Geloਗੇਲੋ

Gelo is a Punjabi work by Ram Sarup Ankhi (1932 to 2010), the Sahitya Akademi Award winning novelist of Punjab's Malwa villages. It tells the story of Gurmel Kaur, called Gelo, a young woman of the Malwa belt, inside the hard world of its farming families. The book is listed among Ankhi's story books in bibliographies of his work, while the film coverage that brought it back into public view describes it as a novel. Either way, its second life is certain: in 2016 it became the Punjabi feature film Gelo, directed by Manbhavan Singh, and reached an audience far beyond the printed page.

What is Gelo about?

Gelo is about Gurmel Kaur, a girl of Punjab's Malwa belt, and the farming world that shapes and finally closes around her. The film made from the book, following Ankhi's story, presents the problems of the farmers living in the Malwa belt through her life. The Tribune, reviewing the film on its release, described it as the journey of a woman from a promising life to a dark end. That arc, a bright beginning ground down by the conditions of a farming household, is the shape Ankhi returned to across his fiction: not villains, but a land, a debt-bound economy and a set of customs that leave a young woman very little room to move.

A note on the book itself is owed to the reader. Ankhi's bibliographies list Gelo without a date among his story collections, between Adha Admi (1977) and Kadon Phirange Din (1985), while Wikipedia's account of the author calls it his novel Gelo in the same breath as the film. The original year of publication is not given in the sources this page rests on, so this entry leaves it open rather than guessing. What is not in doubt is the authorship, the Malwa setting, the central figure of Gurmel Kaur, and the story's reach through the film.

Themes: a woman's life in the Malwa fields

Ankhi is Punjabi literature's regional novelist of Malwa. Scholarship on his work notes that he set all his novels in the Malwa region, particularly the districts of Bathinda, Sangrur and Barnala, and that his characters stand as representatives of their whole community: their language, customs, dress, work and survival. His own account of his scene is a cluster of some fifty villages across Mansa, Bathinda, Barnala and Sangrur. Across that fiction he wrote about the village life of Punjab, about farmer suicide, indebtedness and drug addiction, and about the social, cultural, political and economic life of Malwai people.

Gelo puts a woman at the centre of that world. The Malwa of Ankhi's books is a cotton and wheat country of small and middling farmers, where a household's honour and its debts are carried on the same shoulders, and where a daughter's or a bride's life is decided early by others. A story that follows Gurmel Kaur from a promising start to a dark end, told by the writer who knew those fifty villages from inside, becomes more than one woman's fate: it is the farming belt looking at what it does to its own daughters.

The author

Ram Sarup Ankhi was born on 28 August 1932 in the village of Dhaula in Barnala district. He was educated at Government Mohindra College, Patiala, continued with his ancestral profession of farming, and later served as an English teacher in a government school, while writing in Punjabi. He began his career as a poet and became a fiction writer, with fifteen novels, eight story books and five collections of poems to his credit. His novel Kothe Kharak Singh (1985), a story of three generations in a fictional Malwa village and also in this Kosh, won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1987, and he received the Sarb Shresht Sahitkaar award in 2009. He died on 14 February 2010 at Barnala. His autobiography Malhe Jharhiyan is also in this Kosh.

The film and the book's legacy

Many of Ankhi's books and short stories have been adapted for the screen, and Gelo is the best known of the adaptations. The film Gelo, directed by Manbhavan Singh and written by Ankhi with Manbhawan Singh, was produced by Celebration Studioz and Sonark Solutions, with music by Umar Sheikh. Jaspinder Cheema played Gelo, with Pavan Malhotra as Balwant Singh and Gurjit Singh as Raama. It was released worldwide on 5 August 2016, six years after Ankhi's death, and the Punjabi press received it as a film that creates the atmosphere of rural culture and shows the Malwa farming world to cinema audiences.

That second life is now the main road by which new readers find the book. A Malwa story written by a farmer and schoolteacher of Barnala district, carried first in Punjabi print and then on cinema screens, Gelo stands in this Kosh beside Kothe Kharak Singh and Malhe Jharhiyan as part of the record of how Ankhi's fifty villages entered Punjabi literature, and of how one young woman of those villages, Gurmel Kaur, became the face of their hardest story.