Kasumbhraਕਸੁੰਭੜਾ

About the book

Kasumbhra, also spelled Kasumbhara, is a Punjabi poetry collection by Mohan Singh, published in 1939. It was his second collection, following Sawe Pattar, the first book of which the Central Institute of Indian Languages survey says that it made him so popular that some of its poems became household songs of the people. The Encyclopaedia of the Sikhs lists Kasumbhra in the same place in his bibliography, dated 1939, between Saave Pater (1936) and Adhvate (1944). The survey renders the title as The Red Oleander, after the oleander flower, bright, bitter and impossible to ignore, which is a fair emblem for the book itself.

The collection appeared while Mohan Singh was teaching Persian at Khalsa College, Amritsar, in the years 1933 to 1939 when, as the Encyclopaedia records, Teja Singh, Sant Singh Sekhon and Gurbachan Singh Talib became his friends, and he studied Blake, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Browning and the other English romantic poets, together with the Oxford Book of English Ballads. It also appeared in 1939, the year he started his famous literary Punjabi monthly, Panj Darya. Kasumbhra is the book of that Amritsar circle: a college poet absorbing English romantic poetry and the new progressive ideas moving through Lahore and Amritsar, and remaking both in Punjabi.

What is Kasumbhra about?

The Central Institute survey gives the shortest accurate answer. The influence of Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis is explicitly evident in his second collection of poems, Kasumbhara, it says, a book that established him as the representative poet of the period. Inside it are poems written on contemporary social and political problems, poems to inspire youth to rise against the British rulers, and beautiful love poems built on a single hard theme: that love could not be realised in a hierarchical society based on the suppression of human desire. That mixture, politics, desire and lyric beauty held inside one small book, was new in Punjabi poetry, and it explains why this second collection, rather than the more purely romantic first one, is treated as the announcement of a modern age.

Taj Mahal: beauty built on labour

Its most celebrated single poem is Taj Mahal. The survey describes it in one sentence that has followed the poem ever since: in this celebrated poem, he rejects the grandeur and beauty of the Taj Mahal built on the exploitation of ill paid workers. The move is characteristic of the whole collection. A monument every love poet was expected to praise becomes, in Mohan Singh's hands, a question about the hands that built it: what were the workers paid, and whose love story does the marble actually tell? Romance is not abandoned in Kasumbhra. It is audited, and made to answer for the world that produced it.

Themes: love that a divided society blocks

The love poems carry the book's second argument, and the survey states their shared structure exactly: beautiful love poems mainly structured around the theme that love could not be realised in a hierarchical society based on the suppression of human desire. Desire, in Kasumbhra, is neither a private failing nor a private joy. It is blocked or freed by the order of the world around it, by rank, wealth and custom. That is the Freudian half of the book answering its Marxist half, and it is why the love poems read less like escapes from the political poems than like their other half.

SikhiWiki's account of the poet describes the same turn in the language of a life: a progression from romance to reality, from conventional love to an uninhibited expression of the man and woman relationship, in a poetry that, under the radical western influence of Marx and Freud, graduated from feathers to iron. Kasumbhra is where that graduation happens. Its archetypal conflict, between blood and judgment, between body and soul, between dream and reality, is already the engine of these poems, which is why its political poems still read as songs and its love poems still read as arguments.

The author

Mohan Singh (1905 to 1978) was born in Mardan, now in Pakistan, and belonged to Dhamial, his ancestral village near Rawalpindi. He took a master's degree in Persian and from 1933 taught Persian language and literature at Khalsa College, Amritsar. In 1940 he became a lecturer at Sikh National College, Lahore, then left teaching to start the firm Hind Publishers, having already founded the monthly Panj Darya in 1939. After the Partition of 1947 he shifted his business to Amritsar and then to Jalandhar, later taught at Khalsa College, Patiala, and was appointed Professor Emeritus at Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana, where he died. His collections run from Saave Pater (1936) to Buhe (1977), with the epic Nanakayan (1971) among them, and in 1959 he received the Sahitya Akademi Award for Wadda Vela.

Reception and legacy

The verdict of the surveys is unusually united. The Central Institute survey credits Mohan Singh with enunciating a truly modern age of Punjabi poetry, liberating it from the all pervading mysticism of Bhai Vir Singh and Puran Singh, and names Kasumbhara as the collection that established him as the representative poet of the period. The Encyclopaedia of the Sikhs calls him a major force in Punjabi poetry after 1935 who, in the next twenty five years, influenced the generations of Punjabi poets, created new norms in Punjabi poetry and created the language of new metaphors, and who is considered the most important Punjabi poet after Waris Shah.

For a reader today, Kasumbhra is the essential second step after Sawe Pattar. The green leaves of the first book turn, in the second, to the red oleander: the same lyric gift, now carrying an argument about labour, rank and desire that Punjabi poetry had not made before in this form. Start with Taj Mahal, then read the love poems against it, and the founding argument of modern Punjabi poetry, that a love song and a social conscience belong in the same book, is in your hands.