Puran Singhਪੂਰਨ ਸਿੰਘ

Early life and Japan

Puran Singh was born on 17 February 1881 in Salhad, near Abbottabad, in what is today Pakistan. He passed his matriculation examination at the Mission High School in Rawalpindi in 1897, and his ability won him a scholarship that took him, remarkably for a Punjabi youth of that era, to Japan. From 1900 to 1903 he studied at Tokyo University, earning a degree in industrial chemistry with a focus on pharmaceutical sciences.

Japan changed him in more ways than one. He came under the influence of the Buddhist monk Kakuzo Okakura and for a time became a Buddhist monk himself; later, drawn to the mystic Swami Ramtirtha, he lived as a Hindu sanyasi. These were not poses but a genuine spiritual restlessness, the same hunger that would later fill his poetry. He married Maya Devi in 1904 and began to look for a way to unite his scientific training with his inner life.

Scientist and seeker

Returning to India, Puran Singh worked as a chemist, and in 1907 he joined the Forest Research Institute at Dehradun as a forest chemist. His research on essential oils and forest products was genuinely distinguished; he is counted among the founders of the chemistry of forest products in India. He determined the composition of Coorg rubber, developed tests for timber and beeswax, and with colleagues prepared charcoal briquettes from Indian woods. Later, as a sugar chemist, he patented a method for refining sugar without bone charcoal, a technique welcomed across the Indian sugar industry.

In 1912, at a Sikh Educational Conference in Sialkot, he met Bhai Vir Singh, and the encounter settled his wandering. Under Vir Singh's influence he returned to his Sikh roots as a mystic poet, though of a highly original kind. In 1918 he resigned from the Forest Research Institute, unable to bear institutional life, and after brief stints in Gwalior and at a sugar factory he leased farmland near Nankana Sahib. It was on that farm, among the Muslim peasant neighbours who regarded him as their pir, that he wrote his great Punjabi poems.

The poet of free verse

Puran Singh is credited with introducing free verse into Punjabi poetry, inspired by his admiration for Walt Whitman. Like Whitman, he believed the form of a poem should grow organically from its subject, and all his Punjabi poetry is written in verse libre. His collections Khulle Maidan, Khulle Ghund, Khulle Asmani Rang and Khulle Lekh, their very titles proclaiming openness, sang of villagers, peasants and the poor in a direct, ecstatic voice that Punjabi had never heard before.

He wrote with equal power in English. His books Sisters of the Spinning Wheel, Unstrung Beads and The Spirit of Oriental Poetry carried his vision of India's spiritual heritage to Western readers, and his prose meditations on the Sikh Gurus remain influential. In all he left some two dozen volumes in English, Punjabi and Hindi, a body of work that Punjabi University, Patiala, has since published in full.

Legacy

Puran Singh died on 31 March 1931 in Dehradun, at the age of fifty. He had dreamed, half-seriously, of a Nobel Prize in literature, and though it never came, his place in Punjabi letters is secure as one of the founders of modern Punjabi poetry. Scientist, monk, farmer and mystic, he lived as though the boundaries between those callings were an illusion, and his poetry still carries that conviction: that the divine is to be found in the open field, in honest labour, and in the unbounded human heart.