Gulbanoਗੁਲਬਾਨੋ

About the book

Gulbano is a collection of short stories by Ajeet Cour, one of the best-known Punjabi writers of her generation. The Punjab Government honoured Cour for the collection in 1962, and in the same year the Punjabi Sahitya Samikhya Board chose her as its Shiromani Sahitkar, its writer of the year. The book made her name as a short-story writer, and the Sikh Encyclopedia counts her among the very best in the language.

The stories are written in Punjabi, in the social-realist mode that runs through all of Cour's fiction. They take ordinary Punjabi households, marriages and workplaces as their ground, and they look closely at what those places cost the women who live in them. Cour writes in a racy, fluent style, and her insight into the human situation is penetrating. The collection sits at the start of a long career in the short story: her other well-known collections include But-Shikan, Saviyan and Chirian.

What is Gulbano about?

The stories in Gulbano are about women in relationships and their position in society. That is the subject Cour returned to all her life, in novels, novellas and memoirs as well as in stories: how a woman keeps her dignity when marriage, family and money all pull against her, and what happens when she refuses to accept the place assigned to her.

Cour's women are not symbols. They are wives, mothers, daughters and working women, as angry and rebellious as often as they are patient, and the stories follow their choices rather than judging them. A much-discussed example of her short fiction from the same period, 'Happy New Year', translated from Punjabi by Khushwant Singh, turns on a government clerk's promotion and his wife's fury at the price of keeping up appearances, a small domestic quarrel that opens out into a picture of a whole society running on gifts and favours.

Gulbano remains the collection readers and critics reach for first when they talk about Cour as a story writer.

The stories and their world

The world of the stories is the Punjabi world Cour knew first hand: Lahore before Partition, then Delhi, where her family settled after 1947. The households are middle-class and working, the marriages arranged or barely chosen, the money always short, and the women in them are expected to keep the home running whatever it costs them.

Cour's eye is on the small humiliations and the quiet rebellions: a wife who answers back, a mother who counts the cost of a daughter's marriage, a woman who discovers that respectability is a cage with the door left open. The stories were translated into many Indian languages and broadcast and telecast over the years, which is how a Punjabi collection honoured in 1962 reached readers far beyond Punjab.

Read beside her later books, Gulbano shows where Cour's lifelong subjects began. The same concern with women's lives runs through her novellas Dhup Wala Shehar and Post Mortem, and through her autobiography Khanabadosh, which won the Sahitya Akademi Award. Gulbano is the early proof of it, written before the honours arrived.

ਲੇਖਕ

Ajeet Cour was born in Lahore in 1934, and had her early education there. After Partition her family came to Delhi, where she took an MA in Economics. She worked as a journalist and edited trade directories, and she went on to found the Academy of Fine Arts and Literature in New Delhi and the Foundation of SAARC Writers and Literature (FOSWAL), which brings writers from across South Asia together.

She has written novels, novellas, short stories, memoirs and translations, and her books have been translated into English, Hindi and several other languages. Her autobiography Khanabadosh won the Sahitya Akademi Award, she received the Padma Shri in 2006 and the Kuvempu Rashtriya Puraskar in 2019, and in 2024 she was given the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship, the Akademi's highest honour.

Reception and legacy

Gulbano was honoured by the Punjab Government in 1962, and the same year Cour was named Shiromani Sahitkar. More honours followed: the Punjabi Arts Council in 1979, the Punjabi Academy in Delhi in 1983, and in 1984 both the international IAPX Award and the Baba Balwant Award. The collection's reputation has held ever since, and it is still listed first among her story collections.

The book matters because it fixed Cour's subject and her manner early: plain, fluent Punjabi prose, women at the centre, and no looking away from what marriage and family demand of them. Later Punjabi women writers work in a space Gulbano helped to open, and the collection is still read as an introduction to Cour and to the modern Punjabi short story.

What to read after Gulbano

The natural next step is Cour's other story collection in this Kosh, But-Shikan, another of her best-known books, and her autobiography Khanabadosh, which tells the life behind the fiction in her own voice. Her novella Dhup Wala Shehar is a shorter way into the same world. Together the three books show the range of a writer who began with stories like these and kept returning to women's lives across a writing life of more than seventy years.