Hanere Vich Sulagdi Varnmalaਹਨੇਰੇ ਵਿਚ ਸੁਲਗਦੀ ਵਰਨਮਾਲਾ

About the collection

Hanere Vich Sulagdi Varnmala — "Words Smouldering in the Dark," or "Script Smouldering in the Dark" — is the collection for which Surjit Patar won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1993. Published in 1992, it belongs to the darkest decade of modern Punjab, the years of militancy, and it is Patar's answer to that darkness: not slogans, but smouldering words — language kept alive like embers, refusing to go out.

Patar was already, by the early 1990s, the most beloved living Punjabi poet — the author of Hawa Vich Likhe Harf (Words Written in the Air) and Birkh Arz Kare (Thus Spake the Tree), the translator of Lorca, Brecht, and Neruda, the professor at Punjab Agricultural University whose mushaira performances filled halls. This collection deepened that love into something graver: the recognition that the gentle poet of trees and air was also the conscience of his time.

The 1992 publication placed the book in the final, worst years of the militancy — the period Punjabis remember as the time of unmarked cremations and disappeared sons. Patar, who had built his reputation on poems of air and trees, chose this moment to publish his darkest and most direct book. The decision was itself a statement: the poet of gentle images would not look away. The "smouldering" of the title is also a description of the poet's method under censorship and fear — saying what could be said, and letting the heat do the rest.

It is worth remembering what the Punjabi poetry world looked like in 1992 to grasp this book's courage. The progressive poets had their certainties, the romantics their gardens, and the militant years had made public speech dangerous — poets were being watched, some threatened. Into this climate Patar brought a book whose title promised neither escape nor propaganda but smoulder: the slow, stubborn persistence of the word under pressure. That the Sahitya Akademi honoured it the very next year suggests the judges recognized what was at stake.
## Themes & style

The poems circle a set of conflicts that critics have mapped carefully: desire against convention, nature against civilization, the personal against the political. Patar's great subject is the sensitive self trying to stay human inside systems — of violence, of power, of custom — designed to dehumanize. The collection's most famous poem gives the book its ethic: do not ask the poet to bless injustice; recognize the enemy, and do not sever your own limbs; against sorrow we must fight, against poverty we must fight, against those who exploit under the pretext of protection we must fight.

The style is unmistakably Patar's: lucid, musical, image-rich, never obscure for obscurity's sake. Where Pash hammered and Shiv swooned, Patar reasons and persuades — the professor's clarity fused with the lyricist's ear. The "smouldering" of the title is exact: these are not poems that blaze and vanish, but poems that hold their heat.

The famous title poem's ethic — fight sorrow, fight poverty, fight the exploiters, but never sever your own limbs, never dishonor your wings — is a complete political philosophy in miniature. It refuses both quietism and nihilism: the world is to be fought, but the fighter must remain whole. This is Patar's distinctive contribution to the poetry of resistance — where Pash demanded the hammer, Patar demands the discipline. The poem has been quoted in contexts its author never imagined, which is the fate of all true political poetry: it outgrows its occasion.

A word on Patar's nature imagery, because it is the signature readers love most. Trees, air, birds, seasons — the Birkh Arz Kare sensibility — run through even this darkest book, and they do structural work: nature is the standard against which human violence is measured and found wanting. When Patar writes of a tree, he is writing of a patience and rootedness his human world has lost. The smouldering words are, in this sense, seeds as well as embers — things that burn and things that might grow.
## The poet

Surjit Patar (1945–2024), born in Patar Kalan village, was the defining Punjabi poet of the late twentieth century. He earned his MA from Punjabi University, Patiala, and a PhD on the transformation of folklore in Guru Nanak's bani from Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, then taught Punjabi at Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana, until retirement. His honours included the Sahitya Akademi Award (1993), the Saraswati Samman (2009) for Lafzan Di Dargah, and the Padma Shri (2012), which he later returned in solidarity with the farmers' protest. He translated Lorca's tragedies, Girish Karnad's Nagmandala, and poems of Brecht and Neruda into Punjabi, wrote film dialogues (Shaheed Uddham Singh; the Punjabi version of Heaven on Earth), and led the Punjab Arts Council and the Punjabi Sahit Akademi. He died in Ludhiana on 11 May 2024, mourned across both Punjabs.

Patar's translation work is the hidden engine of his poetry. Rendering Lorca's tragedies, Brecht's poems, and Neruda's odes into Punjabi taught him what the language could carry — and the traffic went both ways: his Punjabi gave those world poets a new home, and their example gave his own verse its international confidence. The professor who wrote a PhD on folklore in Guru Nanak's bani never stopped being a student, and the student never stopped becoming a teacher.
## Reception & legacy

The 1993 Sahitya Akademi Award confirmed the collection as the major Punjabi poetry book of its decade. It remains Patar's most cited work in criticism and the volume readers reach for when they want the poet at his most morally serious. Its poems are recited at literary gatherings to this day, and its title has entered the language as a phrase.

After Patar's death in May 2024, the collection acquired a new gravity — the book readers reached for to mourn him, the verses recited at condolence meetings across Punjab. The Sahitya Akademi Award of 1993 now reads as the first of the national honours rather than the last word; the Saraswati Samman (2009) and the Padma Shri (2012, later returned) followed. But for most readers, this remains the essential Patar: the dark book by the gentle poet.
## Read it if...

You want the other pole of Punjabi protest poetry — not Pash's hammer but Patar's ember. Read it in Punjab's dark decade and our own: the smoulder, unfortunately, is still warm.

You want poetry for hard times that neither lies about the hardness nor surrenders to it. Keep it near; some books are tools.