Birkh Arz Kareਬਿਰਖ਼ ਅਰਜ਼ ਕਰੇ

About the book

Birkh Arz Kare — 'Thus Spake the Tree' — is one of the signature collections of Surjit Patar (1945–2024), the Punjabi poet whose work enjoys an immense popularity with the general public that few modern poets anywhere can match. It stands among his classic books — Hawa Vich Likhe Harf (Words Written in the Air), Hanere Vich Sulagdi Varnmala (Words Smouldering in the Dark, which won him the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1993), Lafzaan Di Dargah, Patjhar Di Pazeb and Surzameen.

The title gives the book's governing image: the tree, rooted and patient, as the speaker of the poems — or as the one to whom the poet makes his arz, his petition. In Patar's hands the tree becomes the great witness of Punjabi life: it has seen the village change, the seasons turn, the children grow and leave.

Plot & themes

Patar's great subjects are all here: the Punjab countryside as a moral and emotional landscape; time passing — leaves falling, children leaving, the poet ageing; language itself, which Patar treats as a living thing that can smoulder, bloom and wound. His diction is famously musical — he is the most singable of modern Punjabi poets, and many of his poems have been set to music — yet it never sacrifices precision for melody.

What distinguishes Birkh Arz Kare within his oeuvre is its sustained use of nature as interlocutor. The tree is not decoration; it is the other party in a conversation about rootedness in a time of uprooting. Written across the decades when Punjab was changing fastest — the Green Revolution's aftermath, migration, the dark years of militancy — the poems offer the tree's answer to human hurry: stay, witness, endure.

Patar began writing poetry in the mid-1960s and debuted as a voice distinct from both the progressives and the experimentalists: neither slogans nor obscurity, but a lyricism rooted in the folk song and the classical Punjabi kavi tradition, sharpened by his scholarly training — his PhD was on the transformation of folklore in Guru Nanak's bani.

The author

Surjit Patar (1945–2024) was born Surjit Hunjan in Patar Kalan, Jalandhar. He took a master's from Punjabi University, Patiala, and a PhD from Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, then taught Punjabi at Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana, retiring as professor. He translated Lorca's tragedies, Girish Karnad's Nag-Mandala, and poems of Brecht and Neruda into Punjabi; wrote dialogues for the Punjabi film on Shaheed Udham Singh and for Deepa Mehta's Heaven on Earth; and served as president of the Punjabi Sahit Akademi, Ludhiana. He won the Sahitya Akademi Award (1993), the Padma Shri (2012) and the Saraswati Samman (2012).

Reception & legacy

Patar is that rare thing: a poet acclaimed by critics and memorised by the public. His mushaira and kavi-darbar performances drew crowds in the thousands, and his lines circulate on social media, in wedding speeches and in protest gatherings alike. Birkh Arz Kare remains one of the first books readers reach for when they want Patar at his most characteristic — the poet as the tree's petitioner, asking rootedness for its secret.

Read it if...

you want to know why Punjabis call Patar their own Keats; you love nature poetry that is never merely decorative; or you want the gentlest possible introduction to modern Punjabi verse — the book that has converted thousands of non-readers into poetry readers.