Dhani Ram Chatrikਧਨੀ ਰਾਮ ਚਾਤ੍ਰਿਕ

Early life

Dhani Ram Chatrik was born on 4 October 1876 in the village of Pasian-wala in Sheikhupura district, in what is today Pakistan. His father, Pohu Lal, was an ordinary shopkeeper who moved the family to the village of Lopoke in search of work. It was his father who first taught him the Gurmukhi and Urdu scripts, planting the seeds of the literacy that would define his life.

The boy developed a passion for calligraphy, and in pursuit of it he travelled all the way to Bombay to learn the craft of Gurmukhi typography. Though born a Hindu, he became a deep admirer of the Sikh faith after meeting Bhai Vir Singh, the great Punjabi poet of the age. That meeting changed his direction: inspired, he began to write verses in Punjabi, and he never stopped.

Poet of the people

Chatrik is counted among the founders of modern Punjabi poetry. Where earlier verse had lived largely in the qissa and spiritual traditions, he wrote about the Punjab in front of him, its fields, fairs, seasons and village speech, in a fresh, musical voice the common reader could love. His language was simple, his metaphors drawn from peasant life, and his tone warmly descriptive. Poems like his vivid picture of a village fair, with wrestlers, drummers and celebrating farmers, made him beloved across the province.

His bibliography is long and varied. It includes Fullan Di Tokri (1904), Nal Damyanti (1906), Dharmvir (1912), and the celebrated Chandanwari (1931), along with Kesar Kiari (1940), Nawan Jahan (1942), Noor Jahan Badshahbegum (1944) and Sufikhana (1950). He also wrote powerfully against caste and communal division; his poem Kora Qadir pleads with Sayyids and Brahmins alike to bury their pride and recognise their common humanity. His short lyric Boli Hai Punjabi Saadi, a defiant love song to the mother tongue, is still recited wherever Punjabis gather.

Printer and language builder

Unusually for a poet, Chatrik was also a master of the printing trade, and this second calling may be his greatest service to Punjab. He standardised the type set for the Gurmukhi script and, at his Sudarshan Printing Press in Amritsar, used modern technique to print the Guru Granth Sahib and Bhai Kahn Singh Nabha's Mahan Kosh, the first great Punjabi dictionary. He quite literally built the machinery that carried Punjabi literature into the modern age of print.

His devotion to the language extended to public life. In 1926 he became president of the Punjabi Sahit Sabha, the Punjabi literary society, and he worked all his life to win Punjabi its due status among the people and the government. He has been called Punjab's greatest lyricist, and the Sahitya Akademi honoured him with a dedicated volume in 1988, while Punjabi University, Patiala, dedicated its annual diary to his memory.

Legacy

Dhani Ram Chatrik died on 18 December 1954, at the age of seventy-eight. He left behind a double legacy: as a poet who gave modern Punjabi its popular voice, and as a craftsman who gave the language its printed form. His poems remain in school syllabi, his songs are still sung, and every Punjabi book set in clean Gurmukhi type owes something to the boy from Sheikhupura who went to Bombay to learn how letters are made.