Rani Tattਰਾਣੀ ਤੱਤ

Rani Tatt (2015) is the first book by the Punjabi poet Harmanjeet Singh, a collection of poetry and prose about Punjab, its nature and its old ways of life. It sold out its first print run in ten days, went through seven editions in two years, and won its author the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar in 2017. In a market where a Punjabi poetry book is lucky to sell five hundred copies, Rani Tatt has sold more than twenty-eight thousand.

About the book

Rani Tatt was released on 19 August 2015 by Colours of Punjab. Its full title is Rani Tatt (Sohile Dhoor Mitti Ke), and it runs to 159 pages. The book is divided into two parts. The first part holds the poems, and the second part holds longer verse. Harmanjeet writes in an old, deep Punjabi vocabulary, the words of the village and the fields rather than the city, and his subjects are the things that vocabulary was made for: the rivers and the seasons, the trees and the birds, the work of the fields, and the people who lived close to the land.

What does Rani Tatt mean?

Rani Tatt means the supreme element. Harmanjeet has explained the title with a comparison his readers know well: it is supreme, he says, as the rani haar, the queen's necklace, is said to be the most beautiful. The title is a claim about the book itself, that what is inside it is the best of something, and it is also a claim about Punjab, that the old life of the land holds something supreme that the present should not lose. The subtitle, Sohile Dhoor Mitti Ke, points the same way: towards the soil and the dust of Punjab, and the songs that rise from them.

What is in the book?

The poems look at Punjab through nature. A river, a tree, a season or a bird becomes a way of talking about the people who live beside it, and about the changes that have come to their lives. The book moves between the old Punjab and the new one: the village as it was, with its festivals and its work, and the Punjab of today, where much of that life is thinning out. The Sahitya Akademi's booklet on the award put it plainly: the poems have the strength to go deep into the rich and ancient heritage of Punjab and connect it with the modern ethos in a meaningful manner, and they perceive and portray culture through nature, and nature through culture. The prose pieces in the second part work the same ground at greater length, in the voice of a man who grew up in a Mansa village and still lives close to that life.

The author

Harmanjeet Singh was born on 27 June 1991 in Khiala Kalan, a village in Mansa district, and began writing poetry at a young age. He was educated at Baba Jogi Peer Public Senior Secondary School and a nearby college, and he works as a primary school teacher in a government school. He had never thought of publishing his poems until Rani Tatt came into being in 2015. Since then he has become one of the best known lyricists in Punjabi cinema. He wrote Laung Laachi, the title song of the 2018 film, sung by Mannat Noor, and the devotional songs Aar Nanak Paar Nanak and Nanak Aadh Jugaadh Jiyo for Diljit Dosanjh. His words have been sung by Sunidhi Chauhan, Neha Bhasin, Amrinder Gill and Manpreet Singh, and he has also composed music for films, including Paunda Boliyaan for Puaada in 2021.

Reception: an unlikely bestseller

Rani Tatt became a bestseller in a market where poetry rarely sells at all. Most Punjabi books are reckoned to sell about five hundred copies. Rani Tatt crossed that figure in ten days. Within two years it had gone through seven editions and sold eleven thousand copies, and it has since passed twenty-eight thousand copies, selling in India and overseas. In 2017 the Sahitya Akademi gave Harmanjeet its Yuva Puraskar for the book, and he had already received the Punjabi Sahitya Academy Award for prose and the Shri Kanvar Singh Chauhan Yadgiri Nazam Puraskar. The Hindustan Times, reporting the award, said he wanted to demolish the belief that poetry has no commercial value.

Why is Rani Tatt still read?

It is still read because it does two things at once. It keeps alive a vocabulary and a way of seeing that belong to the old Punjab, the words for the soil, the seasons and the birds, and it uses them to talk about the present, about what is being lost and what is worth keeping. For young Punjabi readers it is also proof that a first book by a village schoolteacher can travel further than anyone expected. Rani Tatt began as a book of poems about nature. It ended up as evidence that Punjabi poetry still has readers, and that they will come when the poems speak their language.