Balbir Madhopuriਬਲਬੀਰ ਮਾਧੋਪੁਰੀ

Early life

Balbir Madhopuri was born on 24 July 1955 in Madhopur, a village in Jalandhar district of Punjab’s Doaba region, into an Ad Dharmi Dalit family of the Chamar community. His parents were agricultural labourers, and as a child he worked alongside them in the fields. His father, however, was determined that his son would study, and that insistence became the engine of Madhopuri’s life. He was born Balbir Chand, but during his college years he dropped the surname Chand — which he felt carried the odour of the Hindu caste order — and took the name of his village instead, becoming Balbir Madhopuri. That act of renaming, narrated in his autobiography, was his first literary gesture: a refusal to carry a name that humiliated him. He earned an M.A. in Punjabi from Lyallpur Khalsa College, Jalandhar.

Career

After his studies, Madhopuri worked with the Food Corporation of India and then served as an information officer with the Press Information Bureau at Jalandhar from 1983 to 1987. He then moved to Delhi, where he spent the rest of his career in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting: as editor of the Punjabi edition of the magazine Yojana, and later as Deputy Director (News) at All India Radio. He retired in 2015. Alongside journalism he became a prolific translator, rendering forty-five books from Hindi and English into Punjabi, and he directed the Punjabi Bhawan and edited the quarterly Samkali Sahit for the Punjabi Sahit Sabha in Delhi. His translation work won him the Sahitya Akademi Translation Prize in 2013 for his Punjabi rendering of Raj Kamal Chaudhary’s stories.

Major works

Madhopuri began as a poet. His collections Maroothal da Birkh (Tree of the Desert) and Bhakh da Pataal (The Inferno) gave voice to the anger and deprivation of Punjab’s Dalits, and his writing has always stayed with the oppressed classes. His landmark work is the autobiography Changiya Rukh, published in Punjabi in 2002. The title means ‘a tree lopped from the top’ — Madhopuri’s metaphor for the Dalit, whose growth has been slashed by the caste order but who, like the lopped tree, keeps sending out fresh branches. It took him four years to write. The English translation, Against the Night, translated by Tripti Jain and published by Oxford University Press in 2010, made it the first Punjabi Dalit autobiography to reach English readers; it was nominated for the Crossword Award in 2011 and has since been translated into Hindi, Urdu, Russian and Polish. His novel Mitti Bol Payi (2020) won the Dhahan Prize for Punjabi Literature in 2021.

Legacy

Changiya Rukh changed what Punjabi literature could talk about. It forced caste — the segregated bastis, the humiliation at school, the denial of wells and temples — into the centre of the literary conversation, and it made the autobiography of a community, as Madhopuri puts it, out of the autobiography of a man. Fourteen books of fiction and poetry, dozens of translations, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Punjabi Academy in Delhi, and his role as chair of the Dhahan Prize for Punjabi Literature mark the distance he travelled: from a child labourer in a Dalit quarter of Madhopur to one of the most translated Punjabi writers of his generation.