Satluj Di Hawaਸਤਲੁਜ ਦੀ ਹਵਾ

Satluj Di Hawa, in English Breeze from the Sutlej, is the first book of Punjabi poetry by Lal Singh Dil (1943 to 2007), published in 1971. Dil was a landless Dalit labourer's son from Ghungrali Sikhan, a village near Samrala in Ludhiana district, and he wrote from inside the world his poems describe: the fields, the daily wage and the humiliation of caste. The book appeared as the Naxalite movement rose and fell in Punjab, and it made his name as a poet. An obituary notice, quoting the Indian Express, later called the collection an epoch in the history of Punjabi revolutionary poetry, and Surjit Patar has said Dil will be counted as one of the major Punjabi poets of the twentieth century.

About the book

Dil had been writing since his school days. He was still in Class X, working as a wage labourer, when his first poem appeared in Preetlari, the famous Punjabi literary journal, and more poems followed in journals such as Lakeer and Nagmani before any book existed. Satluj Di Hawa gathered that early work in 1971. The timing is part of the book's story. Dil had been drawn into the Naxalite movement in 1968, took part in the agitation at the Birla Seed Farm and then in the unsuccessful raid on the Chamkaur police station on 30 April 1969, and was arrested, tortured and sentenced to six months of hard labour. He was in and out of jail up to 1971, the year the book came out, and by the end of that year he had fled Punjab for Uttar Pradesh, fearing the police and disillusioned with the movement. The breeze of the title is therefore not a gentle image. It is the wind off the river Satluj, the great river of his home country in Malwa, carrying the heat of the fields with it.

What is Satluj Di Hawa about?

Satluj Di Hawa is about the people at the very bottom of Punjab's countryside, written by one of them. Its poems take up the landless labourer, the daily wager, the Dalit family, the woman picking fruit in someone else's orchard, and set their days against the promises of revolution that were in the air. In the title poem, quoted in The Caravan, the revolutionary slogans of the Indian soil shake distant lands, and the jungles call out to watch the enemy go up in flames. Yet the book's best known poems are quiet ones. In Bholiaan, girls picking fruit hold on to small moments of joy across a poor woman's whole life, from childhood to middle age. In Nadeen, weeds, a daily wager's small trowel with a wooden handle softened by many hands becomes, in Dil's eye, a work of art. Shaam da Rang, Ik Soch and Mera Desh belong to the same first flowering: evening, a single thought of love, and a country of half hungry people counting stars to soothe aching limbs.

Themes: the landless, caste and a quiet revolutionary voice

The critic T. C. Ghai, summing up Dil's poetry, notes that it focuses for the first time in Punjabi poetry on the lives of men, women and children at the lowest rungs of Indian society: the Dalits, the landless labourers and farm workers, the daily wagers, and the nomadic and wandering tribes whom Dil believed were the original inhabitants of the land, the people he later named in the title of his collected poems, Naglok. Where Pash, the loudest voice of the same movement, sang of a revolution round the corner in blood and thunder imagery, Dil mostly remained a poet of understatement, and the difference is caste as much as temperament. He complained that his poetry was sidelined because of his low caste, even inside a movement that preached a caste free society, and his portraits of women, the daily wage labourer women above all, are drawn with an empathy his contemporaries remarked on: Amarjit Chandan compared them to Amrita Shergil's paintings.

The author

Lal Singh Dil was born on 11 April 1943 in Ghungrali Sikhan, in a Ramdasia Chamar family of tanners. His father worked all his life as an agricultural labourer on other people's land, and Dil was the first of his clan to pass the tenth standard, in 1960 to 1961, while working for wages. College, a teacher training course and an honours course in Punjabi literature all had to be given up unfinished. After his release from jail he spent the years from 1971 to 1983 in Uttar Pradesh, working as a cook, watchman, gardener and farm hand, and in 1972 he converted to Islam, believing he would find no caste there. He returned to Samrala in 1983 and ended as a tea vendor at the bus terminal, still writing. His later books are Bahut Saare Suraj (So Many Suns, 1982), written in Uttar Pradesh, Sathar (1997), the autobiography Dastaan (1998) and the long poem Aj Billa Phir Aaya, published in 2009 after his death at Ludhiana on 14 August 2007. His full life is told in his people entry in this Kosh.

Reception and legacy

The judgements on Dil were made early and have not been revised down. The poet and critic Harbhajan Singh, on first reading him, called him a truly new signature in contemporary poetry. The Indian Express, in its obituary, called Satluj Di Hawa an epoch in Punjabi revolutionary poetry, and the filmmaker Ajay Bhardwaj placed Dil at the beating heart of his 2005 documentary Kitte Mil Ve Mahi, on caste and the Sufi tradition in post Partition Punjab. Dil's poems were gathered whole in Naglok (1998), and English readers reached him through Nirupama Dutt's Poet of the Revolution (Viking Penguin, 2012), her translation of the memoirs with a selection of poems, and through T. C. Ghai's Exclusion, Deprivation and Nothingness (2017), a translation of one hundred poems. In this Kosh the book stands beside Pash's Loh Katha, the other great poetic record of the same movement, and the two read together show its two voices: the thunder, and the understatement that outlasted it.