Sahitya Akademi honour for Kazak, Punjab’s Verrier Elwin

Vishav Bharti

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, December 18

“It is an outcome of hard work of half a century,” was Kirpal Kazak’s first reaction when news of the Sahitya Akademi Award broke this afternoon. Kazak, who started life as a mason, spent years with nomadic tribes for conducting research on various aspects of their life. He has been conferred the award for “Antheen” (endless), a collection of short stories.

Kazak’s life is worth a classic in itself. Around a decade and a half back, talking to a journalist about his poverty-ridden childhood, he spoke how he was raised over leftover food which his mother would beg from the village. He was just four when the family had to migrate from Sheikhpura in Pakistan to Patiala. Soon, masonry, the family profession, was an obvious choice. But Kazak’s heart lay somewhere else. He wrote his first short story in the early 1970s, when he was just 19. He would send dispatches for Amrita Pritam’s magazine “Nagmani”. She would ask for more. Soon eminent Punjabi scholars, Bhai Jodh Singh and Dr Harbans Singh, spotted the mason with a ‘unique talent’. “I was asked to join the engineering wing of Punjabi University, Patiala, as a ‘mortar mate’ (in charge of labourers) in 1986,” says Kazak. Just read and write, was his brief.

Soon, he was brought to the department of literary studies of the university as a technical assistant. Under a project from the university, he started a study on the culture of Sikligars and Gadi Lohars, the nomadic tribes of Punjab. “Wherever they would go, I would travel with them on their carts. I would eat whatever they would offer and sleep under the open sky,” Kazak says, adding that he became one among them. Later, he chased the Santhals in Jharkhand and Gujjars in Jammu and Kashmir. His work was often compared with the British-born anthropologist Verrier Elwin’s work on tribes in Central India.

But Kazak kept on working as a technical assistant with the literary studies department until former bureaucrat Swaran Singh Boparai joined as vice-chancellor of the university. Just 45 days before his retirement in 2002, in a rare honour, the university appointed him as a professor in the same department despite his not being even a matriculate.

Besides research on Punjab’s culture and nomads, Kazak is known for his short stories. Now, his works have been prescribed in the syllabus of almost all the universities of Punjab as well as Delhi University. “People like me come from the grassroots. So, it is an honour for the hard work that I have done,” he says.