ਅਜਮੇਰ ਸਿੰਘ ਔਲਖਅਜਮੇਰ ਸਿੰਘ ਔਲਖ

ਮੁੱਢਲਾ ਜੀਵਨ

Ajmer Singh Aulakh was born on 19 August 1942 at Kumbharwal village in Sangrur district, into the poor farming household of Harnaam Kaur and Kaur Singh. (The Indian Cultural Forum's obituary gives his birth village as Kishangarh Farwahi, near Mansa.) He grew up in the Malwa countryside whose speech, customs and hardships would later fill his plays. As a student he befriended Hakam Singh Samaon, the Naxalite hero of Punjab, a friendship that pulled him toward the radical politics of his generation. He went on to earn a master's degree in Punjabi.

The teacher who built a people's theatre

In 1965, the year he finished his M.A., Nehru Memorial College opened at Mansa, and Aulakh joined it as a lecturer in Punjabi. He taught there for 35 years, retiring in 2000; the college, once private, was taken over by the Punjab government in 1994. His eldest daughter Supandeep Kaur later became its dean of cultural affairs.

The classroom was only half his life. Aulakh founded Lok Kala Manch, the People's Art Forum, a touring theatre troupe that carried his plays to villages, grain mandis and open grounds, performed in the colloquial speech of the Malwa countryside. His wife Manjit and their three daughters joined the troupe, and he directed many of the productions himself. The plays found a second stage in college competitions: at Punjabi University Patiala's annual drama festivals, teams performing Aulakh's plays won prizes year after year.

Major plays

His first collection of one-act plays, Arbad Narbad Dhundukar (Eons and Nebulae), appeared in 1978, followed by Begane Bohar di Chhan (Shade of the Alien Banyan), Anhe Nishanchi (Blind Shooters) and Gani. In all he wrote nearly 13 one-act plays and about 20 short plays, besides dramatising stories by other writers. His eight full-length plays include Satt Begane (Seven Aliens), Kehar Singh di Maut (Death of Kehar Singh), Salwan, Bhajjian Bahin (Broken Arms, built on a story by Waryam Sandhu), Ik Ramayan Hor, Ikka si Darya, Jhanan de Paani (translated into English as Waters of Chenab), Aise Jan Virle Sansare and Chanan de Vanjare. Early one-act hits like Aabra Cadabra and Arbad Narbad Dhundukara packed festival halls.

What did his plays stand for?

His drama belonged to the people he wrote about: field labourers, bonded labourers, small farmers and the rural poor. His characters fight landlords, resist anti-farmer government policies and expose the state's oppression of struggling people, while his women characters take on landlords and custom with unusual directness. The 1967 Naxalite upsurge shaped his politics: in October 1973 he joined the Panjabi Sahit-Sabhiachar Manch, a forum of writers crafting literature from a Marxist perspective, and he was jailed in Bathinda for months during the Emergency. One of his early short stories, 'Behkada Roh', appeared in the radical journal Hem Jyoti in March 1975.

When Punjab was torn between state repression and Khalistani terror in the 1980s, Aulakh wrote against both. After the poet Pash was assassinated on 23 March 1988, Aulakh argued at the Progressive Writers' Association's Barnala meeting that the artist should not speak too directly, yet his plays kept attacking oppressors of every kind. He stayed active in the democratic movement as a patron of the Kendri Punjabi Lekhak Sabha and president of the Association for Democratic Rights, Punjab.

Honours, and the award he returned

The Sahitya Akademi gave him its 2006 award for the play collection Ishq Bajh Namaaz da Hajj Naahi. His other honours included the Sangeet Natak Akademi award, the Punjab government's Shiromani Natakakar award, the Punjabi Sahit Akademi award and the Pash memorial award; the IAPA in Canada named him Shiromani Sahitkar in 1991, the Punjabi Sahit Akademi gave him its Kartar Singh Dhaliwal Award in 1996, and Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, conferred an honorary Doctor of Letters. Then in October 2015, after the assassinations of Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare and M. M. Kalburgi, Aulakh joined the writers returning their Sahitya Akademi awards in protest, alongside Gurbachan Singh Bhullar, Surjit Patar and Atamjit.

Death and legacy

Doctors found incurable cancer in 2008 and gave him two or three years; he fought it for nine. On the night of 14 June 2017 he chatted with his family until 10 pm, cheerful as ever; in the early hours of 15 June he died quietly at his home in Mansa, aged 74, five days after being discharged from Fortis Hospital, Mohali, where he had been receiving palliative care. His will, written in Punjabi on 29 November 2013, asked that his daughters light his pyre, that no bhog or religious rite be held, that only a short memorial meeting take place, and that no political speaker address it.

His daughters, Supandeep, Sohajdeep and Ajdeep, lit the pyre on 16 June before thousands of farmers, farm labourers and writers raising slogans of 'inquilab zindabad'; his ashes were consigned to the canal flowing through Farwahi. The memorial meeting at Mansa on 25 June drew a few thousand people and was addressed by his fellow writers Gurbachan Singh Bhullar, Surjit Patar and Atamjit; the Punjab Assembly paid him tribute. He is survived by his wife Manjit Aulakh. His plays are still staged across rural Punjab, and Lok Kala Manch's travelling-theatre model remains his lasting gift to Punjabi culture.