ਪੀੜਾਂ ਦਾ ਪਰਾਗਾਪੀੜਾਂ ਦਾ ਪਰਾਗਾ

About the book

Piran Da Paraga is the first book of Shiv Kumar Batalvi, published in 1960 by Lok Sahit Prakashan of Amritsar. It gathers 25 poems written between 1957 and 1960, the years in which a college student from Batala who had sung folk and film songs began to sing his own poems instead. The collection became an instant success, and it made the name of a poet still in his early twenties.

The book arrived at a turning point in Punjabi poetry. The classical Sufi and qissa centuries were long past, and the post Partition field was dominated by senior figures such as Mohan Singh and Amrita Pritam. Into that company stepped a young poet whose weapons were the folk song, the village image and an unsparing subject: his own sorrow. Senior Batala writers, Jaswant Singh Rahi, Kartar Singh Balgan and Barkat Ram Yumman among them, took him under their wings, and Yumman introduced him to the kavi darbars, the poetry gatherings where his way of singing his own verse would soon make him the star attraction.

What does Piran Da Paraga mean?

Piran is the plural of pir, pain. A paraga is a handful, the measure a farmer scoops up in one palm, and translators have rendered the title both as A Handful of Pains, in the standard scholarly survey of his poetry, and as The Scarf of Sorrows. Either way the measure is deliberately small. The young poet is not claiming an ocean of grief. He is holding out one handful, and asking the reader to feel its weight.

The title proved prophetic as a programme. Pain, and specifically birha, the pain of separation from the beloved, became the signature subject of everything Batalvi wrote, until admirers named him Birha Da Sultan, the sultan of separation. This first handful contains the whole later harvest in seed.

Themes: the pain of separation

The scholarly survey of his poetry in the Journal of Punjab Studies describes this collection plainly: poems expressing pain and sorrow of separation, and his desire for death. That bluntness is the book's character. Poem after poem returns to parting: the beloved gone, the season turned, the singer left with a voice and nothing to spend it on. In his early twenties Batalvi was already rehearsing the farewell he would sing for the rest of his short life.

What kept the sorrow from becoming monotone was the world it moved through. Batalvi's imagination had been stocked in childhood by Ramlila performances, wandering minstrel singers and snake charmers, and by the streams and mango orchards of his home village, Bara Pind Lohtian. The survey of his work notes that these early impressions gave his poetry its haunting stock of images and its rural flavour. In Piran Da Paraga that stock is already on the page: grief spoken in the language of fields, fairs and village nights.

ਲੇਖਕ

Shiv Kumar was born on 23 July 1936 at Bara Pind Lohtian, in what was then Gurdaspur district and is now in Pakistan. Partition brought his family to Batala in 1947, and the town gave him his pen name, Batalvi. He passed his matriculation in 1953, then drifted in and out of colleges at Batala, Nabha and Qadian without taking a degree. It was in his final year at S. N. College, Qadian, in 1957, that he started writing poetry in Punjabi: the poems of this book are that beginning, gathered as he wrote them.

The career that followed was brief and blazing. Five collections appeared between 1960 and 1965, ending with the verse play Loona, which in 1967 made him the youngest recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Award. He sang his poems at kavi darbars to pin drop silence, married Aruna in 1967, and died at Kiri Mangial on 6 May 1973, aged 36, having predicted his early death in verse for years.

Reception and legacy

Was Piran Da Paraga a success? By every account, immediately. Summaries of his life call the first anthology an instant success, and the evidence is in what followed: a second collection, Lajwanti, within a year, showing a maturity the survey finds less prominent in this first book, and a run of books that carried him to Loona in five years. The first collection is the apprentice work of a master, and it reads that way: uneven in the manner of first books, and already unmistakably his.

Scholars kept returning to it. Pritam Saini's 1979 study of Batalvi's thought and art gives this collection a special study of its own, and the Journal of Punjab Studies survey begins its account of the poetry here, with the early pangs of birha from which the later, more complex work grew. For a reader meeting Batalvi for the first time, Piran Da Paraga is the right door: 25 short poems, the folk tune already in the voice, the sorrow already complete.