Arbad Narbad Dundakarਅਰਬਦ ਨਰਬਦ ਧੁੰਧੂਕਾਰਾ

About the book

Arbad Narbad Dundakar — 'Eons and Nebulae' — is the first published collection of one-act plays by Ajmer Singh Aulakh (1942–2017), the Mansa-district playwright who became the most performed dramatist of rural Punjab. Published in 1978, it gathers the short plays with which Aulakh had been winning Punjab's college and university drama festivals for years: with Aabra Cadabra, the title piece Arbad Narbad Dundakar was one of the two early one-acters that made his name.

Aulakh was a lecturer at Nehru Memorial Government College, Mansa, where he taught for four decades, and his theatre grew out of that world: plays written to be staged by students, in the colloquial rural idiom, for audiences of farmers, farm labourers and young people. Engaging, spicy dialogue in the people's own speech is what made these plays click.

Plot & themes

The title piece is characteristic of Aulakh's method: five characters drawn from the romantic legends of Punjab — the Heer-Ranjha, Mirza-Sahiban world — whose tragic ends, popularly attributed to metaphysical fate, are reread in historical and material terms. The lovers' doom is not written in the stars; it is written in the land records, the clan codes and the feudal order. Folk tale becomes people's history.

That operation — subjecting local and folkloric tales to socio-historical meaning — is Aulakh's signature across the collection. His people are the rural poor: tenant farmers, labourers, women ground between landlords, moneylenders and the state. The plays are short, performable, and built for impact: a festival jury or a village audience had to get the point in one sitting, and they did.

The book stands at the head of a long shelf: Begane Bohar di Chhan (Shade of the Alien Banyan, 1981), Anhe Nishanchi (Blind Shooters), Gani, and the full-length plays — Satt Bigane, Kehar Singh di Maut, Salwan, Bhajjian Bahin (from Waryam Sandhu's story), Ik Ramayan Hor, Jhana de Paani (translated as Waters of Chenab). Aulakh won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2006 for Ishaka Bajha Namaza da Hajj Nahi.

The author

Ajmer Singh Aulakh (1942–2017) was born in Kumbharwal, Sangrur district, and spent his working life as a Punjabi lecturer in Mansa. A social activist as well as a playwright, he stood for the cause of farm labourers and deprived castes; his plays return obsessively to the struggles of the rural poor against landlords and against the anti-farmer policies of governments. During the Khalistani terror years he held to progressive values, writing against both state and militant terror — unnerved, friends said, but unmoved, after Pash's assassination in March 1988. He died of stomach cancer in 2017. His honours included the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award, the Shiromani Natakakar Award and an honorary D.Litt. from Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar.

Reception & legacy

Aulakh's one-acters were the biggest hits of the Punjabi University, Patiala inter-college drama festivals year after year — every season some team or other won a prize on an Aulakh play. Arbad Narbad Dundakar, as the first collection, is the record of how that happened: the moment when a lecturer from Mansa taught Punjab's students to see their own folk legends as history, and their own history as something that could be staged, argued with, and changed.

Read it if...

you want Punjabi theatre's most performable short plays; you are interested in how folk legends get turned into political theatre; or you want the book that launched the most-produced playwright of rural Punjab.