Amarjit Chandan

Amarjit Chandan is a Punjabi poet, essayist, editor and translator who lives in London. He was born in 1946 in Nairobi, Kenya, where his father Gopal Singh Chandan worked as a railway carpenter before becoming a full-time photographer. The family moved to Nakodar in Punjab in 1957, and he studied at Panjab University, Chandigarh. He is a living public figure, and this profile rests on published biographies of him.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s he was part of the Maoist or Naxalite movement in Punjab. He founded Dastavez ("The Document"), described as the first revolutionary underground literary magazine in Punjabi, which brought into print poets including Lal Singh Dil, Pash, Sant Ram Udasi, Darshan Khatkar and Harbhajan Halwarvi. The authorities declared him an offender and put a reward on his head.

Key moments

• August 1971: arrested in Amritsar on charges of carrying bombs and bank robbery, which Wikipedia describes as false. He was held in solitary confinement in the Jalandhar and Amritsar jails.
• August 1973: released after two years. He then collected and published Bhagat Singh's letters and translated Bhagat Singh's essay "Why I Am an Atheist" into Punjabi.
• 1975: first collection of Punjabi poems, Kaun Nahin Chahega. Later Punjabi collections include Jarhan (1995), Sachi Taksaal (2016) and Rizq (2021).
• 1980: moved to Britain. He worked as a journalist for literary and political magazines before leaving India, and in London has published in Gurmukhi and in English, including Sonata for Four Hands (2010) and The Parrot, the Horse and the Man (2017). He has translated Brecht, Neruda, Ritsos, Nazim Hikmet and John Berger into Punjabi.
• 2019 onward: co-editor of Baramah, an annual Punjabi magazine in Persian script published in Lahore, a link between the two Punjabs.

He received a lifetime achievement award from the All-Party Parliamentary Group of Punjabis in Britain in 2006, the Anad Kav Sanman in 2009 and a lifetime achievement award from the Punjab Languages Department.

He is remembered in this record as a participant in, and a literary witness of, the Naxalite decade in Punjab, and as a Punjabi writer working across the border and the scripts.