ਹਰਭਜਨ ਸਿੰਘਹਰਭਜਨ ਸਿੰਘ

Dr Harbhajan Singh (1920 to 2002) was a Punjabi poet, critic and translator who, along with Amrita Pritam, is credited with revolutionising the style of modern Punjabi poetry. Orphaned as a small child in Lahore, he educated himself through odd jobs, became professor of Punjabi at the University of Delhi, published seventeen collections of poems, and received the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Saraswati Samman and the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship.

Which Harbhajan Singh was the Punjabi poet?

The Punjabi poet Harbhajan Singh is not the cricketer of the same name. He was born in 1920, a generation earlier, in Lumding in Assam, and he spent his life in Lahore and Delhi as a teacher, scholar and poet. Search his name and the two lives cross constantly, which is why this page keeps his dates at the front: poet, critic and translator, 1920 to 2002, author of Na Dhuppe Na Chhaven and professor of Punjabi at the University of Delhi until 1984.

An orphaned childhood in Lahore

Harbhajan Singh was born in Lumding, Assam, in 1920, to Ganga Devi and Ganda Singh. His father was ill with tuberculosis and died before the boy was one year old. The family had moved to Lahore, where they had bought two houses in Gawalmandi, but death kept coming: his mother and his two sisters also died, leaving him without a direct family by the time he was four. Sources differ on the exact days of his birth and death, so this page gives the years, on which they all agree.

He was brought up in Ichhra, Lahore, by his mother's younger sister, and he was educated at the local DAV School, where he was a top student from the start and ranked among the top three in Punjab. Money, not ability, stopped his studies. He took odd jobs instead: sales boy at a homeopathic chemist's shop in Lahore, lower division clerk with the Government of India in New Delhi, and assistant librarian at Khalsa School in New Delhi.

Education earned the hard way

Singh completed his higher education largely without regular college, taking two degrees in English and Hindi literature from the University of Delhi. The Sikh Encyclopedia adds an MA in English and Hindi, a Gyani, and a PhD on medieval Hindi poetry preserved in Gurmukhi script. That thesis topic is a clue to the man: from the beginning he worked where languages meet, Hindi poetry in a Punjabi script, and he never stopped crossing those borders.

He began teaching English, moved to Hindi, and finally to Punjabi. The Sikh Encyclopedia traces the climb precisely: senior lecturer and head of the Hindi department at Guru Tegh Bahadur Khalsa College in Delhi from 1951 to 1967, then professor of Punjabi in the Department of Modern Indian Languages at the University of Delhi from 1968 to 1984. He retired as professor emeritus in 1984, lectured at universities across India, and supervised a generation of Punjabi scholars, among them Attar Singh, Tirlok Singh Kanwar, Atamjit Singh, Mohinder Kaur Gill and Satinder Singh. His son Madan Gopal Singh became a well known singer and scholar.

The poetry: a new voice for Punjabi

Literary histories place Harbhajan Singh at the front of the New Poetry in Punjabi literature, the movement that brought the loneliness and isolation of the individual in the machine age into Punjabi verse, a condition he had lived himself as a young man. His poetry argues for the freedom of the individual, with undertones of mysticism in the tradition of Guru Nanak and Waris Shah, and the English Romantics and Iqbal among its influences. Scholars describe the mix as lyrical, humanist and modernist at once: folk song simplicity on the surface, a searching, unsettled mind underneath.

He published seventeen collections of poems. The early landmarks include the verse play Tar Tupka in 1957 and Adh Raini, or Midnight, in 1962. Na Dhuppe Na Chhaven, Neither Sun Nor Shade, in 1967 won him the Sahitya Akademi Award for 1969 and remains his best known book. Sarak De Safe Utte and Main Jo Bit Gaya followed in 1970, Alaf Dupehar in 1972, and the late collection Alvida Ton Pehlan, Before Bidding Goodbye, in 1984 summed up a long career. After retirement he also helped edit the monthly Akas.

Critic and translator between worlds

The poet was also one of Punjabi's busiest scholars. He wrote nineteen works of literary history and criticism, among them Mul Te Mulyankan in 1972, Sahitya Shastra in 1973, Sahitya Siddhant in 1974 and Sahitya Adhyan in 1981, books that taught Punjabi readers how to argue about literature itself. The poets he rated highest tell his map of the world: Guru Nanak and Guru Arjan, Shah Hussain, Waris Shah and Bulleh Shah, Mir Taqi Mir, Lorca, Rabindranath Tagore, Noon Meem Rashid and Puran Singh.

As a translator he carried fourteen works into Punjabi, including Aristotle's Poetics, rendered as Arastu Da Kavya Shastra in 1964, selections from the Rig Veda as Rigbani in 1963, Gorky's My Universities in 1961, Longinus on the sublime in 1970, and work by Sophocles and Tagore. Translation, for him, was not a side activity: it was how a small literature stays in conversation with the whole world.

Honours and later life

The honours came steadily. After the Sahitya Akademi Award of 1969 he received awards from the Delhi Administration in 1974 and the Punjab Government in 1976, and the Soviet Land Nehru Award in 1980. The Kabir Samman, one of India's highest literary honours, given by the Madhya Pradesh Government, followed in 1987. In the 1990s came the Saraswati Samman and, in 1994, the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship, the academy's highest honour: at that time only one other Punjabi writer, Gurbaksh Singh Preetlari, had received it. In 2002, the last year of his life, the Punjabi Sahitya Akademi at Ludhiana gave him its Dhaliwal Sanmaan.

Legacy

Harbhajan Singh died in 2002, aged 82. He left three kinds of work behind him, and each kind still works. The poems gave modern Punjabi poetry a voice for the solitary city dweller. The criticism gave Punjabi scholarship its working vocabulary. The translations gave Punjabi readers Aristotle, the Rig Veda and Gorky in their own language. An orphan from Gawalmandi who once shelved books in a school library for a living ended by stocking the shelves of Punjabi literature itself.