Bhai Vir Singh Jiਭਾਈ ਵੀਰ ਸਿੰਘ ਜੀ

Bhai Vir Singh Ji (5 December 1872 to 10 June 1957) was a Sikh poet, scholar and theologian from Amritsar, called the father of modern Punjabi literature. He gave Punjabi its first novel, its first epic and its modern lyric, and he helped the Sikhs of his time take pride again in their language and faith. His books are still read today.

Early life and education

Bhai Vir Singh Ji was born on 5 December 1872 in Amritsar, the eldest of Dr Charan Singh's three sons. His family traced its ancestry back to Diwan Kaura Mal, once vice-governor of Multan. His grandfather, Kahn Singh (1788 to 1878), had spent his youth in monasteries at Haridwar and Amritsar, learning Sanskrit and Braj and the old systems of medicine. That learning passed to his only son, Charan Singh (1853 to 1908), a Braj poet, prose writer, musicologist and lexicographer.

From his mother's side came another tradition. His maternal grandfather, Giani Hazara Singh (1828 to 1908), was a leading scholar of the Gianian Bunga in Amritsar, a school of Sikh exegesis going back to the time of Guru Gobind Singh Ji. Giani Hazara Singh translated Saadi's Gulistan and Bustan into Punjabi, and he wrote a commentary on the vars of Bhai Gurdas Ji. As a schoolboy, young Vir Singh spent much of his time with his grandfather, learning Sanskrit, Persian and Braj and the science of Sikh exegesis.

His schooling joined old learning with new. He learned Persian and Urdu from a Muslim maulvi in a mosque, and Sanskrit and Sikh literature from Giani Harbhajan Singh. Then he joined the Church Mission School in Amritsar and took his matriculation examination in 1891, first in the entire district. At school, watching some classmates convert to Christianity strengthened his own religious conviction. The missionaries showed him how powerful the written word could be, and his English courses taught him the modern literary forms, above all the short lyric. At seventeen he married Chatar Kaur, daughter of Sardar Narain Singh of Amritsar, and they had two daughters.

The Khalsa Tract Society and Khalsa Samachar

Bhai Vir Singh Ji grew up in an age of ferment. Sikh sovereignty in Punjab had ended and the old aristocracy was in decline, and Christian, Muslim and Hindu movements were all seeking converts among the Sikhs, while many feared the faith would be absorbed. The Singh Sabha movement arose to answer that fear, with Bhai Vir Singh Ji as its literary voice. He did not seek a career in government service. He chose the calling of a writer, and he set out to build the presses and papers it needed.

A year after his matriculation he set up a lithograph press with Bhai Wazir Singh, a friend of his father's, and first wrote and printed geography textbooks for schools. When Wazir Singh died, Bhai Vir Singh Ji bought the press, which became the Wazir Hind Press, the main press publishing literature for the Singh Sabha movement.

In 1894 he launched the Khalsa Tract Society to promote the Singh Sabha's aims, and its cheap tracts carried Sikh theology, history and reform to readers who could not afford books. The tracts introduced a new kind of literary Punjabi, plain, light of touch and fresh in expression, and in that writing lay the beginnings of modern Punjabi prose. The Society's journal, Nirguniara, put him in touch with a widening circle of readers, and some of his greatest works were first serialised in its columns. In November 1899 he started a Punjabi weekly, the Khalsa Samachar.

He was also among the principal promoters of the institutions that carried the renewal forward: the Chief Khalsa Diwan, the Sikh Educational Society (1908) and the Punjab and Sind Bank (1908, with Sir Sunder Singh Majitha and Sardar Tarlochan Singh).

The novels that created Punjabi fiction

His literary career began with romances that proved to be the forerunners of the Punjabi novel, and his four novels are still the foundation of Punjabi fiction. Sundari, published in 1898, is regarded as the first novel in Punjabi. Its heroine, Sunder Kaur, converts to Sikhism and joins a band of Sikh warriors in the jungles. Bijay Singh followed in 1899; Satwant Kaur appeared in two parts, the first in 1900 and the second in 1927. Baba Naudh Singh, full title Subhagji da Sudhar Hathin Baba Naudh Singh, was serialised in Nirguniara from 1907 and published in book form in 1921.

All four novels look back to the heroic eighteenth century, and they give their readers models of courage, fortitude and human dignity. But they are not only tales of war. Baba Naudh Singh, the most realistic of the four, follows a widow, Subhagji, searching for reunion with her dead husband, and it weaves social reform and moral teaching into scenes of ordinary town life. The novels championed Sikh identity without devaluing other religions, and he even reproved the destruction of Hindu idols in Kashmir in his book Avantipur de Khandar.

The women of his novels were new in Punjabi writing. Sunder Kaur, Rani Raj Kaur, Satwant Kaur, Subhagji and Sushil Kaur are strong, well rounded characters, and Sikh teaching on the equality of men and women runs through them. He often showed his women as more open to spiritual enlightenment than the men around them, and his heroines are still held up as an inspiration.

Poetry, epic and scholarship

In 1905 he began serialising Rana Surat Singh, the first Punjabi epic, written in blank verse. Its widowed queen, Rani Raj Kaur, searches for her lost paradise, and the poem, more than 14,000 lines long, turns her journey into a picture of the Sikh people emerging from defeat and despair into a fresh beginning. It appeared in book form in 1919, and he then turned to shorter poems and lyrics. Then came Dil Tarang (1920), Tarel Tupke (1921), Lahiran de Har (1921), Matak Hulare (1922) and Bijlian de Har (1927), and much later Mere Sayian Jio (1953). In this poetry he refined the old verse forms, naturalised the rubai from Urdu, and grafted old forms onto English blank verse, paving the way for the modern Punjabi poem. The first play written in Punjabi, Raja Lakhdata Singh (1910), also came from his pen.

He revised and enlarged his grandfather's dictionary, Sri Guru Granth Kosh, first published in 1898; the revised version appeared in 1927. He published critical editions of old Sikh texts: Sikhan di Bhagat Mala (1912), Prachin Panth Prakash (1914), Puratan Janam Sakhi (1926) and Sakhi Pothi (1950). His annotation of Kavi Santokh Singh's Suraj Prakash, published from 1927 to 1935 in fourteen volumes covering 6,668 pages, was his longest undertaking. His lives of Guru Nanak Dev Ji and Guru Gobind Singh Ji, Sri Guru Nanak Chamatkar and Sri Guru Kalgidhar Chamatkar, were first serialised in Nirguniara.

The last great labour of his life was a detailed commentary on Guru Granth Sahib. He had annotated selections from it as early as 1906, in Panj Granth Steek, and he said himself that all of his writing was an exposition of Gurbani. It remained unfinished at his death, but the portion he had completed, nearly half of the holy book, was published after his death in seven large volumes.

Why is Bhai Vir Singh called the father of modern Punjabi literature?

The title is not a flourish. Before him, Punjabi literary writing lived largely in Braj or in folk forms, and there was no modern Punjabi prose, no Punjabi novel, no Punjabi epic and no Punjabi lyric as readers know them today. He created or transformed every one of them, and he did it in a language ordinary Punjabis could read, at a price they could afford, through tracts and a weekly paper that reached the villages. His lyric poems carried the Shabad into a form Punjabis had never heard before. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism calls him the creator of modern Punjabi literature, and every history since has used the same words. He was honoured with the title of Bhai, the Brother of the Sikh Order, very early.

Honours and legacy

Recognition came in his lifetime: the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1955 for Mere Sayian Jio, the first Sahitya Akademi Award ever given for Punjabi writing, and the Padma Bhushan in 1956. In early 1957 he was taken ill with a fever. He died at his home in Amritsar on 10 June 1957, aged 84. India issued a stamp for his birth centenary in 1972, and his house on Lawrence Road in Amritsar is kept as a memorial for visitors.

His legacy is not a single book but a whole literature. The novel, the epic, the lyric, the play, the essay and the critical edition all begin their modern life in Punjabi with him, and the institutions he helped to found carried his work into the next century. For a man who set out at eighteen to teach his people their own faith through the written word, there could be no fuller answer.