Mainu Vida Karoਮੈਨੂੰ ਵਿਦਾ ਕਰੋ

About the book

Mainu Vida Karo, Bid Me Farewell, is a Punjabi poetry collection by Shiv Kumar Batalvi, published in 1963 by Lahore Book Shop, Ludhiana. It was his fourth book in a run of collections that appeared almost every year at the start of his career: Piran da Paraga in 1960, Lajwanti in 1961, Aate Diyan Chiriyan in 1962 and then this one. Batalvi was still in his twenties, a young poet from Batala whose readings and singing of his own verse were already drawing crowds, and the farewell of the title was not a pose. The study of his life and poetry published in the International Journal of Punjab Studies notes that dying young was a fate he had predicted and romanticised throughout his poetry, long before his death at the age of 36 in 1973.

The collection came two years before Loona (1965), the verse play on the Puran Bhagat legend that made him, in 1967, the youngest recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award. Mainu Vida Karo belongs to the earlier, song centred phase of his work, before the long dramatic poem: short lyrics and songs, built to be sung as much as read, in which one mood returns in form after form. That mood is stated in the title itself. Vida means a farewell, and the book asks, again and again, to be bid farewell while there is still time.

What is Mainu Vida Karo about?

The International Journal of Punjab Studies study, in its survey of the collections, describes Mainu Vida Karo as another collection of songs full of symbols of death and the pain of separation, expressed in different forms. Among the poems it singles out is Dharmee Babula, the lament of a love torn girl addressed to her father. In the translation printed in the study she begs him to bring back the season when the cotton flower blooms, the season in which she lost her song: separation choked its throat, sorrow ravaged its face, and no tears she pours on the seeds of her dreams can make a flower bloom. Her closing question turns the family's wealth against itself: what use are fertile lands and lakes, she asks, if daughters wilt and swans stay parched?

That one poem shows the method of the whole book. The speaker is rarely the poet in his own person. He lends his voice to a daughter speaking to a father, to lovers at the point of parting, to the dying addressing the living. The study praises exactly this gift, his exceptional talent for interweaving the culture of Punjab into his poems: the cotton flower, the seasons of the village year, the wells and the swans are not decoration but the language in which separation is thought and felt.

Themes: farewell, death and birha

Birha, the pain of separation from the beloved, is the oldest subject in Punjabi poetry, running from the Sufi poets through Waris Shah. Batalvi made it his signature, and later readers would call him its sultan. In Mainu Vida Karo the separation is doubled: the lover parts from the beloved, and the self parts from life. Death is not an event at the end of these songs but a presence inside them, addressed, bargained with and sometimes welcomed. The title's farewell is therefore both a lover's goodbye and a young man's rehearsal of his own ending, which is why the collection reads, in hindsight, like a prophecy he kept making until it came true in 1973.

Yet the book is not only gloom. The same study of his poetry stresses its versatility and its deep roots in Punjabi folk song, and the collections around this one move between sensuous love lyrics, social subjects and songs of sheer melodic pleasure. The farewell songs endure because the melody carries the sorrow: these are poems people sing, at gatherings and on recordings, as much as poems people read in silence.

The author

Shiv Kumar Batalvi (1936 to 1973) was born on 23 July 1936 in Bara Pind Lohtian, in what is now Pakistan, and his family settled in Batala after the Partition of 1947, from which town he took his pen name. His first collection, Piran da Paraga, appeared in 1960 and was an instant success. Loona (1965) brought him the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1967, making him its youngest recipient at the time. He married Aruna in 1967, worked for a time at the State Bank of India in Chandigarh, and died on 6 May 1973 at Kiri Mangial, aged 36. His poems have been sung by Jagjit Singh and Chitra Singh, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Surinder Kaur, Hans Raj Hans and Ghulam Ali, among many others.

Reception and legacy

Mainu Vida Karo holds its place in every bibliography of Batalvi's work, from the International Journal of Punjab Studies list, which records its 1963 Lahore Book Shop publication, to the standard accounts of his career, where it marks the moment the death wish that runs through his poetry was first fully expressed in a book title. His poems were later gathered in his complete poetry, Samuchi Kavita, and the songs have never really left circulation: singers keep recording Batalvi, and each generation of Punjabi listeners meets the farewell songs again. For a reader coming to Batalvi for the first time, this collection is where his central subject is at its purest, before Loona gave it a story and a stage. Start here, and the later fame, and the early grave, both make a different kind of sense.