ਸੰਤ ਰਾਮ ਉਦਾਸੀਸੰਤ ਰਾਮ ਉਦਾਸੀ

Early life in Raisar

Sant Ram Udasi was born on 20 April 1939 in Raisar, a Malwa village that then lay in Sangrur district and today falls in Barnala district, Punjab. He was born into a Dalit Mazhabi Sikh family of landless labourers, and the world of his childhood was the world he would write about for the rest of his life: people who worked land they did not own and were still treated as less than full members of the village. Schooling did not come easily to a poor Dalit boy in rural Punjab, but he stayed with his studies, trained as a teacher and entered the government school service. The classroom gave him a living. The village gave him his subject.

He began writing poetry in 1961. His earliest verses belonged to the faith of his upbringing: devotional poems shaped by the Sikh and Namdhari traditions around him, and, like many young poets of his generation, romantic verse as well. Nothing in those first poems announced the writer he was about to become, but the raw material was already there: a labouring childhood, a teacher's eye for ordinary lives, and a memory full of the songs and sayings of the Malwa countryside.

From devotion to revolution

In the late 1960s the Naxalite movement reached Punjab, and it changed Udasi completely. As a young man he had looked for dignity within his religion of birth, but he found caste discrimination and untouchability rooted deep inside the community itself. His poetry turned away from devotion and towards the people he had grown up among: the landless labourer, the Dalit worker, the poor peasant. Swords, guns and knives began to appear in his verses as signs of revolt, and anger replaced consolation.

Crucially, he wrote in forms his readers already carried in memory: songs, bolian, ghazals and rubais that could be sung at a village gathering or shouted at a rally. Alongside Pash and Lal Singh Dil, he became one of the defining voices of the revolutionary Punjabi writing of the 1970s. Scholars of Dalit Punjabi literature treat Udasi and Dil as the two Dalit poets the Naxalite upsurge produced, a pairing that put caste, and not only class, at the centre of the movement's poetry.

The books: Lahu Bhije Bol and after

During the 1970s Udasi published three collections of poetry: Lahu Bhije Bol (Blood-Soaked Words, 1971), Saintan (Gestures) and Chounukrian (The Four-Edged). A fourth book, Lahu to Lohe Tak (From Blood to Iron), followed in 1979. Lahu Bhije Bol made his name. Its poems speak in plain, direct language about exploitation, caste and the daily humiliations of farm labour, and they refuse to soften their anger for polite readers.

The poems also travelled in a way printed books rarely do. Because so many of them were built like songs, singers took them up, and lines written in Raisar were soon being heard far beyond Barnala. That double life, on the page and in the voice, is the key to everything that happened to his work after his death.

Arrest, torture and the cost of dissent

His politics cost him dearly. Udasi was arrested for his Naxalite connections and tortured in custody. Studies of Dalit Punjabi literature record that the torture inflicted on Dalit detainees such as Udasi and Dil was more severe than that meted out to their higher caste comrades, a detail that says much about the Punjab he was writing against. He was also suspended from his teaching job, and the years that followed brought mental strain and money worries alongside the harassment.

He kept writing and kept teaching when he could. He was honoured with the Bawa Balwant Award, and the Lok Kavi Sant Ram Udasi Memorial Trust (International) was later established as a research foundation devoted to his life and works, a sign that readers and scholars refused to let the official record be the last word on him.

What is Sant Ram Udasi famous for?

Sant Ram Udasi is famous for Lahu Bhije Bol (1971), his collection of revolutionary Punjabi poems, and for songs such as Maa Dharteye that became anthems of protest in Punjab. He is remembered as a lok kavi, a people's poet: a schoolteacher from a landless Dalit family who wrote about labourers and the poor in language they could sing back. His standing rests on that combination of caste consciousness, revolutionary politics and singable form, which no Punjabi poet before him had fused in quite the same way.

Death and the second life of his songs

Udasi died on 6 November 1986, aged forty seven. For years his books were kept alive by activists, singers and the Punjabi left rather than by the literary mainstream. Then, in the winter of 2020 to 2021, his afterlife became extraordinary. As farmers camped at the Singhu and Tikri borders of Delhi against the farm laws, Hindustan Times reported that Udasi was the most sung poet of the protest. Ravinder Grewal sang his songs at the borders, Bant Singh carried them on the march from Joga near Mansa, and Jasbir Jassi's recording of Maa Dharteye, made a decade earlier, played from protest speakers.

His words were on the tents and posters too. Visitors to the Tikri camp photographed his line Utth Kirtiya, uth ve, utthan da vela (Rise, worker, rise: the time to rise has come) handwritten on Punjabi posters, and researchers studying the music of the agitation found songs built on his poetry among the protest's defining sounds. The Jalandhar writer Des Raj Kali said the farmers' struggle had made the revolutionary dreams of Udasi's poetry come alive. A poet who died at forty seven, largely unhonoured in his lifetime, had become the voice of the largest protest of his readers' generation.