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About the book

Wadda Vela is a Punjabi poetry collection by Mohan Singh, published in 1958. The Encyclopaedia of the Sikhs places it late in the sequence of his books, after Aawazan (1954) and before Jandre (1964), in a bibliography that runs from Saave Pater (1936) and Kasumbhra (1939) to the epic Nanakayan (1971) and Buhe (1977). A year after it appeared, the book carried its author to the honour that fixed his public standing: the Sahitya Akademi Award for 1959, given for Wadda Vela as a work of poetry, an award recorded by both the Encyclopaedia tradition and SikhiWiki.

By 1958 Mohan Singh was no longer the young romantic of Saave Pater. He had taught Persian at Khalsa College, Amritsar, founded the monthly Panj Darya in 1939 and run his own publishing firm through the Partition, which moved his business from Lahore to Amritsar and then Jalandhar. Wadda Vela is the book of the settled, post Partition poet, and its award made official what Punjabi readers already knew: that the romantic who had remade the love poem had become the representative Punjabi poet of his age.

What is Wadda Vela about?

SikhiWiki, glossing the title as Early Morning, groups Wadda Vela with Aawazan and Jandre as the collections that gave poignant expression to life groaning under overwhelming forces: exploitation, inequality, illiteracy and obscurantism. That is the centre of the book. The dawn of the title is not a private mood. It is the hoped for morning of a society still waiting for light, written by a poet SikhiWiki describes as a progressive who wanted to change the world for the betterment of the common man.

The love poetry has not gone. It has changed its address. SikhiWiki traces the poet's development as a progression from romance to reality, from conventional love to an uninhibited expression of the man and woman relationship, in a poetry that graduated from feathers to iron under the influence of Marx and Freud. In Wadda Vela the two halves of that development stand together: the lyric gift that made him famous, now carrying the weight of a groaning world, and a social conscience that never stops the poems from singing.

The Sahitya Akademi Award

In 1959 Wadda Vela received the Sahitya Akademi Award for Punjabi poetry. The award matters in the book's own story because of what it recognised. The Akademi did not honour the early romantic collections that had made Mohan Singh popular in the 1930s. It honoured the mature book of 1958, in which the love poet of Saave Pater and Kasumbhra had become a poet of exploitation, inequality and the common man's dawn. The national honour therefore marks the exact point where the romantic progressive arc of his career was complete and publicly sealed.

ਲੇਖਕ

Mohan Singh (1905 to 1978) was born in Mardan, now in Pakistan, and belonged to Dhamial, his ancestral village near Rawalpindi. He took a master's degree in Persian and from 1933 to 1939 taught Persian at Khalsa College, Amritsar, where Teja Singh, Sant Singh Sekhon and Gurbachan Singh Talib became his friends and he read Blake, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth and Browning. He founded Panj Darya in 1939, lectured at Sikh National College, Lahore, then left teaching for his firm Hind Publishers. After the Partition of 1947 he shifted the business to Amritsar and then to Jalandhar, later taught at Khalsa College, Patiala, and was appointed Professor Emeritus at Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana, where he died on 3 May 1978.

Reception and legacy

The Encyclopaedia of the Sikhs calls Mohan Singh a major force in Punjabi poetry after 1935 who influenced the generations that followed, created new norms in Punjabi poetry and created the language of new metaphors, and who is considered the most important Punjabi poet after Waris Shah. SikhiWiki goes one step further and records that he has been hailed as the greatest Punjabi poet of the 20th century, naming Amrita Pritam, Harbhajan Singh and Shiv Kumar Batalvi among the poets who contributed alongside him to the growth of modern Punjabi poetry.

Within that standing, Wadda Vela holds the certificate. Saave Pater is the book that made him loved and Kasumbhra the book that made him modern, but Wadda Vela is the collection the nation chose to honour, and it remains the natural summit of a first reading of Mohan Singh: start with the green leaves of 1936, pass through the red oleander of 1939, and finish at the great morning of 1958, the book in which Punjab's romantic revolutionary asked what the dawn would cost and who it was for.