Surjit Patarਸੁਰਜੀਤ ਪਾਤਰ

Early life

Surjit Patar was born on 14 January 1945 in the village of Patar Kalan in Jalandhar district, in Punjab’s Doaba region — the village that gave him his pen name. His father, Harbhajan Singh, migrated to Kenya for work and was home only in brief spells, so the boy grew up largely in the company of his mother and four older sisters, in a household where absence and longing were part of daily life.

He matriculated from a village school and went to college in Kapurthala, switching from science to the arts — a change of direction that set the course of his life. He graduated from Randhir College, took a master’s degree from Punjabi University, Patiala, and then a PhD from Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, on ‘Transformation of Folklore in Guru Nanak Vani’ — a thesis that showed where his heart lay: in the folk roots of Punjabi expression.

The professor-poet

Patar joined the academic profession and retired as Professor of Punjabi at Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana. The campus, with its tree-lined roads and its distance from the literary cliques of the big cities, suited him. He began writing poetry in the mid-1960s, and his collections — Hawa Vich Likhe Harf (Words Written in the Air), Birkh Arz Kare (Thus Spake the Tree), Hanere Vich Sulagdi Varnmala (Words Smouldering in the Dark), Lafzaan Di Dargah (Shrine of Words), Patjhar Di Pazeb (Anklet of Autumn) — made him the most beloved Punjabi poet of his generation.

His verse is deceptively simple: short lines, images drawn from village life and nature, a music that makes his poems loved by ordinary readers and admired by critics. He wrote of trees and seasons and the quiet dignities of rural Punjab, but also of darkness — the title Hanere Vich Sulagdi Varnmala, words smouldering in the dark, catches the undertow of melancholy in his work.

Translator and man of letters

Patar was also one of Punjabi’s great translators. He rendered into Punjabi the three tragedies of Federico García Lorca, Girish Karnad’s play Nagmandala, and poems of Bertolt Brecht and Pablo Neruda, and adapted plays from Euripides, Racine and Jean Giraudoux for the Punjabi stage. He wrote television scripts on Punjabi poets from Sheikh Farid to Shiv Kumar Batalvi, and film dialogue for Shaheed Uddham Singh.

He led the state’s literary institutions, serving as president of the Punjab Arts Council in Chandigarh and earlier of the Punjabi Sahit Akademi in Ludhiana — roles in which he championed young writers and fought for the language’s place in public life.

Honours and legacy

The honours accumulated: the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1993 for Hanere Vich Sulagdi Varnmala, the Saraswati Samman, and in 2012 the Padma Shri for literature and education. He died of cardiac arrest at his home on Barewal Road in Ludhiana on 11 May 2024, at seventy-nine, and was cremated with full state honours — the chief minister himself shouldering the bier.

For Punjabis, Patar was the poet of the everyday made luminous. His lines are quoted at weddings and funerals, painted on trucks, and taught in schools. He showed that Punjabi poetry could be both popular and profound, and his death felt, across the state, like the dimming of a lamp.