ਮਲ੍ਹੇ ਝਾੜੀਆਂਮਲ੍ਹੇ ਝਾੜੀਆਂ

About the book

Malhe Jharhiyan is the autobiography of Ram Sarup Ankhi, the Punjabi novelist of Malwa, published in 1988. Its title names the thorny ber bushes of the Punjab countryside, bushes that carry small sweet berries on hard, scratching branches, and reference accounts give its meaning in English as Thorny Bushes with Berries. The book appeared in two volumes and was later updated twice, so the life in it was not left frozen in 1988: Ankhi went back to his own story as he went on living and writing it. A second autobiography, Apni Mitti De Rukh (Trees of My Own Soil), followed in 2004, which makes Malhe Jharhiyan the first and larger of the two accounts in which Punjab's great storyteller of village life told that life himself.

The timing matters. Malhe Jharhiyan came the year after Ankhi received the Sahitya Akademi Award, in 1987, for his novel Kothe Kharak Singh (1985), the three generation story of a fictional Malwa village that is also in this Kosh. He was 56, a farmer's son from Dhaula who had farmed himself and then taught English in a government school while writing in Punjabi, and the award had confirmed him as a leading voice of rural Punjab. The autobiography is where that voice turns from the invented village to the real one: the ground, the family and the years out of which the novels were made.

What is Malhe Jharhiyan about?

Malhe Jharhiyan is about Ankhi's own life in the Malwa region of Punjab: his native village Dhaula and its surrounding country, and later the town of Barnala, where he settled. Reviewing the two volumes, the playwright and columnist Atamjit noted that Ankhi was content with his life in Dhaula and Barnala and always sought his themes, settings and characters from within this region, because his wide canvas never required anything from outside it. The autobiography tells that rooted life from inside: a childhood in the village, the passage from poetry to fiction, work on the land and in the classroom, and a landscape changing around him, the same transformation his novels record, here carried by the man who watched it happen to his own fields and neighbours.

Atamjit's review also caught the quality readers meet in the book. It is not only his art of storytelling that mesmerises its reader, he wrote: his simplicity, honesty and bluntness also produce magic. Those are working values in an autobiography. Ankhi does not present a polished public figure; the divergent sides of the man are part of the record, among them that he was a Brahmin by caste who kept a Sikh appearance, as was the custom of his Malwa country, wild in childhood and disciplined in his writing, a poet who became a fiction writer. The thorn and the berry of the title sit over the whole book: a hard rural life, told plainly, with its sweetness kept in view rather than sentimentalised.

Themes: one region, one life

The deepest theme of Malhe Jharhiyan is staying. Ankhi's fiction is set in a cluster of some fifty villages across the Malwa districts of Mansa, Bathinda, Barnala and Sangrur, and it deals with village life and its pressures, among them farmer debt and addiction. The autobiography shows where that knowledge came from: not from research trips but from a life lived in the middle of it, farming, teaching and writing in the same few miles for decades. Its second theme is change over time, the sea change, as Atamjit put it, that passed over the same landscape in one lifetime, from the Punjab of his childhood to the post Green Revolution Malwa of his later novels. Because Ankhi updated the book twice, that theme is built into its very form: the life account itself kept changing as the country it describes changed.

ਲੇਖਕ

Ram Sarup Ankhi (28 August 1932 to 14 February 2010) was born in Dhaula village, in present day Barnala district, studied at Government Mohindra College, Patiala, worked first in his ancestral profession of farming and then as an English teacher in a government school, and wrote in Punjabi. He began as a poet and became a fiction writer, with 15 novels, eight story collections and five collections of poems to his name. Kothe Kharak Singh won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1987; he also received the Kartar Singh Dhaliwal Award in 1992 and the Sarb Shresht Sahitkaar award in 2009. From 1993 he edited the Punjabi short fiction quarterly Kahani Punjab, assisted by his son Krantipal. He died at Barnala in 2010.

Reception and legacy

Malhe Jharhiyan is the book readers and critics reach for when they want Ankhi whole. Atamjit's contemporary review in two volumes praised exactly the qualities the autobiography needed, storytelling, simplicity, honesty and bluntness, and Amarjit Chandan's obituary of Ankhi returned to the same review when summing up the man and his work. The book was reprinted by Unistar Books in 2007, late in Ankhi's life, alongside reprints of his novels. Read with Apni Mitti De Rukh, its shorter successor of 2004, it forms the personal half of a double record: the novels, above all Kothe Kharak Singh, tell what happened to Malwa's villages, and Malhe Jharhiyan tells what it was like to be the writer who lived inside that story and would not leave it.