Kahani Punjab
Kahani Punjab is a Punjabi-language quarterly literary magazine published from Barnala, in the Malwa region of Punjab, India, and dedicated solely to the Punjabi short story. It was started in 1993 by Ram Sarup Ankhi, the Sahitya Akademi Award-winning Punjabi novelist and story writer, who edited its first 67 issues. After him, his son Kranti Pal — a professor of Punjabi at Aligarh Muslim University — took over the editorship from the 68th issue. The magazine passed its hundredth issue, an exceptional record for a small Punjabi literary quarterly, and its releases have been marked by literary functions at Aligarh Muslim University attended by writers and scholars from several languages.
A magazine devoted to a single form, in a single language, published from a small Malwa town rather than a metropolitan centre, might look like a marginal enterprise. Kahani Punjab's record suggests the opposite. For more than three decades it has appeared on time, quarter after quarter, encouraged budding story writers, carried Punjabi translations of fiction and criticism from other Indian languages and from world literature, and organised the Kahani Goshthi, a story-reading gathering that brings writers and critics of different languages together. It is one of the clearest examples of the Punjabi "little magazine" tradition at its most durable.
Founding in Barnala in 1993
The editing and publication of Kahani Punjab was started by Ram Sarup Ankhi in 1993. Barnala, the magazine's home, is a town in Punjab's Malwa region, the southern part of the state whose rural life Ankhi chronicled throughout his fiction. The choice of base was characteristic: Ankhi was born in the village of Dhaula in Barnala district, spent his working life in the region as a farmer and then as an English teacher in a government school, and set the bulk of his writing in a cluster of villages across the Mansa, Bathinda, Barnala and Sangrur districts of Malwa.
An account of Punjab's little magazines describes the founding plainly: in Barnala, fiction writer Ram Swarup Anakhi — the name is transliterated in several ways — had been bringing out a quarterly magazine, Kahani Punjab, dedicated solely to the Punjabi short story. The same account sets the magazine in its proper context, a tradition of small Punjabi magazines so dynamic that editors and publishers continue to bring them out despite financial losses. Kahani Punjab was not a commercial launch; it was a writer's act of service to his form.
Ram Sarup Ankhi, Founding Editor
Ankhi (1932–2010) began his career as a poet and ended as a fiction writer, with fifteen novels, eight books of stories and five collections of poems to his credit. He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1987 for his novel Kothe Kharak Singh, named after a fictitious but typical Malwa village, a novel of epic dimensions spanning three generations from the years after 1940–42 through the Emergency and into the early 1980s. His later novels took up the post-Green Revolution troubles of Malwa directly: indebtedness and farmer suicide, the pauperisation of the small peasantry, drug addiction, the influx of migrant labour and the disintegration of village communities.
An obituary notice summarised his standing as a mesmerising storyteller who chronicled rural life in Malwa in the latter half of the twentieth century, and noted that he also edited the Punjabi short fiction quarterly Kahani Punjab from 1993, assisted by his son Krantipal. Ankhi edited the magazine's first 67 issues — at four issues a year, a span of well over a decade and a half of continuous quarterly editing, carried on alongside his own novels, stories and two volumes of autobiography, Malhe Jharhian and Apni Mitti De Rukh. He died at Barnala in February 2010.
Dedicated to the Short Story
The magazine's defining feature is in its title and its remit: kahani means story, and Kahani Punjab exists for the story alone. Where most literary magazines divide their pages among poetry, fiction, essays and reviews, this quarterly committed itself to one genre. Assessments of the magazine have repeatedly returned to that commitment. It has, in the words used at the release of its 103rd issue, carved a niche in literary genres, particularly the short story and fiction, encouraged budding story writers, and introduced its readers to stories from various Indian and other languages of the world.
That double function — publishing Punjabi stories, and translating stories into Punjabi — made the magazine both a workshop and a window. For a new Punjabi writer, it offered a rare periodical that would judge a submission purely as a story. For a Punjabi reader, it offered access, in his or her own language, to fiction written elsewhere. Later issues broadened the mixture within the story-centred frame to include well-crafted prose, essays, articles, interviews and dialogues, but the short story remained the reason for the magazine's existence.
Kranti Pal and the Second Editorship
After Ankhi's 67 issues, the responsibility passed to his son, Professor Kranti Pal, a faculty member in Punjabi who became Chairman of the Department of Modern Indian Languages at Aligarh Muslim University. The succession is one of the magazine's unusual strengths. Little magazines commonly die with their founding editor's energy; Kahani Punjab was designed, in effect, as a family trust for a literary form, and the handover from the 68th issue kept it alive into a second generation.
Under Kranti Pal the magazine's public life has centred partly on Aligarh, where new issues have been formally released at university functions. The 103rd issue was released by Professor Mohammad Asim Siddiqui, Chairman of the Department of English at AMU, who observed that Kahani Punjab is an important journal contributing not only to Punjabi literature but to the literature of other languages, and praised the regularity with which every issue is brought out on time — a discipline he compared to Sir Syed Ahmad Khan's punctual publication of the Aligarh Institute Gazette and Tahzeeb-ul-Akhlaq. Regularity is an unglamorous virtue, but for a quarterly dependent on contributors and readers across two states, it is the virtue on which all the others rest.
The Hundredth Issue and After
The magazine's hundredth edition was treated as a milestone worth marking at length: the third volume of the 100th edition was released at Aligarh by Professor Shafey Kidwai, a Sahitya Akademi awardee of 2019 and Chairman of the Department of Mass Communication, in the presence of scholars from across the university. The 101st edition followed, released at a ceremony at the university's Public Relations Office, and the 103rd issue continued the sequence.
These numbers matter because of the arithmetic of little magazines. A quarterly that reaches a hundred issues has sustained itself for twenty-five years of deadlines, printing bills and contributor relations, without the advertising base of a commercial magazine. Each release function at Aligarh — attended by professors of English, mass communication and history alongside Punjabi scholars — also demonstrated the magazine's reach beyond its own language community: a Barnala quarterly being launched, issue after issue, at a central university in Uttar Pradesh, by academics of several disciplines.
Translations, Interviews and Dialogues
The contents of the landmark issues show how Kahani Punjab understands its mission. The hundredth edition was described as an assemblage of well-crafted prose, interviews and dialogues of leading figures of Hindi, Urdu and European literature translated into Punjabi. Among its most absorbing segments was the Punjabi translation of a novel by the Hungarian author and Nobel laureate Imre Kertész, whose work upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history, alongside the Punjabi translation of Syed Asghar Wajahat's Pakistani Safar Nama, introducing Punjabi readers to the work of the eminent Hindi scholar, fiction writer and playwright.
The same edition comprised rare interviews with poets and writers such as Qurratulain Hyder, Moin Ehsan Jazbi, Aal-e-Ahmad Suroor and Shahryar, and chapters on dialogues involving Fyodor Dostoevsky, Balraj Sahni, Intezar Husain, Gagan Gill, Maitreyi Pushpa, Joginder Paul and Bipan Chandra. The 101st edition added multigenerational short stories, essays and dialogues ranging from the past to the present, including stories and articles by contemporary writers chronicling the Covid pandemic — its tragedies, cynicism and despair, and the resilience of the human spirit — as well as biographical sketches including one of Ganda Singh, Punjab's first historian and a Padma Bhushan awardee. A magazine nominally about one form had become a channel through which the wider republic of Indian and world letters spoke to Punjabi readers in Punjabi.
Kahani Goshthi
Kahani Punjab's activity has not been confined to print. For many years the magazine has organised the Kahani Goshthi, a story-reading session held at Dalhousie in Himachal Pradesh, where story writers and critics of different languages assemble to brainstorm on literature. Scholars from Aligarh have participated in the event alongside writers from elsewhere.
The Goshthi extends the magazine's founding logic into a physical gathering. A quarterly journal creates a community on paper, issue by issue; a regular reading session gives that community faces, voices and arguments. That the gathering is multilingual — writers and critics of different languages, not Punjabi alone — matches the magazine's own translation practice, and helps explain why its releases draw scholars from departments of English, history and mass communication as well as of Punjabi.
The Punjabi Little-Magazine Tradition
Kahani Punjab belongs to a tradition that an account of Punjab's small magazines traces through titles such as Preetlari, which inspired several writers to start little magazines in Punjabi, including Anu, a hand-sized monthly from Ludhiana publishing only poems and short stories, and Akhar, a popular bi-monthly of poetry from Amritsar, alongside Lakeer, a quarterly literary journal from Jalandhar edited by the Sahitya Akademi Award-winning fiction writer Prem Prakash, whose own first short story had appeared in Preetlari.
The tradition's economics are forbidding and its motives are not. Editors continue despite financial losses because the magazines carry values their founders believed in — Preetlari's circle, in the account quoted here, spoke of upholding secularism and refusing another partition, and raised a public fund to keep the magazine alive. Kahani Punjab's version of that commitment is generic rather than political: the belief that the Punjabi short story deserves a periodical of its own, maintained on time, for as long as its editors can sustain it. Three decades, two editors and more than a hundred issues later, that belief has been vindicated in the only currency little magazines recognise — continued publication.
Assessment
Kahani Punjab is a quarterly literary magazine from Barnala, Punjab, founded in 1993 by Ram Sarup Ankhi and edited since its 68th issue by his son Kranti Pal of Aligarh Muslim University. Dedicated solely to the Punjabi short story, it has published new Punjabi fiction, introduced stories from other Indian and world languages in translation, carried interviews and dialogues with major literary figures, marked its hundredth issue with a multi-volume edition, and sustained the Kahani Goshthi gathering at Dalhousie. In a literary culture whose small magazines are famous for burning brightly and briefly, Kahani Punjab's distinction is duration: a single-form, single-language quarterly, edited by a father and then his son, that simply kept appearing.
