Lafzan Di Dargahਲਫ਼ਜ਼ਾਂ ਦੀ ਦਰਗਾਹ

About the book

Lafzan Di Dargah is a Punjabi poetry collection by Surjit Patar, published in 1999, the year Punjab marked three hundred years since the founding of the Khalsa. Its title means Shrine of Words, and it is also read as a court of words: the place a poet brings his case when every other door is shut. The collection gathers 73 poems, and a decade after it appeared it carried its author to the Saraswati Samman for 2009, one of the highest literary honours in India, given by the K.K. Birla Foundation.

Patar states the book's idea in its introduction, in lines his readers quote back to him: to mould my anguish into a song is my way of salvation, and if the other doors are shut, here is the door of a court of words. The dargah of the title is therefore not a building. It is poetry itself, treated as the one shrine, and the one court, that cannot turn a Punjabi away.

What is Lafzan Di Dargah about?

It is about words themselves: what a mother tongue is worth, who gets to keep it, and what it costs when it slips away. Again and again the poems return to language. In one, the poet's own mother could not make sense of his poem, though it was written in his mother tongue. In another, Aia Nand Kishore, he turns a gentle satirical eye on the intimate relationship between language and livelihood. In Meri Jaat, stating his caste leaves him, in his own telling, tongue tied. A book named for words keeps asking what words do to the people who speak them.

Themes: the mother tongue on trial

By 1999 Patar had already written the poems of Punjab's darkest years, and this collection speaks in a quieter, more reflective register: satire rather than lament, the smile that carries a charge inside it. The court of words hears cases no other court will take. A mother who cannot read her son's poem, a migrant whose name becomes a Punjabi poem, a man stopped by the question of his caste: each is a small hearing, and the verdict the book keeps returning is that a people's language is not a decoration on their life but the ground of it. Lose the words, the poems argue, and the shrine stands empty.

The author

Surjit Patar was born Surjit Hunjan on 14 January 1945 in Pattar Kalan village in Jalandhar district, and took his pen name from his village. He graduated from Randhir College, Kapurthala, took a master's degree at Punjabi University, Patiala, and a PhD at Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, on the transformation of folklore in Guru Nanak's bani. He retired as Professor of Punjabi at Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana. He began writing poetry in the mid 1960s. His collections before this one include Hawa Vich Likhe Harf, a book of 51 ghazals published in 1979, and the twin collections of 1992, Birkh Arz Kare and Hanere Vich Sulagdi Varnmala, the second of which won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1993. He translated Lorca, Girish Karnad, Brecht and Neruda into Punjabi, served as president of the Punjabi Sahit Akademi and the Punjab Arts Council, and received the Padma Shri in 2012. He died in Ludhiana on 11 May 2024, aged 79.

The Saraswati Samman

The Saraswati Samman, instituted by the K.K. Birla Foundation, honours an outstanding literary work in an Indian language published in the previous ten years, and it is counted among the most prestigious literary awards in India. Patar received it for 2009, for this collection. The award placed Lafzan Di Dargah in rare company: a book of Punjabi poems, judged against the best writing in every scheduled language of India, and chosen. For a collection whose subject is the fate of the Punjabi language itself, the honour carried a meaning beyond its author: the court of words had been heard in Delhi.

Why does Lafzan Di Dargah still matter?

Because its question is now asked in Brampton and Southall as loudly as in Ludhiana: what happens to a mother tongue when the schools, the jobs and the screens all reward another language? Patar asked it first about his own mother, in poems a general reader can carry whole in memory, and he asked it without bitterness, in the voice that made him the most loved Punjabi poet of his generation. Lafzan Di Dargah completes the shelf of his major collections in this Kosh, beside Hawa Vich Likhe Harf, Birkh Arz Kare and Hanere Vich Sulagdi Varnmala, and it is the right door through which new readers should enter his work.