Ram Sarup Ankhiਰਾਮ ਸਰੂਪ ਅਣਖੀ

Early life

Ram Sarup Ankhi was born on 28 August 1932 in Dhaula, in the Barnala district of what was then British Punjab. He was educated at Government Mohindra College, Patiala. After his studies he worked his ancestral land as a farmer, and later became an English teacher in a government school — though he wrote only in Punjabi — retiring in 1990.

Career

Ankhi began as a poet and ended as a fiction writer: fifteen novels, eight story collections and five poetry collections stand to his credit. His subject was the village Punjab of the Malwa belt — a cluster of some fifty villages across Mansa, Bathinda, Barnala and Sangrur, the landscape he knew from the inside. Farmer indebtedness and suicide, drug addiction, the post–Green Revolution crisis, the influx of migrant labour and the disintegration of village communities run through his work.

From 1993 he edited the Punjabi short-fiction quarterly Kahani Punjab, assisted by his son Krantipal. He won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1987, the Kartar Singh Dhaliwal award of the Panjabi Sahit Akademi, Ludhiana, in 1992, and the Sarb Shresht Sahitkaar award in 2009. Several of his works were adapted for the screen — his novel Gelo became a Punjabi feature film in 2016.

Major works

Kothe Kharak Singh (1985) is his magnum opus: an epic of three generations in a fictional but entirely typical Malwa village, stretching from 1940–42 through the Janata Party's rule after the Emergency to Indira Gandhi's return to power in the early 1980s. It won him the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1987. His other novels include Partapi (1993), Dulle Di Dhab (2003), Salphas (2006 — named for the insecticide that debt-ridden farmers consumed to kill themselves), Jaminan Wale (The Landed Gentry, 2004), Kanak da Qatlam (Slaughter of the Wheat, 2007) and Bhima (2009), about a migrant farm labourer.

His two-volume autobiography Malhe Jharhian (Thorny Bushes with Berries, 1988) and Apni Mitti De Rukh (2004) trace his own journey from village schoolboy to celebrated novelist. His story collections began with Sutta Naag (1966) and include Kachcha Dhaga (1967), Manukh Di Maut (1968) and Gelo.

Legacy

Ankhi is remembered as a mesmerising storyteller and the chronicler of rural Malwa in the latter half of the twentieth century. In his writing the Malwa landscape comes alive, and his late novels brought the agrarian crisis — debt, drugs, migration — into Punjabi literature with rare directness. He wrote at least a book a year well into old age, and died on 14 February 2010 at Barnala, aged 77, leaving behind a body of work that gave the farmers of Malwa a literature of their own.