Ajeet Courਅਜੀਤ ਕੌਰ

Early life

Ajeet Cour was born on 16 November 1934 in Lahore, in the family of Sardar Makhan Singh, a doctor. She spent her early childhood in Lahore, studying at Sacred Heart School, a convent run by Irish nuns — it was there that she began spelling her surname with a "C" instead of a "K". As a child she also took lessons in the Gurmukhi script from Kartar Singh Hitkari, the scholar and father of Amrita Pritam.

Partition changed her life. After 1947 her family moved to Delhi, where she earned an M.A. in Economics from Delhi University. In 1952 she was married to Rajinder Singh; the marriage failed and ended in divorce. She raised her two daughters, including the artist Arpana Caur, as a single mother while supporting the family through teaching, journalism and writing.

Career

Cour began writing during her M.A. years, but her husband forbade her to write and she put the pen down for eight years before returning to fiction. She rebuilt her life as a single working mother in Delhi and emerged as one of the strongest social-realist voices in Punjabi prose, writing about women's inner lives, troubled marriages and the double standards of society. Her fiction includes the short-story collections Gulbano, Mehak di Maut and Butt Shikan and the novellas Dhup Wala Shehar, Post Mortem and Gauri — the last of which was made into a film, while her story Na Maaro was serialised for television. Over her career she produced nineteen short-story anthologies, novellas and novels, made nine translations and edited more than twenty works. Beyond her own writing she built institutions: she founded the Academy of Fine Arts and Literature in New Delhi, served as its president, and later chaired the Foundation of SAARC Writers and Literature (FOSWAL). In 2003 she was part of the first delegation of Indian writers to visit Pakistan.

Major works

Her most famous book is Khana Badosh (The Nomad), an autobiography in two volumes that brought her the Sahitya Akademi Award — listed as 1985 in reference works and 1986 on her own website. Translated into English as Pebbles in a Tin Drum (1995), it begins with the death of her daughter in a burn accident in France and moves back through Partition, a failed romance, a failed marriage and her struggle to survive as a single mother in Delhi. Its sequel, Koora Kabara (A Load of Rubbish, 1997), continued the story; a later volume, Weaving Water (2018), reflected on surviving domestic violence. Her story collection The Other Woman and the 2024 memoir The Blue Potter — portraits of seventeen Punjabi literary and art legends — have kept her in the public eye. A drama film, Rehmat, directed by Gurvinder Singh and based on her short stories, entered competition at the Locarno Film Festival in 2026.

Legacy

Cour has been honoured with the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Padma Shri (2006), the Kuvempu Rashtriya Puraskar (2019) and, in 2024, the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship — the Akademi's highest honour. She was also among the "1000 PeaceWomen Across the Globe" nominated collectively for the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize. The Tribune described her as a writer who "portrayed angry rebellious women around us". As of 2026 she is living, and at ninety-one was still publishing and speaking about the writers she had known.