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Journalism of Courage
There are books that teach you how to live. There are books that tell you how others lived.
And then, once in a long while, comes a book that reminds you that living itself is an art — shaped by heat, glazed by grief, cooled by grace. Ajeet Cour’s The Blue Potter is that book.
Written by a 94-year-old chronicler of Punjab’s creative conscience, it is not a conventional memoir, nor a neat catalogue of artistic achievement. It is, instead, a kiln of memory — each story a shard of clay, each life fired in its own furnace of faith, beauty, and bewilderment. Cour does not so much write about artists as she communes with them. Painters, poets, potters, lovers, mystics — they walk through her pages not as profiles but as presences.
At the centre of this luminous collection stands Bhapa Gurcharan Singh, the legendary ceramist whose hands turned earth into eternity. He is the “blue potter” of the title — blue not as colour alone, but as mood, as music, as metaphysical hue.
Around him swirl others: the innocent king Khushwant Singh, the rebel prime minister V. P. Singh with a painter’s eye, the nightingale Amrita Pritam, the emperor of short stories Balwant Gargi, the velvet-voiced Jagjit Singh — and two remarkable figures who remind us how politics and poetry can share the same pulse: Krishna Sobti and Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Cour, herself an artist of language and survivor of exile, renders their lives with a gaze at once maternal and merciless.
The book opens with the faint roar of a storm. A child — Gurcharan — is wrapped in a sheet and carried through the night by a servant as rain, thunder, and flowing water surround them. It is his first memory, half dream, half baptism. Cour tells us that the image never left him; it soaked into his consciousness like wet clay taking form. From that deluge grew his lifelong devotion to soil — the element that grounds, yields, and outlives.
Through Cour’s narration, Gurcharan Singh’s life becomes a parable of creation itself. In his hands, broken pots continue to breathe — their fragrance lingering decades after they’ve cracked.
What makes these chapters shimmer is not the accuracy of biography but the alchemy of empathy. Cour listens more than she records. She allows pauses, sighs, silences. When Bhapaji speaks of beauty — “that which when seen evokes awe and tears” — she lets the sentence settle like glaze over terracotta. Her prose, translated with devotion by Sushmindar Jeet Kaur, carries the patina of spoken Punjabi: tender, teasing, irreverent, unhurried.
Cour’s genius lies in her refusal to separate the personal from the political, or the artist from the soil that raised him. Each portrait is at once intimate and ideological. Khushwant Singh, “the innocent king,” lies dead, his eyes donated to another, his head wrapped in saffron by Cour’s daughter Arpana Caur. Even death here is staged like ritual theatre — irreverent, ironic, loving.
Cour quotes Khushwant’s self-written epitaph — “Here lies the man who neither cared for any man nor for any God… Thank God that he is dead now”. She reveres her subjects by refusing to deify them.
Into this circle of remembrance steps Vishwanath Pratap Singh, India’s reluctant prime minister — and perhaps its most poetic. Cour writes of him not as a politician but as a painter who never stopped seeing the world as colour before ideology. She recalls the brush in his hand, the silence between his words, the humility that survived power.
In her eyes, he is the rare statesman who saw aesthetics and ethics as the same act — “a stroke of truth across the canvas of compromise.” Through him, Cour restores to Indian politics a forgotten tenderness — the idea that governance, too, can be a form of art.
And then there is Jagjit Singh — the ghazal singer whose voice made melancholy fashionable again. Cour paints him in the half-light between performance and prayer. His baritone, she writes, “was not sound but surrender — a man pouring wine for wounds the world would not name.”
She recalls evenings when his singing turned rooms into sanctuaries, where grief acquired rhythm and loss, luminosity. His friendship with the poets of Punjab, his duet with Chitra that became a dialogue with eternity, his refusal to trivialise pain — all find delicate echo in Cour’s prose. “He sang,” she writes, “so that silence might not die.”
And there, like a sudden brush of wind through the corridors of Delhi’s literary circles, arrives Krishna Sobti — formidable, fearless, and forever on fire. Cour writes of her not as rival but as reflection: two women who turned rebellion into routine.
Sobti’s voice, sharp as kohl and slow as whisky, becomes the conscience of a generation that refused to write meekly or live mildly. “She walked into a room,” Cour recalls, “and even silence straightened its spine.” Through Sobti, The Blue Potter gains its feminist ferocity — the reminder that courage, too, can be a craft.
Atal Bihari Vajpayee, meanwhile, glows at the book’s edge — not as prime minister but as poet. Cour’s recollection of his companionship with Rajkumari Kaul and the Delhi intelligentsia unveils a man who spoke politics but dreamt in verse.
She describes an evening when Vajpayee, reading his own poetry aloud, stopped midway and whispered, “The hardest words are the ones that never make it to paper.” That one sentence reveals what Cour cherishes most: sincerity over spectacle, solitude over slogan.
To speak of Punjab’s art without Amrita Pritam would be to drain it of its pulse. Cour writes of Amrita not as icon but as intimacy — the woman who wrote her own commandments, who lived through Partition and passion with equal abandon. “Amrita never edited her heart,” Cour observes, “and that was her punishment and her poetry.”
Their friendship — sometimes fraught, always fierce — anchors the emotional centre of The Blue Potter. Cour recalls visiting her in later years, frail but fiery, her room smelling of ink and rosewater. They speak of Sahir, of loss, of how a writer’s loneliness is never cured, only cultured.
If there is one idea that threads through The Blue Potter, it is restraint — that rare discipline of saying only what must be said. Cour praises writer Virk for this very quality: his refusal of sentimentality, his quiet precision. Yet the irony is delicious — Cour herself is incapable of such restraint. Her language overflows with warmth, wit, and wonder.
Cour’s Punjab is not the postcard of mustard fields and bhangra beats; it is a bruised civilisation where art keeps rescuing dignity from despair. Her vision of beauty is inseparable from ethics. Cour extends that to her readers. This mixture of moral gravity and maternal gentleness defines her voice.
Much credit belongs to translator Sushmindar Jeet Kaur, who manages to retain the cadence of Cour’s oral storytelling — that Punjabi habit of circling a memory until it sings. The translation neither flattens nor embellishes; it breathes. It takes courage to translate a writer who has herself spent a lifetime translating suffering into beauty. Kaur does it with invisible grace. The result is a book that feels handmade — like pottery glazed by two steady hands, one of experience, one of faith.
Because remembrance matters. Because art matters. Because in an age of algorithmic amnesia, an old woman sitting at her desk in Delhi and writing about the colour of clay is performing the highest form of resistance — attention.
In the end, The Blue Potter is not about pottery at all. It is about the hands that hold when everything else breaks. When I closed its soft-bound cover, I felt the same quiet ache I felt after reading Shahid Siddiqui’s I, Witness and Swami Mukundananda’s Bhagavad Gita for Everyday Living. All three books — political, spiritual, artistic — speak of one truth: that to remember is to serve. Siddiqui remembers a nation; Mukundananda remembers the soul; Ajeet Cour remembers beauty.
