ਲਾਜਵੰਤੀਲਾਜਵੰਤੀ

About the book

Lajwanti is a Punjabi poetry collection by Shiv Kumar Batalvi, published in 1961 by Lahore Book Shop, Ludhiana. It was his second book, appearing a single year after his first collection, Piran da Paraga (1960), made a young poet from Batala suddenly known across Punjab. The bibliography in the study of his life and poetry published in the International Journal of Punjab Studies records the book in that place and under that publisher, and the Central Institute of Indian Languages survey of Punjabi literature lists it in the same early sequence, between Piran da Paraga and Aate Diyan Chiriyan (1962), under the translated title Touch Me Not.

The title is a plant and a portrait at once. Lajwanti is the touch-me-not, the sensitive plant whose leaves fold at a touch, and the journal study translates the title as The Shy Maid. Both renderings point the same way: this is a book about tender things that close against the world, and about the people, above all the village girls of Punjab, who live that tenderness. It appeared in 1961, the year the study records Batalvi resigning from the revenue department post his father had pressed him into: the patwari's job went, and poetry became the whole of his working life.

What is Lajwanti about?

The journal study answers that question by contrast with the book before it. Within a single year, it says, Shiv appeared to have arrived at a level of maturity that was not as prominent in his earlier poetry, and this collection has some remarkable poems on many different subjects. Where Piran da Paraga had gathered the poems of 1957 to 1960 around pain, the sorrow of separation and the desire for death, Lajwanti ranges outward: a poor girl wronged by a landlord, the sun standing over mountain ridges, a beloved located by perfume, dawn and henna coloured light. The study makes a second observation that fits this book exactly. Across his poetry there are subjects Batalvi touched once, wrote one memorable poem on, and then never came back to. Lajwanti is full of those single visits, and they are much of its freshness.

Sheesho: a village girl and a landlord

The poem scholars single out is Sheesho. The study calls it an exceptionally beautiful and comparatively long poem, and states its subject plainly: the exploitation of a poor village girl by the rich landowner. What it praises is the double achievement, the poetic quality of the telling together with the poet's heart wrenching pity and compassion about the poor girl's plight. Nothing in the first collection quite prepares a reader for it, because here the singer of love songs steps aside and lets a village girl's wrong carry the whole poem.

Sheesho matters beyond its own pages. Four years later Batalvi built Loona (1965) around a young wife wronged by the order of her marriage, and the journal study reads that verse play as a profound and perceptive empathy with women's emotions and feelings as victims of social inequity. That sympathy was not new in 1965. It was already present in 1961, in a young poet's second book, turned on a poor girl and a powerful man in a Punjab village.

Songs of nature and love

Beside Sheesho stands a long poem the study quotes simply as Geet, a song, and offers as proof of Batalvi's mastery of describing natural scenery. It opens with the sun hiding behind the high peaks of mountains, planting little seedlings of light. In the translation printed in the study, the yellow sunshine is crushed into small pieces to make anklets for the mountaintops, fragrances flow ankle deep in the wind, birds fall asleep, and through a clump of green trees a water channel flows, piping a melody. These are the folk images of the Punjab village, wells, channels, birds and the blue lotus, raised to a finish no Punjabi lyric poet of his generation matched.

A second song, also titled Geet in the study, turns the same gift to love, and its mood is entirely different from the sadness around it. Where rivulets of perfume flow, there my beloved lives. Where passing breezes halt, where dawn arrives on little bare toes and night throws henna beams on feet, where fragrance bathes in moonlight, there my beloved lives. The study ends its account of the collection with a plain verdict: a number of Shiv's memorable and popular poems are part of this collection. The two songs show why. Nature and the beloved are described in one breath, each lending the other its beauty.

ਲੇਖਕ

Shiv Kumar Batalvi (1936 to 1973) was born on 23 July 1936 in Bara Pind Lohtian, in what is now Pakistan, and his family settled in Batala after the Partition of 1947, from which town he took his pen name. His first collection, Piran da Paraga, appeared in 1960 and was an instant success. Loona (1965) brought him the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1967, making him its youngest recipient at the time. He married Aruna in 1967, worked for a time at the State Bank of India in Chandigarh, and died on 6 May 1973 at Kiri Mangial, aged 36. His poems have been sung by Jagjit Singh and Chitra Singh, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Surinder Kaur, Hans Raj Hans and Ghulam Ali, among many others.

Reception and legacy

Literary histories keep Lajwanti in its exact place in the arc of the career. The Central Institute survey, tracing Batalvi from Piran da Paraga through Lajwanti and Aate Diyan Chiriyan to Main Te Main (1970), finds the theme of disappointment in love, bereavement and despair dominating his poetry, built on lyricism, images and symbols drawn from village life, folk forms and simple language. Against that summary, Lajwanti is the collection that proves the summary incomplete: the despair is here, but so are social anger, landscape painting and compassion for a wronged girl, four years before Loona made those qualities famous.

One caution for readers searching the title. Lajwanti is also the name of Rajinder Singh Bedi's celebrated Urdu short story, whose heroine is a woman abducted during the Partition and taken back by a husband who cannot accept her as before. That is a different work, in a different language. The Lajwanti on this page is Batalvi's 1961 Punjabi poetry collection, and it rewards reading as the hinge of his early career: the book in which the singer of separation showed, in his mid twenties, that pity, landscape and anger at injustice belonged in his songs too.