Khulle Ghundਖੁੱਲ੍ਹੇ ਘੁੰਡ

About the book

Khulle Ghund, which means Free Veils, is the second book of Punjabi poetry by Professor Puran Singh, published in 1923, the same year as Khulle Maidan. Written in free verse, without rhyme or fixed metre, it is a book of nature, village life and the soul's awareness, and it stands with its companion volumes as one of the founding works of modern Punjabi poetry.

The title is the book's programme. Ghund is the veil, and khulle means open, free, unbound. Where Khulle Maidan opened the meadows, Khulle Ghund lifts the veil: it looks past the surface of things to the life moving underneath, the consciousness the poet calls surta, the soul's awareness of itself and of the divine. The poems refuse closed forms as surely as they refuse closed thinking.

What the poems are about

At the heart of the book is surta, the soul's awareness, the idea Puran Singh returns to again and again. In his preface to the book he sets surta against hankar, the ego: the one opens the mind to the world and to the divine, the other closes it. Two poems in the collection take the idea up directly, Surt ate Hankar (Consciousness and Ego) and Guru Avatar Surat, which pictures the Guru as the sun of suns, the source of the light by which the soul sees.

Around that centre the poems gather the Punjab countryside: its fields and rivers, its farmers and labourers, its seasons and skies. Puran Singh writes about villagers, peasants and the poor with love rather than pity, and nature in his poems is never only scenery. The open field and the open sky are the images of the free life he is arguing for, a life lived close to the earth and open to heaven.

Free verse: a new way to write Punjabi poetry

Before Puran Singh, Punjabi poetry moved mostly in fixed metres and inherited forms. He broke with that tradition under the influence of the American poet Walt Whitman, whose free, rolling lines he had met during his student years in Japan. Free verse let him follow the shape of a thought instead of the shape of a stanza, and it let his poems sound like speech: urgent, tender and direct.

The break mattered because the subject matter was new too. A poem about a farmer's field or a labourer's day needed a form as plain and unadorned as the life it described. Khulle Ghund, with Khulle Maidan beside it, showed that Punjabi poetry could be modern without ceasing to be Punjabi, and the poets who followed him walked through the door he opened.

The author

Puran Singh was born on 17 February 1881 at Salhad, near Abbottabad, in what is now Pakistan, into a Sikh family. He studied industrial chemistry in Japan, graduating from Tokyo University, and returned to India to work as a scientist, most notably as a forest chemist at the Forest Research Institute in Dehradun from 1907 to 1918. He distilled essential oils, ran factories and published dozens of scientific papers, and he was as serious about chemistry as he was about poetry.

Four influences shaped him: his years in Japan, his meeting with Walt Whitman, his discipleship under the mystic Swami Rama Tirtha, and his meeting with Bhai Vir Singh at Sialkot in 1912, which returned him to Sikhism. He married Maya Devi in 1904. In his last years he farmed rosha grass at Chak 73 near Nankana Sahib, losing his plantation to floods in 1928 but rejoicing that his manuscripts were saved. He fell ill with tuberculosis in 1930 and died at Dehradun on 31 March 1931, aged fifty.

Reception and legacy

The book appeared in the middle of the busiest years of Puran Singh's life. In 1923 he also published the English aphorisms of Unstrung Beads; in 1926 came The Spirit of Oriental Poetry and the third Punjabi volume, Khulle Asmani Rang. The three Punjabi books together are now counted as the founding documents of free verse in the language, and scholars still point to them as the place where modern Punjabi poetry begins.

Their influence is out of all proportion to their size. The three volumes are slim, but they taught Punjabi poetry three lasting lessons: to look at ordinary life, to trust free rhythm, and to treat the Punjab countryside as a subject worthy of the highest art. Khulle Ghund is the middle volume of that argument, the book where the veil lifts and the reader sees what the open meadows were opening onto.

Why is Khulle Ghund still read?

It is still read because it is the most inward of the three books. Khulle Maidan celebrates the open field; Khulle Ghund asks what the open field opens onto, and answers: a soul awake to itself. Readers who come to Puran Singh for the nature poetry stay for the philosophy, and the book rewards a slow reading, in a field or a garden, with its attention to light, season and labour.