Mere Sayian Jioਮੇਰੇ ਸਾਈਆਂ ਜੀਓ

About the book

Mere Saiyan Jio — 'O My Beloved!' — is a 1953 collection of lyrics by Bhai Vir Singh (1872–1957), the last major poetry book of his lifetime. It came at the end of a lyric sequence that had begun with Dil Tarang (1920) and run through Tarel Tupke (1921), Lehran de Haar (1921), Matak Hulare (1922), Bijliyan de Har (1927), Preet Veena (1929), Kambdi Kalai (1933), Lehar Hulare (1946) and Kant Maheli (1950): three decades in which Vir Singh, almost single-handedly, created the modern Punjabi poem.

In 1955 the collection won the Sahitya Akademi Award — the first time the award was given for Punjabi. The following year Vir Singh received the Padma Bhushan. The two honours together were a national recognition of what Punjab had long known: that the Singh Sabha's poet-novelist-scholar was the founder of modern Punjabi literature.

Plot & themes

The lyrics of Mere Saiyan Jio are addressed, as the title says, to the Beloved — and in Vir Singh's mystical idiom the Beloved is at once the divine and the human, the soul's eternal longing for merger with its original essence. The theme is the one he had pursued since the epic Rana Surat Singh (1905): the matter-bound human consciousness reaching out to its divine source, the ephemeral balanced against the eternal.

What is new in the late lyrics is their stripped, intimate quality. The young Vir Singh of the romances wrote in high metaphor; the old Vir Singh writes as if speaking quietly to someone in the room. Nature — so profoundly moving in his earlier work — is still present, but now as a confidant rather than a spectacle. Readers often describe these poems as prayers that do not announce themselves as prayers.

The collection is also, quietly, a summa: motifs from across his career — the widow's longing, the village, the seasons, the Name — return here in their simplest form, as if the poet were gathering his life's subjects for a final, unadorned statement.

The author

Bhai Vir Singh (1872–1957) needs little introduction on this site: founder of the Khalsa Tract Society (1894), editor of Nirguniara and Khalsa Samachar, creator of the Punjabi novel (Sundari, 1898) and of modern Punjabi prose, critical editor of classical Sikh texts, annotator of the Sri Gur Pratap Suraj Granth in fourteen volumes, and — in his final years — the author of a detailed commentary on the Guru Granth Sahib, left unfinished at his death in 1957. The Sahitya Akademi Award (1955) and Padma Bhushan (1956) crowned a lifetime of unrelieved work.

Reception & legacy

The 1955 award fixed Mere Saiyan Jio in literary history as the book that carried Punjabi into the national academy — the first Punjabi book the Sahitya Akademi honoured. For readers it remains the most approachable of Vir Singh's poetry books: shorter, more intimate and more musical than the epic Rana Surat Singh, it is the volume by which many Punjabis first meet him as a poet rather than as a novelist or scholar. Its lyrics continue to be sung in Sikh congregations and at cultural gatherings.

Read it if...

you know Vir Singh the novelist and want Vir Singh the poet; you are interested in the mystical lyric in modern Punjabi; or you want the book that won Punjabi its first national literary prize — the crown of a career that created a literature.