But-Shikanਬੁੱਤ-ਸ਼ਿਕਨ

About the book

But-Shikan — 'The Idol-Breaker' — is a short story by Ajeet Cour (born 1934, Lahore), one of the most eminent Punjabi fiction writers of the post-Partition generation. Cour's work is known for its deeply personal and socially conscious exploration of women's lives: unequal relationships, displacement, domestic oppression, and the search for dignity and belonging. Her autobiography Khanabadosh received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1985, and she was honoured with the Padma Shri in 2006.

The story belongs to Cour's world of working women navigating institutions built without them in mind. Its title is ironic: the 'idol' that gets broken is not a god of stone but the image a woman has carefully constructed to survive in a workplace.

Plot & themes

Mrs Chaudhary is a lecturer in a college. She remains aloof, keeps to her work, and declines to join the cliques her colleagues keep pressing her to enter. She has built a wall of professionalism around herself — and it holds, until her colleagues discover a 'secret' about her.

What happens then is the story's real subject. Cour is less interested in the secret itself than in what its discovery does: the shift in the staff room's temperature, the way curiosity curdles into judgment, the quiet violence of a workplace deciding it finally 'knows' a woman. Mrs Chaudhary's aloofness, which looked like arrogance, is revealed as strategy — the armour of someone who understood, long before her colleagues did, exactly what this room would do with her truth.

The story is characteristic Cour: no melodrama, no villains twirling moustaches, just the precise observation of how respectable people wield information. The idol that breaks is the colleagues' image of Mrs Chaudhary — and, in a subtler sense, the reader's too.

The author

Ajeet Cour was born in Lahore in 1934 and moved to Delhi with her family after Partition. A fiction writer, memoirist and cultural activist, she founded the Foundation of SAARC Writers and Literature to promote cultural dialogue across South Asia. Her celebrated autobiography Khanabadosh (1985 Sahitya Akademi Award) and her Padma Shri (2006) mark her as one of Punjabi literature's most decorated living voices. Her fiction returns obsessively to women's inner lives under the pressure of family, work and custom.

Reception & legacy

Cour's short fiction is widely taught and anthologised as an exemplar of Punjabi feminist writing — stories in which the political is located not in slogans but in staff rooms, kitchens and marriages. But-Shikan circulates in Punjabi audiobook and reading-circle culture as a compact, discussable text: the kind of story a group can argue about for an hour, because everyone has met Mrs Chaudhary, or been her.

Read it if...

you like short stories that do their work in twenty pages; you are interested in Punjabi women's writing beyond the big names of an earlier generation; or you have ever watched a workplace turn on someone and wanted the anatomy of how it happens.