Matak Hulareਮਟਕ ਹੁਲਾਰੇ

About the book

Matak Hulare, Enticing Swaying, is a 1922 collection of lyric poems by Bhai Vir Singh (1872-1957), the writer regarded as the creator of modern Punjabi literature. It is an anthology of poems exclusively on the scenes and sites of the valley of Kashmir, and it followed Laharan De Haar (1921) in the lyric sequence that began with Dil Tarang (1920).

The book grew out of the summers Bhai Vir Singh spent in Kashmir. The valley gave him a landscape unlike the plains of Punjab: mountains rising on every side, lakes lying still in the morning, gardens and orchards, and trees that moved in the wind. The poems move through that landscape the way a visitor moves through it, stopping at one view and then another, and the valley itself is the book's single subject.

Matak Hulare is the most place-bound of his early collections. Where Dil Tarang and Laharan De Haar watch water and weather anywhere, this book stays in one valley and looks at it closely, and that closeness is its charm: a whole book given to a single place, written by a poet who had learned to pay attention.

What does "Matak Hulare" mean?

Matak is the graceful swaying of a body in motion, the easy movement of a dancer or a tree in the wind, and hulare are surges and swayings, waves of movement and feeling. The title suggests a graceful swaying, and it is usually rendered in English as Enticing Swaying.

The title fits a book about Kashmir. The valley sways: the chinar trees move in the breeze, the water shivers in the lake, the light changes on the mountains through the day. Bhai Vir Singh's title names that motion, and the poems that follow are his attempt to catch it in words.

Kashmir in the poems

Bhai Vir Singh spent his summers in Kashmir, and the valley stayed with him. He was fond of flowers and grew them in plenty at his own house, and he was a connoisseur of music, and both of those loves show in these poems: they are poems of looking and listening, of colour and of sound, rather than of argument.

The poems spiritualize nature, as his lyrics always do. The mountains, the lakes and the trees are never only scenery: they are a picture of a joyous harmony in the world, and the poet's gladness at finding it. A fugitive thrill of gladness echoes through the lyrics, and the valley becomes, for the reader, a place where the inner life and the outer world meet.

That is what makes the book unusual in Punjabi poetry. Other poets had written about Kashmir in passing, but Bhai Vir Singh gave it a whole book, and he gave it the same close attention he gave to a wave or a flower. The valley is not a backdrop here: it is the poem.

The author

Bhai Vir Singh was born in Amritsar on 5 December 1872, into a family steeped in classical learning. His father, Dr Charan Singh, was a medical practitioner and scholar, and his maternal grandfather, Giani Hazara Singh, belonged to a noted line of scholars of the Sikh scriptures. He studied at the Church Mission School, passed his matriculation in 1891, and set up a lithograph press in 1892.

He founded the Khalsa Tract Society in 1893 and the weekly Khalsa Samachar in 1899, and his novels Sundari (1898), the first novel in Punjabi, Bijay Singh (1899), Satwant Kaur and Baba Naudh Singh (1921) remade Punjabi prose. After the epic Rana Surat Singh appeared in book form in 1919, he turned to the short lyric, and the collections that followed, Dil Tarang, Laharan De Haar, Matak Hulare and Bijliyan de Har, founded the modern Punjabi poem. He received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1955 and the Padma Bhushan in 1956, and died in Amritsar on 10 June 1957.

Reception and legacy

The lyric collections became instantly popular and won Bhai Vir Singh an audience well beyond the religious circle. The short lyric became the characteristic form of modern Punjabi poetry, and Matak Hulare showed that the form could hold a whole landscape, not only a single flower or a passing mood.

The sequence ran on through Bijliyan de Har (1927) and Kambdi Kalai (1933) to Mere Saiyan Jio (1953), which won the first Sahitya Akademi Award for Punjabi in 1955. Matak Hulare stands in the middle of that run, the book where the poet's eye settled longest on one place.

For readers today, the book is the gentlest introduction to Bhai Vir Singh's poetry after Laharan De Haar: the same music, the same attention to nature, but a whole valley to wander in. It is also a small piece of literary history, the first book in Punjabi to give Kashmir a volume of its own.