Ram Sarup Ankhi was born at Dhaula in Barnala district in 1932, taught in village schools, and wrote about the Malwa countryside he lived in.
Kothe Kharak Singh, published in 1985, won the Sahitya Akademi award in 1987 and is a novel about a Malwa village across three generations of change: land, caste, debt, migration and the arrival of the Green Revolution.
He wrote in Malwai Punjabi and did not soften it for readers from elsewhere.
He ran the literary magazine Kahani Punjab from his own house, publishing short fiction, with the same economics as every other Punjabi literary magazine, which is to say his own money.
He is the closest thing Punjabi has to a chronicler of what the Green Revolution did to a particular village over thirty years, written from inside it as it happened.
A kotha is a house built out on a family's own land, away from the abadi, and the move out to them changed how a Malwa village worked. A family on its own fields is out of the street and out of the daily traffic of the village and next to its own tubewell. The novel is about what that costs as much as what it gains.
He wrote about the class beneath the landowning Jat as much as about the Jat. The labourers, the artisan castes and the women in his novels are not background.
Kahani Punjab ran for years on subscriptions and on his own money and printed writers who had nowhere else to publish. It stopped when he died in 2010.