ਆਟੇ ਦੀਆਂ ਚਿੜੀਆਂਆਟੇ ਦੀਆਂ ਚਿੜੀਆਂ

About the book

Aate Diyan Chidiyan, Punjabi for The Sparrows of Flour, is a collection of poems by Shiv Kumar Batalvi, published in 1962. It was the third of the collections he published in the first half of the 1960s, a burst of writing that ran from Piran da Paraga (1960) to Loona (1965). It came after Piran da Paraga (1960) and Lajwanti (1961), and before Mainu Vida Karo (1963) and Loona (1965), the verse play that won him the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1967. The poems are short lyrics and geet, songs written to be sung as much as read, and they carry the voice that made Batalvi the most loved modern poet in Punjabi: tender, musical and full of longing.

What the poems are about

The poems are about love and separation, the condition Batalvi's readers call birha. A lover waits, a beloved leaves, a mother is remembered, a village is lost. The settings are the small things of rural Punjab: sparrows at the doorstep, wheat fields, wells, the riverbank, the courtyard of a village home. Batalvi writes in the first person, as a lover speaking, and his language stays close to the Punjabi folk song, plain words set to a lilting rhythm. What set him apart was that he took this old folk voice and made it carry modern feeling. A study of his life notes that he fused new ways of expressing modern sensibility with the spirit of Punjab's culture and the charm of classical Punjabi poetry and folk songs. The result is poetry that sounds both old and new at once, which is why it travelled so easily from the printed page to the singer's stage.

The title poem

The book takes its name from one of its poems, Aate Diyan Chidiyan, the sparrows of flour. The image is a village one, small and homely: sparrows shaped from kneaded flour, the everyday stuff of a Punjabi kitchen turned into a song. It gives the whole collection its mood. These are not grand poems about kings and battles. They are poems about fragile, ordinary things, a bird, a field, a parting at a village gate, and the ache they leave behind. Readers who know Batalvi only through Loona meet a different poet here: younger, lighter in touch, still finding the voice that would later carry his masterpiece.

ਲੇਖਕ

Shiv Kumar Batalvi was born on 23 July 1936 in Bara Pind Lohtian, a village in Shakargarh tehsil that now lies in Narowal district of Pakistan. His family left the village during the Partition of 1947 and settled in Batala, on the Indian side of the new border, and the loss of his childhood village stayed with him for the rest of his short life. He began writing poetry in Punjabi in 1957, while a student at S.N. College in Qadian, and his first collection, Piran da Paraga, appeared in 1960, when he was twenty-four. Within five years he had published his early collections and Loona, and in 1967 he became the youngest writer to receive the Sahitya Akademi Award. He joined the State Bank of India in Chandigarh in 1968, visited England in 1972, and died on 6 May 1973 at Kiri Mangyal, aged thirty-six.

Why is Aate Diyan Chidiyan still read?

Because its poems refused to stay on the page. Batalvi sang his own verse at kavi darbars, poetry gatherings where audiences fell silent to listen, and singers have carried his lyrics ever since. Jagjit Singh, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Hans Raj Hans and Ghulam Ali are among those who sang his poems, and his lines still turn up in films, from Ajj Din Chhadeya in Love Aaj Kal (2009) to Ikk Kudi Jihda Naam Mohabbat in Udta Punjab (2016). Readers often know the lines before they know whose they are. Aate Diyan Chidiyan is where that afterlife began: the early lyrics, written when Batalvi was twenty-six, already carry the music and the ache that later made him famous. A bookseller's guide to his work advises starting with the short lyric collections before coming to Loona, and this is one of the collections it means.

Reception and legacy

The collection appeared when Batalvi was becoming the star of Punjab's kavi darbars, the poet audiences waited for above all others. By the end of the five years from 1960 to 1965 he was, in the words of one study of his life, a living legend and the most sought-after Punjabi poet of his day. He is remembered now as Birha da Sultan, the king of separation, and the name fits this book as well as any: nearly every poem is about longing or loss. The Shiv Kumar Batalvi Award is given each year in his honour, an auditorium in Batala carries his name, and his poems live on in print in the collected volume Shiv Kumar: Samuchi Kavita. Aate Diyan Chidiyan is the early evidence of why: a young poet, writing about sparrows and partings, already speaking in the voice Punjab still recognises as its own.