ਅਜੀਤ ਕੌਰਅਜੀਤ ਕੌਰ

Who is Ajeet Cour?

Ajeet Cour is a Punjabi writer born in Lahore in 1934, best known for Khana Badosh, the autobiography that brought her the Sahitya Akademi Award. She received the Padma Shri in 2006 and the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship in 2024, and she built two lasting institutions in Delhi: the Academy of Fine Arts and Literature and the Foundation of SAARC Writers and Literature, known as FOSWAL.

Early life in Lahore, then Partition

Ajeet Cour was born on 16 November 1934 in Lahore, the daughter of Sardar Makhan Singh, a well known doctor in the city. She had her early education in Lahore. As a child she also learned Gurmukhi from Kartar Singh Hitkari, the scholar who was the father of the poet Amrita Pritam. Cour knew the young Amrita through those family visits, and that childhood connection later became one of the threads in her memoir writing.

Partition in 1947 changed the direction of her life. Her family left Lahore for Delhi, where she completed an M.A. in Economics at Delhi University. In 1952 she married Rajinder Singh. The marriage ended in divorce, and she raised her two daughters, among them the artist Arpana Caur, largely as a single mother. She supported the household through teaching, journalism and writing, work she combined for years with bringing up her children.

Writing career and major works

Cour writes in Punjabi, and her fiction is rooted in social realism. Again and again she returns to the inner lives of women, to marriages under strain, and to the gap between what society says and what it quietly allows. Reviewers have noticed that anger. The Tribune described her as a writer who portrayed angry, rebellious women around us, and a Hindu review of her collection The Other Woman pointed to the way her stories expose the double standards of everyday life.

Her best known books include the short story collections Gulbano, Mehak di Maut and Butt Shikan, and the longer prose works Dhup Wala Shehar, Post Mortem and Gauri. A 2025 profile in Indulge Express counted 31 collections of short stories, novelettes and novels across her career, along with nine translations and more than 35 edited books. Several of her stories have also reached the screen, and in August 2026 Rehmat, a drama film directed by Gurvinder Singh and based on her short stories, screened in the main competition at the Locarno Film Festival.

What is Khana Badosh about?

Khana Badosh, which can be read as The Nomad, is her autobiography, published in two volumes with a sequel, Koora Kabara. Its English version appeared as Pebbles in a Tin Drum in 1995. Instead of telling her life as a straight line of dates, Cour moves between loss, Partition, a failed marriage and the long work of surviving as a single mother in Delhi. A later autobiographical book, Weaving Water, published in English in 2018, looks back honestly at surviving domestic violence, and writing itself becomes part of how she endured.

Her most recent widely discussed book is The Blue Potter, a memoir of other people rather than of herself. It profiles 17 figures from Punjab's literary and art world whom she knew personally, among them Amrita Pritam, Shiv Kumar Batalvi, Khushwant Singh, Jagjit Singh and Krishna Sobti. The book took her four to five years to complete. It was first published in Punjabi, then appeared in Hindi, Bengali and English, in an English translation by Sushmindar Jeet Kaur, with a Malayalam edition also planned.

Building institutions: the Academy and FOSWAL

Cour did not only write books. With her daughter Arpana Caur she founded the Academy of Fine Arts and Literature in New Delhi in 1975, a non profit centre for art and literature. Google Arts and Culture describes it as a principal centre of literary and cultural activity in Delhi, with a free library and reading hall of more than 10,000 books, an exhibition gallery and free museums. The Academy has held monthly meets of poets in many languages since 1976 and SAARC writers conferences since 1987, and it runs free vocational training for girls from low income families.

Through FOSWAL, the Foundation of SAARC Writers and Literature, she pushed that work across borders. Her official site records that FOSWAL was launched in 1986 with a first conference of Indian and Pakistani writers in New Delhi, and that it later gained recognition as a SAARC body. In 2003 she was part of the first delegation of Indian writers to visit Pakistan. For Cour, literature was also a form of public diplomacy between neighbours who shared languages and histories.

Honours and later life

Her honours track a very long career. Reference works list her Sahitya Akademi Award under 1985, while her own official site lists it under 1986, for Khana Badosh. She received the Padma Shri, India's fourth highest civilian honour, in 2006, and the Kuvempu Rashtriya Puraskar in 2019. In 2024 she received the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship, the Akademi's highest honour. She was also among the 1000 PeaceWomen Across the Globe who were collectively nominated for the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize.

She has remained publicly active into her nineties. She turned 91 in 2025, the year The Blue Potter reached English readers. In October and November 2025 the India International Centre in Delhi hosted Weaving Water: Feminine Countercultures in Paint and Print, an exhibition in which 15 women artists responded to her writing. Cour herself helped inaugurate it. Her life's work now sits in two places at once: on the page, in Punjabi prose that refuses to look away from women's lives, and in the institutions she built so that other writers and artists would have a room of their own.