Udde Baajan Magarਉੱਡਦੇ ਬਾਜ਼ਾਂ ਮਗਰ

About the book

Udde Baajan Magar — 'Following the Flying Hawks' — is the second poetry collection of Avtar Singh Sandhu, known as Pash (1950–1988), the most influential political poet of 20th-century Punjabi. It was published in 1973, between his explosive debut Loh-Katha (Iron Tale, 1970) and Saade Samiyan Vich (In Our Times, 1978). Pash was twenty-three.

The book belongs to the years when Pash was becoming the voice of Punjab's Naxalite-era left: arrested in May 1970 after the publication of Loh-Katha, jailed for nearly two years on a murder charge before acquittal, arrested again during student unrest in 1972. The poems were written inside that pressure — and they read like it.

Plot & themes

The title image — hawks in flight, and the poet following them — sets the book's terms: aspiration as pursuit, the revolutionary as someone who tracks a moving target across the sky. Where Loh-Katha was iron — hard, declarative, confrontational — Udde Baajan Magar is motion: poems of chase, flight, pursuit, the refusal to land.

Pash's politics are explicit and unembarrassed: solidarity with peasants and workers, contempt for landlords, industrialists and the state, and a belief that poetry is a weapon. But what makes the collection last is not the slogans — it is the imagery. Pash writes with a blacksmith's physicality: hands, iron, blood, soil. His most famous lines from this period, like 'Haath' (Hands, 1973) — 'No one can snatch from me the play of these hands. Inside or outside my pockets, in handcuffs or on the trigger of a rifle, hands remain hands and have their own dharma' — come from the world of this book.

There is also, beneath the militancy, the tenderness that readers of Pash always notice: love poems, poems to friends, a sense that the revolution is being fought so that ordinary sweetness can survive. That doubleness — the fist and the open hand — is the collection's signature.

The author

Pash (Avtar Singh Sandhu, 1950–1988) was born in Talwandi Salem, Jalandhar, and grew up inside the Naxalite movement's Punjab. He published Loh-Katha at twenty, edited the literary magazine Siarh (The Plow Line), and became the most recited political poet of his generation. He was assassinated on 23 March 1988 at his village well, with his friend Hans Raj, for his outspoken criticism of Sikh extremist violence. His final collection, Khilre Hoye Varkey (Scattered Pages), appeared posthumously in 1989. His poem 'Sabh Ton Khatarnak' (The Most Dangerous) was included in an NCERT Class XI Hindi textbook in 2005 — the only Punjabi poet so honoured.

Reception & legacy

Udde Baajan Magar confirmed what Loh-Katha had announced: that Pash was not a one-book phenomenon but the defining voice of a political generation. The collection is recited at memorial gatherings every March near his death anniversary, and its title has become shorthand for the Pash attitude — keep moving, keep looking up. Tejwant Singh Gill's Makers of Indian Literature volume on Pash (1999) treats these middle-period poems as the core of his achievement.

Read it if...

you know Pash only from 'Sabh Ton Khatarnak' and want the book where his mature voice formed; you are interested in the poetry of Punjab's Naxalite years; or you want to see what revolutionary poetry looks like when it is also, line by line, good poetry.