Main Te Mainਮੈਂ ਤੇ ਮੈਂ

About the collection

Main Te Main — "I and Me" — published in 1970 by Navyug Prakashak of Delhi, is the last major collection Shiv Kumar Batalvi published in his lifetime. He would die three years later, at thirty-six. The book marks a deliberate break from everything that had made him famous.

The Shiv of Peeran Da Paraga (1960), Lajwanti (1961), and the epic verse-play Loona (1965) was the poet of separation and longing — the "John Keats of Punjabi poetry," the youngest-ever winner of the Sahitya Akademi Award (1967), whose verses about lost love were sung across both Punjabs. Main Te Main keeps the music but turns it inward. This is not the poetry of the beloved who left; it is the poetry of the self that remains — examined, accused, and mourned.

Contemporary accounts describe it as an intellectual work grounded in psychological philosophy: less the winter lyricist of popular imagination, more a modern psychological poet conducting an autopsy on his own consciousness.

The Navyug Prakashak imprint matters: this was a Delhi publication, not a Punjab one, and it signals where Shiv stood by 1970 — a Chandigarh bank employee with a Punjab address and a subcontinental reputation, publishing in the capital. The collection's difficulty reportedly made publishers nervous; the manuscript circulated while friends urged him back toward love lyrics. That he insisted on publishing it as it was — philosophical, pessimistic, unaccommodating — is the measure of his seriousness in his final years.
## Themes & style

The collection's governing subject is the divided self — the "I" that acts and the "me" that watches, judges, and grieves. Where the early poems externalized pain into images of the absent beloved, these poems internalize it: loneliness becomes a metaphysical condition rather than a romantic one.

The style is sparer and more riddling than the lush romanticism of his fame. The famous musicality is still there — Shiv could not write an unmusical line — but it serves a harsher inquiry. Readers and critics at the time were unsettled; some called him a pessimist, others reached for comparisons with Shelley and Keats. Shiv's reported answer to the uproar was defiant: he did not want to be Shelley or Keats; he wanted only to remain Shiv.

Read after Loona, the book feels like a coda the poet wrote knowingly — the lover's agony refined into something closer to existential dread, composed by a man whose health was already failing and who had, by several accounts, begun to speak of his work as finished.

Readers have sometimes heard in these poems a premonition, and it is hard not to: the self-interrogation, the talk of endings, the stripping away of consolation. But the poems resist being reduced to biography. Their real subject is universal — the moment every examined life reaches when the stories it told about itself stop working. Shiv's distinction is to have given that abstract moment a local habitation: the metaphysics arrives in the diction of the Punjabi village, the dread wears a familiar face.
## The poet

Shiv Kumar Batalvi (1936–1973) was born in Bara Pind Lohtian in the Shakargarh tehsil (now in Pakistan) and grew up in Batala after Partition, taking his pen name from the town. His first collection, Peeran Da Paraga, appeared in 1960; Loona (1965), his verse-play on the Puran Bhagat legend, won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1967 and created the modern Punjabi kissa. His poems have been sung by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Jagjit Singh, Surinder Kaur, Hans Raj Hans, and Ghulam Ali, and adapted into Hindi film songs from Love Aaj Kal (2009) to Udta Punjab (2016).

He died on 6 May 1973 in his wife's maternal village of Kiri Mangyal, of liver cirrhosis, after a final decline hastened by his 1972 England tour. He was thirty-six.

The last three years are the stuff of legend: the State Bank job abandoned in spirit if not in fact, the Chandigarh years of declining health, the triumphant and ruinous 1972 England tour, the return to a body already failing. Main Te Main was written inside that decline — which may be why its inwardness feels less like a choice than a necessity. The poet who had sung to thousands in halls was left, at the end, with only the most demanding audience of all: himself.
## Reception & legacy

Main Te Main puzzled some of Shiv's mass audience, who had loved him as the singer of separation, but it secured his standing with critics as a poet who kept evolving to the end. After his death, Guru Nanak Dev University published the posthumous Alvida (1974), and his complete poems continue to appear as Samuchi Kavita.

The collection is now read as the essential late Shiv — the bridge between the romantic legend and the modernist he was becoming.

With time, Main Te Main has come to be seen as the necessary completion of the Shiv story — without it, he would be only the romantic prodigy who died young; with it, he is a poet who outgrew his own legend before the legend closed over him. Young Punjabi poets cite it as permission: proof that the tradition's most beloved voice also dared to be difficult.
## Read it if...

You know Shiv only as the poet of "Ikk kudi jihda naam mohabbat" and want the harder, stranger book — the one where the romance is over and only the reckoning remains. Read it after Loona, slowly, and preferably aloud.

You have ever outgrown your own early work — or watched someone do it. The book is a masterclass in artistic honesty: the courage to disappoint your audience in order not to disappoint yourself.