Sattharਸੱਤਰ

About the book

Satthar is the third poetry collection by Lal Singh Dil, published in 1997, when the poet was 54. It closes the sequence that runs through modern Punjabi poetry like a ground note: Satluj di Hava in 1971, Bahut Saare Suraj in 1982, and then, after a gap of fifteen years, Satthar. His autobiography Dastaan followed a year later, in 1998. The scholar Raj Kumar Hans, surveying Dalit Punjabi literature, places the three collections and the autobiography together and says they enjoy an exalted place in Punjabi letters.

The title is also written Sathar in some accounts. By 1997 Dil was living in Samrala, in Ludhiana district, in the small rooftop room and among the people his poems had always been about, a decade away from his death in 2007. Satthar is therefore a late book in the plainest sense: the work of a poet who had already lived the whole story his early poems had promised, and who kept writing from inside it.

What is Satthar about?

Satthar gathers the poems of Dil's later years, and their world is the one all of his writing came from: the landless labourers and daily wagers of Punjab's villages, the women who work in other people's fields, the travellers who move from village to village with a blanket looking for work. Critics stress that Dil wrote about these people because he was one of them. His triumph, in the Caravan's account of his work, is that he writes of the marginalised without romanticism, contempt or fatalism, and gives dignity to them and to their labour.

Small things carry the weight in this poetry. In one of his best known poems a daily wager's little trowel, its wooden handle softened by the touch of many hands, becomes a work of art. That way of seeing, in which the tools and routines of poor people's work hold beauty and meaning, runs through the later poems as it ran through the early ones. The anger of the Naxalite years is still present, but it sits inside a quieter, more weathered music.

A quieter voice: from slogan to ghazal

Dil's contemporaries noticed that his voice was never the loud one. His friend Baldeep Singh explained that there was an absence of sloganeering in the poetry, and that when Dil recited he spoke in a soft, suppressed tone. The poet Amarjit Chandan, who championed him, said his style was entirely his own, picked up from experience rather than from books, with the ghazal the one form he thought unsuited to Punjabi.

That judgement shapes how Satthar has been read. Chandan considered Dil's later work weaker than what came earlier, saying he lost verve in the end and turned to ghazal writing, with some poems not up to the mark. Other readers hear the same turn differently: a revolutionary poet of the fields ending in the ghazal's older music of longing and loss. Both readings agree on the essential point, that the late poems are the work of the same unmistakable signature that the critic Harbhajan Singh, meeting Dil's lines for the first time, called a truly new signature in contemporary poetry.

The author

Lal Singh Dil (1943 to 2007) was born on 11 April 1943 in Ghungrali Sikhan, near Samrala in Ludhiana district, into a Ramdasia Chamar family of tanners. He was the first in his family to be educated, and he was training to be a basic school teacher when the Naxalbari rising drew him into the revolutionary movement, with its dream of a society free of caste and class. Arrested, jailed and tortured, he was hailed in those years as the bard of the Naxalite movement in Punjab, because the experience of poverty, injustice and oppression in his verse was so true to life.

After prison he fled to Uttar Pradesh and lived by whatever work came: cook, watchman, gardener, labourer, farm hand. He ended in Samrala, where in his later years he ran a tea stall, and he died on 14 August 2007. Raj Kumar Hans notes what set Dil apart even among revolutionary poets: his Dalit consciousness carried no hatred, vengeance or malice, and though he lived and died a faqir, he has come to be counted among the best Punjabi poets of the last half century.

Reception and legacy

Satthar's standing is the standing of Dil's whole body of work, which Punjabi readers have steadily raised since his death. Surjit Patar, quoted in Nirupama Dutt's introduction to her translation of Dil, said he will be counted as one of the major Punjabi poets of the twentieth century. Dutt's Poet of the Revolution, published by Penguin in 2012, translated Dastaan and twenty five of the poems into English and carried Dil's voice to readers far beyond Punjabi. The filmmaker Ajay Bhardwaj had already placed him at the heart of the documentary Kitte Mil Ve Mahi in 2005.

For readers coming new to Dil, the three collections are usually read as one arc: the young revolutionary of Satluj di Hava, the maturing poet of Bahut Saare Suraj, and the older man of Satthar, still writing about the half hungry settlement that retires for the night and counts the stars to soothe aching limbs. Satthar is where that arc comes to rest, and it is the necessary third panel of one of modern Punjabi poetry's most important lives in verse.