ਇਸ਼ਕ ਬਾਝ ਨਮਾਜ਼ ਦਾ ਹੱਜ ਨਹੀਂਇਸ਼ਕ ਬਾਝ ਨਮਾਜ਼ ਦਾ ਹੱਜ ਨਹੀਂ

About the book

Ishk Baj Namaz Da Haz Nahi is a Punjabi play by Ajmer Singh Aulakh of Mansa, the playwright who took Punjabi theatre out of the city auditorium and back to the village ground. Aulakh wrote more than 35 plays, many of them part of university syllabi, and staged them with Lok Kala Manch, the troupe he founded at Mansa in 1976, which has more than 1,000 performances to its credit. The play belongs to the main line of his stage work, listed alongside Satt Begane, Kehar Singh Di Maut, Bhajian Bahin and Jhanna De Paani, and it is the book the Sahitya Akademi chose when it gave him its Punjabi award in 2006, cataloguing the winning work as plays.

The play grew out of the theatre Aulakh built at Nehru Memorial College, Mansa, where he taught Punjabi from 1965 to 2000. Put in charge of cultural activities, he began writing small plays for his students, and wherever a team staged one at a youth festival it won first prize. Encouraged by the novelist Gurdial Singh and the critic T. R. Vinod, he formed Lok Kala Manch in 1976. Aulakh always said his plays were a reflection of his experiences, drawn from what he had seen rather than imagined, and this one turns that habit of close observation onto faith itself.

What does the title mean?

The title is a Punjabi saying built from three borrowed words: ishk, love; namaz, the prayer; and hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. Bajh means without. Put together: without love, the prayer contains no pilgrimage. A person can perform every ritual correctly, the title argues, and still arrive nowhere, because the journey that matters is the one love makes. Aulakh often took his cue from lines of Gurbani and Sufi wisdom, and the title works like one of those lines: short, singable, and impossible to argue with on its own terms.

The Tribune's profile of the playwright sums up the play in one sentence: it conveys how deeds, and not rituals, take one closer to the intrinsic philosophy of Sikhism. Aulakh himself put the same point as a principle: Sikhism, he said, is first and foremost a proponent of equality, and he resented the feudal retelling that projected it differently. The play tests comfortable believers with that standard.

Themes: deeds over ritual

The first theme is the gap between performed religion and lived religion. In Aulakh's Malwa, prayer is public and reputation is its currency, so the play keeps asking what a prayer is worth when the person praying will not share bread, land or dignity with a neighbour. Love, in the title's sense, is not romance: it is the deed that proves the devotion.

Around that centre sit the concerns that run through all of Aulakh's theatre. His abiding subject is the link between economic compulsions and social and family relationships: what money, debt and small holdings do to love and honour inside a household. He wrote, above all, about small and marginal farmers, farm labourers and rural women, and critics noted how he caught the whole range of the peasantry, including families whose caste standing sat far above their economic condition. The play brings that same unsparing eye to the village's religious life.

ਲੇਖਕ

Ajmer Singh Aulakh was born on 19 August 1942 at Kumbharwal in Sangrur district and grew up in the Malwa belt he would put on stage. As a small boy in Kishangarh Pharwahi he was already writing poems and singing them at public platforms. He taught Punjabi at Nehru Memorial Government College, Mansa, from 1965 to 2000, and his first collection of one act plays, Arbad Narbad Dundakar, appeared in 1978.

He died at Mansa on 15 June 2017, aged 74. His honours included the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award, the Shiromani Natakakar Award of the Punjab Language Department and the Pash Memorial Award, besides the Sahitya Akademi Award this book won. His last wishes, honoured by his family, asked that his daughters light his pyre and that no religious function be held in his memory.

The Sahitya Akademi Award

Did Ishk Baj Namaz Da Haz Nahi win the Sahitya Akademi Award? Yes. The Akademi's Punjabi winners list for 2006 records Ajmer Singh Aulakh and this book, in the plays category. It was the national academy's recognition of a body of stage work that had already made him, in the words of the translators of New Wave Punjabi Drama, arguably the best known Punjabi playwright depicting the life and travails of the rural masses of Malwa.

Nine years later the award came back into the news. In October 2015 Aulakh was one of the Punjabi writers who announced they would return their Sahitya Akademi awards, protesting what they called rising intolerance after the murders of rationalist writers. The gesture matched the play's own teaching: a form kept without conviction behind it is worth little.

Reception and legacy

Aulakh's plays were received, unusually, by both camps of his audience: rural crowds who watched Lok Kala Manch in the open air, and scholars who put the texts on university syllabi. The critic Attar Singh admitted that he had once thought Punjabi drama as a literary form was finished, and that Aulakh's emergence made him ashamed of that judgement. This play, carried by the 2006 award, is the title under which much of India first met that theatre.

Its legacy is the standard it sets for Punjabi drama with a religious theme. The play argues with ritual from inside the tradition, using the vocabulary of namaz, hajj and Gurbani, and it refuses the easy ending in which the believer simply performs harder. For students of Punjabi theatre it remains the natural companion to Aulakh's farming plays: the same Malwa, the same plain Malwai speech, turned this time on the soul's accounts rather than the land's.