows rich by devouring the people who work for it. The title tells the reader, before the story even begins, whose side the book is on.

That choice of title was typical of Nanak Singh. His novels took their stories from social life and named their targets plainly: social evils, economic inequality, corruption, hypocrisy, moneylending and communal frenzy are the subjects his fiction returns to again and again.

What is Adamkhor about?

Adamkhor is a social novel, written from a socialist point of view. It exposes the workings of capitalism: how money and power corrupt, how vice is rewarded, and how ordinary people are used up by those above them. Its sharpest satire falls on the exploitation and ruin of women, who bear the worst of a system that treats people as things to be used.

The novel does not stop at exposure. Its character Bharti, who is steeped in socialist ideas, shows the way out: a path away from the ills of capitalism and toward a life built on equality and dignity. Bharti is the novel's answer to its own anger, the proof that Nanak Singh wrote to change minds, not only to describe misery.

A novel of 1951

Adamkhor was published in 1951, four years after Independence, when India was arguing about what kind of country it would become and what place socialism would have in it. Nanak Singh Pustakala in Amritsar brought it out. The book belongs to the first wave of Punjabi novels that treated the new nation's problems as the proper subject of fiction, rather than escaping into romance or history.

The novel sits in the middle of an extraordinary body of work. Nanak Singh wrote 59 books, including 38 novels, and his stories and novels kept returning to the same questions: who benefits, who pays, and what a fair society would look like. Adamkhor is one of the novels in which he stated his position most directly.

The author

Nanak Singh was born Hans Raj on 4 July 1897 in Chak Hamid, in Jhelum district, in what is now Pakistan. He had little formal schooling beyond the fourth grade, and as a boy he washed dishes in a sweet shop and sold kulfi at fairs. He witnessed the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar on 13 April 1919, in which two of his friends were killed, and wrote the long poem Khooni Vaisakhi about it. The British banned the poem and seized its copies.

He was jailed during the Guru ka Bagh agitation in 1922, and in jail he read the novels of Munshi Premchand and began writing his own. He went on to become the most prolific Punjabi novelist of his generation, and he is remembered as the father of the Punjabi novel. His novel Pavitra Paapi was made into a film in 1968, and his historical novel Ik Mian Do Talwaran won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1962. He died in Amritsar on 28 December 1971, aged 74.

Where Adamkhor stands

Adamkhor is counted among the Nanak Singh novels that created characters readers never forgot. A history of the Punjabi novel names it alongside Chitta Lahu, Pavitra Paapi, Banjar and Chitarkar as books in which he created unforgettable characters who inspired the writers who came after him. It has never had the fame of Pavitra Paapi or Adh Khidya Phul, but it shows the reforming side of Nanak Singh at its clearest: a novelist who believed fiction should take sides, and who gave his readers both the diagnosis and the cure.

For readers of Punjabi literature, Adamkhor is worth seeking out as the early, uncompromising statement of Nanak Singh's socialism: a short, sharp novel in which the man-eater is named, its victims are counted, and a way out is shown.