ਸੁਰਜੀਤ ਪਾਤਰਸੁਰਜੀਤ ਪਾਤਰ

Surjit Patar (1945 to 2024) was a Punjabi poet, translator and professor from Pattar Kalan village in Jalandhar district. Author of Hawa Vich Likhe Harf and Hanere Vich Sulagdi Varnmala, he won the Sahitya Akademi Award, the Saraswati Samman and the Padma Shri, and became one of the most widely read Punjabi poets of his generation.

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Surjit Patar was born Surjit Hunjan on 14 January 1945 in Pattar Kalan, a village in Jalandhar district in Punjab's Doaba region. The village gave him the pen name Patar, by which the whole Punjabi world came to know him. His father was Harbhajan Singh and his mother Harbhajan Kaur, and he had four older sisters. His father had migrated to Kenya for work and returned home only for short spells after years away, so the boy grew up largely with his mother and sisters, in a home where separation was a familiar feeling.

He went to a nearby village school for his matriculation, then entered a college in Kapurthala as a science student. Within a year he had switched to the arts, a change that settled the direction of his life. He graduated from Randhir College, Kapurthala, took a master's degree from Punjabi University, Patiala, and completed a PhD at Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, on the transformation of folklore in Guru Nanak's bani. The subject joined his two lasting interests: the Punjabi language and its folk roots.

The professor-poet

Patar joined teaching and retired as Professor of Punjabi at Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana. He began writing poetry in the mid-1960s and kept the double life of professor and poet for decades, writing on a university campus in Ludhiana rather than inside the literary circles of a larger city. That distance suited a writer whose work grew out of village memory, trees, seasons and ordinary speech.

His poetry is known for short, musical lines and images taken from rural life, and it travels easily: verses are quoted in speeches, printed in books, taught in classrooms and remembered by readers who may own no other book of poems. Beneath the simplicity there is a steady melancholy. Even his best known titles hold light and darkness together, as in Hanere Vich Sulagdi Varnmala, words smouldering in the dark. Critics praised the work highly, and the general public made it its own, a combination few poets in any language achieve.

What are Surjit Patar's most famous poems and books?

Surjit Patar's most famous poetry collections are Hawa Vich Likhe Harf (Words Written in the Air), Birkh Arz Kare (Thus Spake the Tree), Hanere Vich Sulagdi Varnmala (Words Smouldering in the Dark), Lafzaan Di Dargah (Shrine of Words), Patjhar Di Pazeb (Anklet of Autumn) and Surzameen (Music Land). Together they form the core of the reputation on which his major awards rest.

His wider work includes the poems and collections listed in his bibliography as Candles, Aiya Nand Kishore, Hanera Jarega Kiven, Fasla and Koi Daalia Cho Langeya Hawa Bann Ke. Individual poems from these books are the ones most often recited at literary gatherings and quoted in public life in Punjab, which is why his name reaches many people first through a single remembered line rather than through a full book.

Translator and man of letters

Patar was also a major translator into Punjabi. He translated the three tragedies of Federico Garcia Lorca and Girish Karnad's play Nagmandala, translated poems by Bertolt Brecht and Pablo Neruda, and adapted plays by Jean Giraudoux, Euripides and Racine for Punjabi readers and the stage. Translation, for him, was a way of putting world literature into the language of his own village readers without flattening either side.

He wrote television scripts on Punjabi poets from Sheikh Farid to Shiv Kumar Batalvi, and dialogue for the Punjabi films Shaheed Uddham Singh and Videsh, the Punjabi version of Deepa Mehta's Heaven on Earth. He also led the institutions of Punjabi letters, serving as president of the Punjab Arts Council in Chandigarh and, earlier, as president of the Punjabi Sahit Akademi in Ludhiana.

Honours and later life

His honours came across five decades. They include the Punjab Sahitya Akademi Award in 1979, the national Sahitya Akademi Award in 1993 for Hanere Vich Sulagdi Varnmala, the Panchnad Puruskar in 1999, the Saraswati Samman and the Gangadhar National Award for Poetry in 2009, the Padma Shri for literature and education in 2012, and the Kusumagraj Literary Award in 2014. The Padma Shri is India's fourth highest civilian award.

In retirement he lived in Ludhiana, on Barewal Road, and remained a reference point for younger Punjabi writers. The university professor who had come from a small Doaba village was, by then, the poet political leaders quoted and students read, and his public readings continued to draw the large, attentive audiences that Punjabi poetry at its best can still command.

Death and legacy

Patar died of cardiac arrest at his home on Barewal Road in Ludhiana on 11 May 2024, aged 79. His family said he did not wake up that morning and was declared dead after reaching hospital. He was cremated with full state honours at Model Town in Ludhiana, his sons Ankur Singh Patar and Manraj Singh Patar lit the pyre, and Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann shouldered the bier. At the funeral Mann announced a new Patar award, of one lakh rupees, to be given each year to emerging poets, open to students from Class 8 to graduation.

His legacy is the place his language holds in daily life. Sukhbir Singh Badal, paying tribute, called him the most popular and beloved Punjabi poet after Shiv Kumar Batalvi, and Mann described his death as a significant loss for the Punjabi literary world. For readers, the measure is simpler: Patar showed that poems in the mother tongue, written plainly and well, could carry private grief, public memory and the life of a whole region, and still be loved by people who never call themselves readers of poetry.