ਪੂਰਨ ਸਿੰਘਪੂਰਨ ਸਿੰਘ

Early life and the Japan years

Puran Singh was born on 17 February 1881 at Salhad, near Abbottabad, in what was then the Punjab province of British India and is today in Pakistan. His father, Kartar Singh, worked in the revenue department, and the family's ancestral home was Dera Khalsa in Rawalpindi district. He passed his matriculation examination at the Mission High School in Rawalpindi in 1897 and the Intermediate examination at D.A.V. College, Lahore, in 1899.

A scholarship then took him further than almost any Punjabi student of his generation travelled. He left for Japan in April 1900, learned Japanese and German, and entered Tokyo University that September, graduating in industrial chemistry with a focus on pharmaceutical sciences in 1903. In Japan he lectured publicly against British rule, published an English monthly called The Thundering Dawn, and fell under the spell of the art scholar Okakura Kakuzo, for a time living as a Buddhist monk. Before sailing home in September 1903 he met the mystic Swami Ram Tirtha and took the vows of a sanyasi. He married Maya Devi in 1904 and resumed the life of a householder.

Scientist and seeker

Science paid for the poetry. Back in India, Puran Singh first distilled essential oils in Lahore, producing thymol and fennel and lemon oils, and served as principal of the Victoria Diamond Jubilee Hindu Technical Institute in the city. In April 1907 he joined the Forest Research Institute at Dehradun as a forest chemist, and over the next eleven years he published a stream of research papers on forest products: catechin and cutch, shellac, turpentine, sandalwood oil and the chemistry of Indian timbers. He is counted among the founders of the chemistry of forest products in India.

The seeker in him never settled. At a Sikh Educational Conference in Sialkot in 1912 he met Bhai Vir Singh, the great figure of modern Punjabi letters, and under that influence he returned to the Sikh faith of his birth, now as a mystic poet of a highly original kind. He resigned from the institute in 1918, worked in the princely states of Patiala and Gwalior, where he turned dry land green with rosha grass, eucalyptus and fruit trees, and then joined a sugar factory, where he devised a method of refining sugar without bone charcoal that the Indian sugar industry welcomed.

How did Puran Singh change Punjabi poetry?

He set it free of metre. Puran Singh is credited with introducing free verse into Punjabi poetry, following the example of the American poet Walt Whitman, whose expansive humanism shaped both his verse and his worldview, alongside thinkers such as Emerson, Carlyle and Thoreau. Where Punjabi poetry had lived inside fixed metres for centuries, his lines grew organically from their subject, rising and falling like speech or song.

The titles of his Punjabi collections announce the programme: Khulle Maidan (Open Fields, 1923), Khulle Ghund (Open Veils, 1923) and Khulle Asmani Rang (Boundless Colours of the Sky), followed by the prose of Khulle Lekh (1929). Their subject was Punjab itself: its villagers, peasants and poor, its rivers, trees and fields, sung in a direct and ecstatic voice that Punjabi had not heard before. His best-known lines celebrate the young men of Punjab, careless of death, submissive to no one, and living in the name of the Gurus.

Writing in English and the Nankana Sahib years

Puran Singh wrote in English with the same fluency, aiming to carry India's spiritual heritage to Western readers. The Sisters of the Spinning Wheel (1921), Unstrung Beads (1923), The Spirit of Oriental Poetry (1926) and The Book of Ten Masters (1926), his meditations on the Sikh Gurus, are the best known of his English books, along with Spirit Born People (1928) and Seven Baskets of Prose Poems (1928). He also translated Bhai Vir Singh's poems into English as Nargas (1924). In all he left dozens of volumes and research papers across English, Punjabi and Hindi.

In 1926 he leased farmland at Chak 73, near Nankana Sahib, and grew rosha grass on a commercial scale among Muslim peasant neighbours who, by local account, regarded him as their pir. Floods in 1928 destroyed much of the plantation, though his manuscripts were saved. It was on that farm, in those years, that he wrote many of the Punjabi poems on which his reputation rests.

Death and legacy

In 1930 Puran Singh fell ill with tuberculosis, and he died at Dehradun on 31 March 1931, aged fifty. Two of his largest works, The Spirit of the Sikh and the novel Prakasina, were still unpublished at his death; their manuscripts reached Punjabi University, Patiala, which published his collected works and later brought the unpublished books out, Prakasina in 1980 and The Spirit of the Sikh in 1981.

Puran Singh is remembered as one of the founders of modern Punjabi poetry, the poet who taught Punjabi verse to breathe in the open air. Scientist, monk, farmer and mystic at different hours of the same life, he believed the divine was to be found in the open field, in honest labour and in the unbounded human heart, and his poetry still carries that conviction.