The Cultural Landscape of Punjab

The Blue Potter: The Creative Genius of Punjab

Ajeet Cour

Translated from the Punjabi by Sushminderjeet Kaur

Aleph Book Company

424 pages · Rs 999

Shortlisted for the 2026 VoW Book Award for translation from Punjabi to English,  this fascinating book , first published as  ‘Neela Ghumiar’  in  2013 captures  the pen portraits of seventeen iconic poets, potters, politicians, publishers,  thespians  and conmen who formed the centre of  Delhi’s  Punjabi cultural life ,without necessarily being Punjabis by birth . 

Ajeet Cour who won the Sahitya Akademi award for her two part autobiographical works – Khanabadosh (The Vagabond ) and  Koora Kabara (Garbage )witnessed the trauma of Partition .   She cannot ,and does not extricate herself from the pain and anguish which is captured in the iconic verse of lament  in which Amrita Pritam involves Waris Shah to look at the blood soaked  Chenab  which witnessed the mayhem and bloodshed in the city of Lahore . 

The first entry in this selection is on  the versatile genius of Khushwant Singh- whose oeuvre includes  the academic treatise ‘The Sikhs ‘ as well as the award winning ‘Train to Pakistan’   and the compilation of  his irreverent column  ‘With Malice towards one and All’. His unwavering faith and support for Indira Gandhi and her son , Sanjay is rudely shaken at the time of Operation Blue Star, and he returned  his  Padma Bhushan in protest.  However , he always remained  a very strong critic of Bhindranwale and the Khalistan movement .

Next is the biographic sketch of  Gurcharan Singh, ‘ The Blue Potter’  :the father of modern Indian studio pottery    on whom this book  is named .   His  life and work has been captured so beautifully in the short documentary ‘The Swan and the Lotus’, which I  had the pleasure of viewing at the IIC.

Amrita Pritam was The Exalted Empress ( of words). Her father had been Ajeet’s  Gurumukhi tutor, and our author holds her in the highest esteem. Even as she  gives her abundant credit for her voice, her wit, her poetry and for breaking the set norms of patriarchy , not she  does  agree with her fawning admiration for  everything that Mrs Gandhi did, including the Emergency. This, as well as her running feud with Krishna Sobti, over the  Zindaginama  - as a proprietary title – do cast a shadow over her ‘ethical integrity’, but when it comes to her writing and her ability to captivate  the audience with her voice , she was indeed the Empress . I was privileged to hear her acceptance speech for the Gyanpith Award in the year  1982 , when I was then a rookie trainee journalist with the Economic Times .   She and the Empress of Chenab – Krishna Sobti –were bitter enemies :  they both won the Sahitya Akademi and the Gyanpith  awards . Both were great friends of Ajeet, who often  had  a tough time in maintaining this balance  – for this was a small charmed circle where everyone knew everyone else , and were quick to take offence !

Balwant Gargi has been called  The Magician of Words – and yes, there were few like him who had such a command over the language .I had the occasion of meeting him with another thespian Mohan Maharishi – who produced Einstein , and I have a copy of his book The Naked Triangle. His bohemian lifestyle was entirely at odds with what a conventional Punjabi Bania was like .

Then we have the publishing doyen of Punjabi  Bhapa Pritam Singh, who started his career as a  Granthi at a  Gurudwara  of the Namdhari sect. After learning typesetting at the  Guru  Khalsa press in Amritsar, he shifted to Delhi, and established the most succesful publishing enterprise , and published all the top names of Punjabi literature. However , the commercial success of his printing press came from printing platform tickets for the railways  for the first few years after Independence ; and then there was no looking back.

The first six entries  are comparatively longer –   the next eleven are shorter . She talks  of  Prime Minister VP Singh as ‘Raja or Faquir’.  But her association with him started only after he had demitted office after implementing the Mandal Commission recommendations , and changing Indian polity forever .Jagjit Singh  was great at singing ghazals,  and  like Ajeet ,  was   fond of Shiv Batalvi ,but  Cour bore a  personal grudge against him for his deeds did not match his words. Shiv Batalvi,  the King of Anguish   gave Punjabi poetry  and writing an entirely new vocabulary and idiom. Batalvi   won the Sahitya Akademi award  at 31 ,for his ‘Loona’- the radical reinterpretation of a young woman trapped in the intersection of caste and patriarchy. But he died young due to excessive drinking , and (perhaps) unrequited , one sided love .

An exceptional bureaucrat  MS Randhawa , whose imprint can be seen in the City Beautiful also   features in her list of prominent Punjabis  who shaped Delhi  and Punjab in the first two decades of Independence . Not only did he encourage theatre and arts, he supported innovative publishing ventures like an outreach for farmers   ‘Nawan Pind’ (  New Village ), a museum devoted to Sikh history as well as the iconic Rose Garden of Chandigarh

KS Duggal was the legendary broadcaster and founder station Director of AIR Jalandhar. Budding authors can take a cue from his writing regime – work in the study from 4 am to 12 noon , with tea and breakfast served there itself , and away from newspapers and  the phone !He too was distressed by Operation Blue Star, and complained to the AIR that the news of tanks  breaching the sanctity  of Golden temple was being announced as an army victory over enemy territory. This is one permanent scar that will indeed take  a long , long time to heal.

Kulwant Singh Virk, whom she calls the Waris Shah of short stories  had a writing style which she calls Virkai . He too writes about partition , but in his narrative,  ‘Khabbal’, he includes , not  just the human beings ,  but even their cattle . ‘ Everything in Pakistan seems displaced, even the animals that have been left behind in abandoned homes , looking around with their forlorn eyes , and stepping cautiously in unfamiliar places ‘

Then we have the  story of Devendra Satyarthi who is fascinated  with  Ram Kinkar, the Shanti Niketan sculptor who designed the Yakhsha and Yakshini statues that  guard the New Delhi office of the RBI. His famous travelogue to Sri Lanka ‘ Lanka Desh Hai Colombo’  shows how the past and present can be woven in  the tapestry of the contemporary.  Rajendra Singh Bedi was considered  both a Punjabi and Urdu writer , and his classic Ek Chadar Maili Si, was one of the first books I read  just when I entered college . It still leaves a lasting impression  on me .

The one person I was not aware of before I read this  book was the ‘artist-yogi-poet’ Sohan Qadri .Born Sohan Singh, he adopted the Qadri title on account of the shrine in his village  , he had settled in Copenhagen where he devoted his life to art and Yoga . He delved into Haiku, and published poems Antar Jyoti ( inner light) and Antat Jhati ( introspection ).But while    Qadri was a dervish in the real sense ,  the penultimate  entry in the book is about  the conman ,Yogi Bhajan – who picked up Yogic postures from the equally controversial Dhirendra Brahamachari, moved to  Canada, and set up a cult following . Yes, he  had perfected the physical postures, and leveraged them to claim a  metaphysical aura . ‘

The last  tribute is  to the nightingale of Jammu-Padma Sachdev, who was called   the Dogri ‘Habba Khatoon’   by the then CM  Bakshi Ghulam Mohammed . She too received the Sahitya Akademi award in 1971 for her collection of poems ‘Meri Kavita, Mere Geet’.  . Although fluent  in Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu, she chose to write in her mother tongue Dogri, and revive interest in  the language which even the Dogra kings  had ignored during their ten decade rule from 1846 to 1947.

In fine , the Blue Potter is  a kaleidoscope of  the world of Ajeet Cour . Punjab here is less a territory than a cultural orbit, centred on the drawing rooms and auditoriums of Delhi. This  is the  best of Punjabiyat  that  needs to be resurrected  - it has received several knocks – 1947, 1984 , the outmigration to Canada and now the menace of drugs – but after reading the Blue Potter , one is convinced that all is not lost . The  geography of Punjab may have shrunk, but the cultural  sphere transcends  her borders.