Hanere Vich Sulagdi Varanmalaਹਨੇਰੇ ਵਿਚ ਸੁਲਗਦੀ ਵਰਨਮਾਲਾ

About the book

Hanere Vich Sulagdi Varanmala is a 1992 Punjabi poetry collection by Surjit Patar, written while Punjab was living through the violence of the 1980s and early 1990s. Its poems take the Punjabi alphabet itself as a flame smouldering in the dark, and speak of language, memory, loss and survival. The book won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1993, the national academy's prize for the best book of the year in Punjabi.

It was Patar's third major collection. His debut, Hawa Vich Likhe Harf, had appeared in 1979, and the ghazal collection Birkh Arz Kare came out in the same year as this book, 1992. Shabadlok of Ludhiana published the first edition. Seven years later came Lafzaan Di Dargah (1999), and the three books together form a long meditation on the Punjabi language and what happens to a people when their words are under threat.

Patar writes no slogans and takes no side in the fighting. He writes about what the violence did to ordinary feeling: how sadness settles, how the past refuses to let go, and how people keep dreaming anyway.

What does the title mean?

Varanmala means an alphabet, literally a garland of letters. The title pictures the Punjabi alphabet smouldering in the dark, like embers that still hold heat. Language, the image says, is a small flame in a shadowed world: threatened, but not out.

The image runs through the whole book. Patar was one of the poets who kept returning to the mother tongue as a subject in itself, and this collection sits between two others that do the same work: Hawa Vich Likhe Harf, which came first, and Lafzaan Di Dargah, which followed. Together they ask what a language carries: memory, dignity, and a way of being Punjabi that no gun can settle.

English renderings of the title vary. The common one is Words Smouldering in the Dark, and the academic literature also gives Script Smoldering in the Dark. The title poem itself has been translated into English and can be read online.

The poems and their themes

The poems circle a few deep conflicts. One is between desire and convention: what people long for against what society allows. Another is between nature and civilisation, with nature shown as dealing more humanely with people than the world humans have built. The past appears again and again as a brutal presence that, once lived through, does not loosen its grip on the present.

Sadness runs through the book, and so does a seeming death wish, but the poems are not surrender. Writing in the Journal of Punjab Studies, Surjit Singh notes that the poems also bring into focus a way of living resilient enough to let human dreams survive, and that even while depicting the debacle of the times they draw attention to the dignified heritage of the Punjabi people.

The title poem makes the book's argument most plainly. It stands against the logic of armed struggle without giving up the cause of justice, and it names the real enemies as sorrow, poverty and those who exploit with the pretext of protection.

Another widely discussed poem is Dhukhda Jangal, the smoking forest, an extended metaphor for the crippling pain in the body and soul of present-day Punjab. Critics have called the poems in this collection classic commentary on the crisis of Punjab. Readers also return often to Kujh Keha Taan Hanera Jarega Kiven, one of Patar's best-known poems, which asks in its opening line what the darkness will say if the poet speaks, and what the lamp will say if he stays silent.

The author

Surjit Patar was born Surjit Hunjan on 14 January 1945 in Pattar Kalan village, Jalandhar district. The village gave him his pen name. He studied at Randhir College, Kapurthala, took an MA from Punjabi University, Patiala, and a PhD from Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, on folklore in Guru Nanak's bani. He taught Punjabi at Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana, and retired as a professor in 2004.

He began writing poetry in the mid-1960s, and his first poems appeared in the anthology Collage in 1973. Alongside his own collections he translated Lorca's tragedies, Girish Karnad's Nagmandala and poems by Brecht and Neruda into Punjabi, and wrote dialogue for Punjabi films. His honours included the Padma Shri in 2012 and the Saraswati Samman in 2009. He died in Ludhiana on 11 May 2024, aged 79.

Reception and legacy

The collection brought Patar the Sahitya Akademi Award for 1993, the national academy's prize for the best book of the year in Punjabi. It is the work that carried him from a much-loved Punjabi poet to a nationally recognised one.

Critics and readers agreed about it in a way that is rare. The Journal of Punjab Studies paper on his work notes that his poems enjoy immense popularity with the general public and have won high acclaim from critics, and that he created poetry with a unique place within Punjabi literary tradition. The best book-length study of the poet, Tejwant Singh Gill's Surjit Patar: Jivan te Rachna (1995), examines his poetry in the light of his life and times, and Sutinder Singh Noor's Kavita Di Bhumika (2002) spends ten pages on this collection alone, showing how a single image, the burning alphabet, can organise an entire poetic world.

More than thirty years after it appeared, the book is still read as the record of how one poet answered a dark decade: not with answers, but with poems that kept the language alight. Its title has become a shorthand for Patar's whole project, and the collection remains the one readers are most often pointed to first.