Partapiਪ੍ਰਤਾਪੀ

About the book

Partapi is a Punjabi novel by Ram Sarup Ankhi, published in 1993. It is the book that stands beside Kothe Kharak Singh (1985) as the work Ankhi is best known for: his Wikipedia entry names the two together in the line that sums up his reputation, and the novel was reprinted by Unistar Books in 2010, seventeen years after it first appeared.

The novel belongs to the middle of Ankhi's career as a novelist. Kothe Kharak Singh, his epic of three generations in a Malwa village, had won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1987. Partapi followed six years later, and Dulle Di Dhab came a decade after that, in 2003. Across those books Ankhi stayed with the same ground: the villages of Malwa, their fields and debts, their kinship and custom, and their slow change under the pressures of the late twentieth century.

What does Partapi mean?

The title comes from the Punjabi word pratap, meaning glory, majesty or splendour. A partapi is one who carries that glory, a person of standing and honour. The title sets the novel's question before a page is read: what honour and standing are worth in a village where land, debt and reputation decide a person's place.

The Malwa world of the novel

Almost everything Ankhi wrote is set in the same place: a cluster of about fifty villages in Malwa, across the districts of Mansa, Bathinda, Barnala and Sangrur. He was born in Dhaula, farmed his ancestral land, taught English in a government school, and lived most of his life in Dhaula and Barnala. His obituary in ApnaOrg puts it plainly: he sought his themes, locales and characters from within this region, and his canvas never needed anything from outside it.

The subjects he returned to were the pressures on that world: village life and its slow unravelling, the debt that trapped small farmers, the arrival of drugs, the pull of migrant labour, and the disintegration of village communities under corporate farming and the aftermath of the Green Revolution. His later novels carry those subjects in their very titles: Salphas (2006), named for the pesticide debt-ridden farmers used to end their lives, and Kanak Da Qatleam (2007), the slaughter of the wheat. Partapi belongs to the same body of work: a patient record of Malwa as it changed.

The author

Ram Sarup Ankhi (28 August 1932 to 14 February 2010) began as a poet and ended as a novelist. He published five collections of poetry before committing himself to fiction, and went on to write fifteen novels, eight story collections and five poetry collections. He won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1987 for Kothe Kharak Singh, the Kartar Singh Dhaliwal Award in 1992, and the Sarb Shresht Sahitkaar award in 2009, a year before his death.

He edited the Punjabi short-fiction quarterly Kahani Punjab from 1993, the same year Partapi appeared, assisted by his son Krantipal. Some of his books were translated into Gujarati, Hindi and English, and his novel Gelo was made into a Punjabi feature film in 2016, directed by Manbhawan Singh.

Reception and legacy

Partapi has stayed in print. The 2010 Unistar reprint, seventeen years after publication, is the mark of a novel readers kept asking for. It is the book readers name second when they name Ankhi at all, after Kothe Kharak Singh, and it anchors his reputation as the novelist of Malwa: the writer who took one small region, some fifty villages around Dhaula and Barnala, and made it hold the whole story of rural Punjab in the late twentieth century.

That reputation rests on patience. Ankhi's novels are not built on incident but on accumulation: seasons, debts, marriages, quarrels and harvests, until a village's whole way of life stands in front of the reader. Partapi works in that way, and it is one reason his name still comes up whenever Punjabi readers argue about who wrote the village best.

Where can I read Partapi?

Partapi is in print in Punjabi in the 2010 Unistar Books reprint (ISBN 978-81-7538-113-1). Look for it through Punjabi booksellers and online Indian bookshops. No English translation is listed, so the Punjabi original is the way to read it.