ਪਾਸ਼ਪਾਸ਼

Pash (9 September 1950 to 23 March 1988), born Avtar Singh Sandhu in Talwandi Salem, Jalandhar district, was a Punjabi revolutionary poet. His collections Loh-Katha, Uddade Bazan Magar and Saade Samiyan Vich made him the defining poetic voice of Punjab's Naxalite years, until militants assassinated him at thirty-seven.

Early life in Talwandi Salem

Pash was born in ਤਲਵੰਡੀ ਸਲੇਮ, a village in Jalandhar district, into a middle class farming family. His father, Sohan Singh Sandhu, served in the Indian Army and also wrote poetry as a hobby, so verse was part of the household long before the son made it his life's work. The Punjab of his childhood was living through the Green Revolution, which raised harvests but also sharpened the gap between landowners and the poor, and through the first stirrings of the Naxalite movement, which spoke directly to that gap.

His pen name came from literature, not politics. According to Tejwant Singh Gill's Sahitya Akademi study of the poet, Pash took the name from Pasha, the working class character in Maxim Gorky's novel Mother. His reading was wide and international: Bertolt Brecht, Pablo Neruda and Leon Trotsky all shaped his thinking, alongside Faiz Ahmad Faiz and the Punjabi tradition he grew up in. That mix of the local field and the world revolution gave his early poems their distinctive voice: rooted in the village, aimed at the powerful everywhere.

Loh-Katha and the jail years

In 1970, aged about twenty, Pash published his first collection, ਲੋਹ-ਕਥਾ (Iron Tale). Its fierce, direct language, attacking landlords, moneylenders and a complacent state, announced a new kind of Punjabi poetry. The establishment reacted quickly. After a brick kiln owner in nearby Nakodar was killed by self-proclaimed Naxalites, Pash, who knew the men involved, was arrested and charged, and he spent time in jail before being acquitted. Gill records that arrest became a pattern: any strike or agitation seemed to signal his arrest, and he was detained again during student unrest in 1972, during the railway employees' strike of 1974, and during the Emergency.

Jail did not silence him; it educated him. After his release he read the Russian revolutionaries and Trotsky closely, and his poetry grew more reflective without losing its edge. Two further collections followed in the 1970s: Uddade Bazan Magar (Following the Flying Hawks) in 1973 and Saade Samiyan Vich (In Our Times) in 1978. Together the three books made him, while still in his twenties, the best known young poet of the Punjabi left.

Editor and organiser

Pash believed a poet should also build institutions. By the age of twenty-two he was editing the literary magazine Siarh (The Plough Line) and Rohle Baan (Raging Arrows), both left leaning journals that gave space to new revolutionary writing. In 1973 he founded the Punjabi Sahit Te Sabhiachar Manch, a forum for Punjabi literature and culture. In Siarh he repeatedly opposed religious fanaticism and separatist politics, arguing against any attempt to divide Punjab again on religious lines.

Recognition from the literary world followed the controversy. In 1985 he was awarded a fellowship at the Punjabi Academy of Letters. By then his poems were being read far beyond Punjab's left circles, recited at meetings and printed wherever Punjabi protest poetry travelled.

What is Pash's most famous poem about?

His most famous poem is Sab Ton Khatarnak, usually translated as The Most Dangerous Thing. It argues, in plain and mounting language, that exploitation, police violence and even betrayal are not the worst things that can happen to a person: the most dangerous thing is the death of our dreams, the slide into a numb, routine life in which everything is endured and nothing is felt. The poem's power lies in that turn: the enemy it finally names is not a landlord or a policeman but surrender itself.

The poem has had a long public life. In 2005 it was included in the NCERT Hindi textbook for Class 11, taking Pash into school classrooms across India. It is still recited at protests and gatherings, and recitations of his work are held every year around his death anniversary. Later Punjabi artists have kept citing him: Sidhu Moose Wala named Pash in songs on his 2021 album Moosetape and described himself as a modern day Pash in vision.

Why was Pash killed?

In the 1980s, as armed separatism rose in Punjab, Pash opposed it as firmly as he had opposed the state and the landlords. In 1986 he moved to the United States after receiving death threats from pro-Khalistan militants, having also toured the United Kingdom. In America he brought out the journal Anti-1947, named against the idea of another partition, and used it to criticise extremist violence.

At the beginning of 1988 he was back in Punjab to renew his American visa. On 23 March 1988, a day before he was due to leave for Delhi, three gunmen shot him dead at the well in Talwandi Salem, along with his friend Hans Raj. He was thirty-seven. The date was the martyrdom day of ਭਗਤ ਸਿੰਘ, a coincidence his admirers have never stopped noting: the revolutionary poet was killed on the revolutionary's day.

Legacy

A fourth collection, Khilre Hoye Varkey (Scattered Pages), was published after his death in 1989, followed by his journals and letters, and a selection of his poems, Inkar, was published in Lahore in 1997. His work has been translated into many Indian languages, and into Nepali and English. Tejwant Singh Gill's monograph Pash, published by the Sahitya Akademi in 1999, fixed his place in the official record of Indian literature.

Pash is often compared with ਸ਼ਿਵ ਕੁਮਾਰ ਬਟਾਲਵੀ, the other great Punjabi poet of his generation to die young, though the two wrote in opposite registers: Batalvi the lyric poet of longing, Pash the poet of revolt. With the revolutionary poet ਸੰਤ ਰਾਮ ਉਦਾਸੀ, he forms the core of the Punjabi protest poetry that still supplies slogans, songs and courage to movements in Punjab today. More than three decades after his death, Sahapedia could still describe him as arguably the most influential political Punjabi poet of the twentieth century.