Who so ever comes in this world
Some how must depart
Part in the earth part in the winds
And some into the flame shall merge

What ever sweetens the breeze tomorrow
Shall have a part of me
I would also be a part of that
Which gives a pang to the heart

Harbhajan Singh, the poet of modern Punjabi poets, died on 21 October 2002 in New Delhi after a 16 year long struggle, first against the cancer of the tongue, which he pulled through, then the paralysis. A prolific writer of more than 50 books, he started his teaching career in a school and rose to the professorship in Delhi University's Department of Modern Indian Languages. Being a scholar of Sanskrit, Hindi and Punjabi, he impressed on a whole generation of students keeping abreast with the latest literary debates in Europe and America. He won all the top literary awards in India including Sahitya (literature) Akademi, Kabir and Saraswati, the last one instituted by the Birla Foundation. He translated works including Rigveda and those of Aristotle, Sophocles, Kabir, Tagore and Soviet-era poets.

            His early work was a personal expression of displacement and transplantation in a new soil. His first collection of poems Lasaan (The Lashes) was inspired by the world peace movement in early 1950s. He combined the Punjabi lyricist idiom of medieval Sufi and Sikh poetry with the imagery of contemporary life. He remained independent of the then dominant socialist realist literary trend, though he was friends with communists and visited Soviet Union. They liked to brand him as a sohajvadi aesthete poet. The recurrent theme of his poetry is yearning for lost love, brooding over impending death and metaphysicality of social phenomenon.
 
            Born in 1920 in Assam he was a self-made man. He spent his formative years in Lahore the cultural capital of the undivided Punjab and after its partition in 1947, he made Delhi his second home. His journals and poems written after the storming of the Golden Temple and anti-Sikh riots all over India after Indira Gandhi's assassination are the chronicles of a tormented poet with humanist Sufi-Sikh roots.

            Though I did not have the opportunity of studying under him, in his company I felt inspired, appreciated and his legitimate successor. Last time I saw him in 2000 in Delhi in his home where his musician, film maker and Marxist academic son Madan Gopal Singh had taken me. He was reduced to a skeleton and needed help with his dragging walk. He did not talk, he whispered. With him an age old Punjabi tradition of tarranum singing poetry has ended, only rivalled by an Irish poet with whom I travelled on a poetry tour some years ago! Harbhajan Singh used to enthral his audience with a theatrical performance. He sang his poems weaving sounds in the air and danced; his flowing grey beard being the centre of attention.

            I would like to imagine my self in the company of a robust Harbhajan Singh walking on the South Bank in London rather than the one whom I saw in Delhi reminding me of my own mortality. He remained conscious till the end. 

            His wife, a daughter and three sons survive him.

Photos by Amarjit Chandan