ਬੁੱਤ-ਸ਼ਿਕਨਬੁੱਤ-ਸ਼ਿਕਨ

About the book

But-Shikan is a 1966 Punjabi short story collection by Ajeet Cour, named for its title story about Mrs Chaudhary, a college lecturer whose colleagues uncover a secret she has kept from them. It is a compact study of a working woman, workplace gossip and the price of dignity, by one of Punjabi literature's most honoured writers.

Reference works list But Shikan among Cour's best known collections, alongside Gulbano, Mehak di Maut, Saviyan and Chirian. The Punjabi Audiobooks listing dates the book to 1966, early in a writing life that began when Cour was still a student. Like much of her fiction, the collection is written in Punjabi in the Gurmukhi script, and it belongs to the social realist tradition: ordinary rooms, ordinary jobs, and the quiet pressures that decide what a woman may and may not be.

The title story: Mrs Chaudhary's secret

In the title story, Mrs Chaudhary teaches at a college. She keeps to her work, stays apart from the staff room's circles, and refuses the invitations her colleagues keep pressing on her to join their cliques. Her distance is not emptiness. It is a discipline, a way of keeping one part of her life her own.

The turn comes when her colleagues discover a secret about her. The podcast that introduces the story to listeners puts the question plainly: what happens then? Cour does not build the story around the secret itself but around its exposure, and around what respectable people do with private knowledge once they have it. A second audiobook summary describes the story as one about what a woman faces when she follows her own desire and passion. Read together, the two summaries point to the same centre: a woman judged not for her work, but for her inner life.

What does "But-Shikan" mean?

But-Shikan means 'The Idol-Breaker'. 'But' is an idol, and 'shikan' is a breaker, a compound Cour's readers would know from Persian and Urdu words long used in Punjabi. The title is ironic. No stone god is smashed in this story. What breaks is an image: the picture of Mrs Chaudhary that her colleagues had settled on, and perhaps the picture the reader had settled on too.

That irony is the story in miniature. The people who break the idol are not rebels. They are colleagues, acting through curiosity and talk, and the idol they break was never a false god. It was a woman's carefully kept privacy.

Themes: dignity, gossip and the working woman

Cour's fiction is known for its close, personal attention to women's lives: unequal relationships, displacement, domestic pressure, and the search for dignity and belonging. But-Shikan brings those concerns into a workplace, a setting Punjabi fiction of its time rarely examined from a woman's side of the desk.

Three themes hold the story together. The first is privacy as self-protection: Mrs Chaudhary's reserve reads as coldness only to people who have never needed it. The second is gossip as a social weapon, the staff room's way of returning an independent woman to the group's control. The third is respectability itself: the unspoken rule that a woman teacher may be educated and employed, so long as her inner life stays invisible.

ਲੇਖਕ

Ajeet Cour was born on 16 November 1934 in Lahore, the daughter of Sardar Makhan Singh, a doctor in the city. As a child she learned Punjabi and Gurmukhi from Kartar Singh Hitkari, the scholar father of Amrita Pritam. Partition in 1947 brought the family to Delhi, where she took an M.A. in Economics, a subject she chose, by her own account in an oral history recorded at the University of British Columbia, because its classes were held at hours her father would allow.

She began writing stories as a student, then stopped for years under pressure in a marriage that later ended. She raised her daughters largely on her own, among them the artist Arpana Caur, and built a second career as a cultural organiser. She founded the Academy of Fine Arts and Literature in New Delhi in 1977 and the Foundation of SAARC Writers and Literature, known as FOSWAL, in 1987.

Her autobiography Khanabadosh brought her the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1985, and she received the Padma Shri in 2006. Later honours include the Kuvempu Rashtriya Puraskar in 2019 and the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship in 2024. Her other books include the collections Gulbano, Mehak di Maut and Saviyan, the novellas Dhup Wala Shehar and Post Mortem, and the novel Gauri, which was made into a film. Her story Na Maaro was serialised for television.

Reception and legacy

Reference works on Punjabi literature name But Shikan among the collections on which Cour's reputation as a short story writer rests. The Sikh Encyclopedia calls her one of the very best short story writers in the language, and a Tribune critic quoted in her biographies described her as a writer who portrayed the angry, rebellious women around us.

The collection's afterlife is now largely a listening one. Punjabi audiobook podcasts have recorded the title story for new audiences. Manpreet Sahota's Next Page devoted episode 116 to But-Shikan, and Harleen Kaur's Punjabi Audiobooks series reads it as episode 108, introducing it to listeners who may never hold the printed book.

Where can I read or listen to But-Shikan?

Print copies of the 1966 collection are scarce outside Punjabi libraries and second hand sellers, and the collection is not among the English translations of Cour's work listed by her publisher Aleph. The most accessible route today is audio: both podcast readings named above are free, in Punjabi, and short enough for a single sitting. Readers who want more Cour in English can turn to Pebbles in a Tin Drum and Weaving Water, the English forms of her autobiography.