ਸਾਡੇ ਸਮਿਆਂ ਵਿਚਸਾਡੇ ਸਮਿਆਂ ਵਿਚ

About the book

Sade Samian Vich, In Our Times, is a Punjabi poetry collection by Pash, published in 1978. Pash was the pen name of Avtar Singh Sandhu (9 September 1950 to 23 March 1988) of Talwandi Salem in Jalandhar district, the most influential political poet in modern Punjabi and a major voice of the Naxalite movement in the Punjab of the 1970s. This is his third collection, and the last book of poems he published in his lifetime.

The book stands in a short, fierce row. Loh-Katha, Iron Tale, came in 1970, when the poet was about twenty, and its militant tone brought a murder charge, nearly two years in jail and then acquittal. Udde Baajan Magar, Following the Flying Hawks, followed in 1973. Sade Samian Vich came five years later, in 1978, and after it Pash published no further collection in his lifetime: Khilre Hoey Varkey, Scattered Pages, appeared posthumously in 1989, a year after his assassination.

What does Sade Samian Vich mean?

Sade Samian Vich means In Our Times. The title is a claim about the poems: they do not escape into legend or into a golden past. They report on the time the poet and his readers were actually living through, the Punjab and India of the 1970s, with its landlords and moneylenders, its police stations and prisons, its strikes and its silences.

That present tense is the book's method. Again and again Pash tests ordinary life against the promises made to it, and finds the gap between the two to be the true subject. A poem of the same year, Taithon Bina, Without You, turns the test on the poet himself: without you, he writes, Avtar Singh Sandhu is Pash, and that is nothing else besides. The man and the pen name, the poem insists, are one witness.

Themes: a decade speaking in the poems

The years behind the 1978 collection were years of arrest. After the first arrest of May 1970 came arrest again during student unrest in 1972, during the countrywide railway strike of 1974, and for an unspecified time during the Emergency. Tejwant Singh Gill, whose Sahitya Akademi monograph Pash appeared in 1999, wrote that any strike announced or agitation launched signalled his arrest. His poem Haath, Hands, written in 1973, gave those years their answer: hands remain hands, inside or outside pockets, in handcuffs or on the trigger of a rifle.

The targets stay consistent across the world of these poems: state oppression, religious fundamentalism, feudalism and landlordism, and the industrialists, traders and politicians who profited from all four. Against them the poems set the labourer, the peasant and the young, and a stubborn refusal to accept that two and two make three, the bitter joke of an earlier Pash poem in which accepting official lies is the only arithmetic the powerful require.

ਲੇਖਕ

Pash was born in Talwandi Salem, a village in Jalandhar district, into a middle class farming family. His father, Sohan Singh Sandhu, was a soldier in the Indian Army who also composed poetry as a hobby, so verse was in the house before the revolution was. Pash grew up amid the Naxalite movement and the Green Revolution, which eased the fear of famine in Punjab while deepening other inequalities, and his poetry took its side early and never changed it.

After his acquittal he edited the literary magazine Siarh, The Plow Line, and in 1973 founded the Punjabi Sahit Te Sabhiachar Manch, a forum for Punjabi literature and culture. A fellowship at the Punjabi Academy of Letters came in 1985, then tours of the United Kingdom and the United States in 1986, where he joined the Anti-47 Front against Sikh extremist violence. In March 1988, in Punjab to renew his visa, he was gunned down with his friend Hans Raj at the well in Talwandi Salem on 23 March 1988, a day before he was to leave for Delhi.

Reception and legacy

Pash's poems have been translated into many languages, including other Indian languages, Nepali and English. His most cited poem, Sab Ton Khatarnak, The Most Dangerous Thing, entered the NCERT Hindi textbook for Class 11 in 2005, taking a Punjabi revolutionary's warning about the death of dreams into classrooms across India. Recitations of his poems are still held in Punjab and beyond, especially around the weekend nearest his death anniversary.

Scholarship followed the recitations. Tejwant Singh Gill's Pash, published by the Sahitya Akademi in its Makers of Indian Literature series in 1999, is the standard short study of the poet. After his death, Khilre Hoey Varkey was followed by his journals and letters, completing the record of a writing life that lasted less than two decades and produced four collections.

Why does Sade Samian Vich still matter?

Because it is the mature middle of a short shelf. Loh-Katha is the young man's thunderclap and Khilre Hoey Varkey the scattered pages gathered after a murder, but Sade Samian Vich is the working poet in his own times, measuring a decade of prisons, strikes and Emergency against the people who had to live through it. Anyone who wants to understand why Pash is still recited at protests in Punjab, and far beyond it, will find the reasons gathered here, in the book that named its own moment.