ਰਾਮ ਸਰੂਪ ਅਣਖੀਰਾਮ ਸਰੂਪ ਅਣਖੀ

Ram Sarup Ankhi (28 August 1932 to 14 February 2010) was a Punjabi novelist, poet and short-story writer from the Malwa region of Punjab. He is best known for Kothe Kharak Singh (1985), an epic novel of three generations in a Malwa village, which won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1987.

ਮੁੱਢਲਾ ਜੀਵਨ

Ram Sarup Ankhi was born on 28 August 1932 in Dhaula, then a village of Sangrur district in British Punjab (it lies in today's Barnala district). He studied at Government Mohindra College in Patiala. After his studies he worked his ancestral land as a farmer, and then joined a government school as an English teacher, retiring in 1990. He wrote only in Punjabi. He spent his life in his native village and its surroundings, later settling in the town of Barnala.

Literary career

Ankhi began as a poet and ended as a fiction writer. Fifteen novels, eight story collections and five poetry collections stand to his credit. From 1993 he edited the Punjabi short-fiction quarterly Kahani Punjab, assisted by his son Krantipal. His subject was the village Punjab of the Malwa belt: a cluster of some fifty villages across Mansa, Bathinda, Barnala and Sangrur, the landscape he knew from the inside. Farmer indebtedness and suicide, drug addiction, the crisis that followed the Green Revolution, the influx of migrant labour and the disintegration of village communities run through his work. Several of his works reached the screen: his novel Gelo became a Punjabi feature film in 2016, directed by Manbhawan Singh.

What is Kothe Kharak Singh about?

It is his magnum opus, an epic of three generations in a fictional but entirely typical Malwa village. The story begins in 1940 to 1942 and moves through the Emergency, the Janata Party's rule after it, and on to Indira Gandhi's return to power in the early 1980s. The novel is divided into four parts, and follows characters like Ginder, Harnami, Arjan, Nand Kaur, Pushpinder and Hardit Singh through love, debt, betrayal and politics. Its themes run through the whole book: the crippling debt cycle of farm families, corruption in public life, the erosion of human values, and the politicization of religion. By its close, Pushpinder's rise as a professor stands as a mark of resilience amid the tragedy around him. The novel won Ankhi the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1987, and it has been widely translated, reportedly into ten languages.

Other major works

His other novels include Partapi (1993), Dulle Di Dhab (2003), Salphas (2006), named for the pesticide that debt-ridden farmers swallowed to kill themselves, Jaminan Wale (The Landed Gentry, 2004), Kanak da Qatlam (Slaughter of the Wheat, 2007) and Bhima (2009), about a Purbia migrant farm labourer. His two-volume autobiography Malhe Jharhian (Thorny Bushes with Berries, 1988) and Apni Mitti De Rukh (2004) trace his own journey from village schoolboy to celebrated novelist. His story collections began with Sutta Naag (1966) and include Kachcha Dhaga (1967), Manukh Di Maut (1968) and Gelo. His novel Zakhmee Ateet (The Wounded Past, 1981) was published in the Persian script in Lahore by the Institute of Punjabi Language and Culture. Some of his books were also translated into Gujarati, Hindi and English.

Honours and later life

In 1987 the Sahitya Akademi, India's National Academy of Letters, gave him its award for Kothe Kharak Singh. He received the Kartar Singh Dhaliwal award of the Panjabi Sahit Akademi, Ludhiana, in 1992, and the Sarb Shresht Sahitkaar award in 2009. He died on 14 February 2010 at Barnala, aged 77. His passing came in a month that claimed five noted writers and scholars of Punjabi literature.

Legacy

Ankhi is remembered as a mesmerising storyteller and the chronicler of rural Malwa in the latter half of the twentieth century. In his writing the Malwa landscape comes alive. He drew his themes, locales and characters from the region he knew best, peopling his novels with characters from many economic, social and religious backgrounds. His late novels brought the agrarian crisis, debt, drugs and migration, into Punjabi literature with rare directness, and he kept publishing new books well into his seventies. His body of work gave the farmers of Malwa a literature of their own.