In the death of Dr Dar­shan Singh Tatla on 4th July in Birm­ing­ham, the aca­d­e­mic field of Pun­jab and Sikh stud­ies has lost an in­ter­na­tion­ally re­puted scholar of unique tal­ent, com­mit­ment and achieve­ments. If I had to name one per­son whose thoughts, feel­ings, dreams, ex­cite­ments and dis­ap­point­ments were all linked to Pun­jab Stud­ies, it was Dar­shan, as he was known to his cir­cle of friends. Pro­fes­sor Emer­i­tus at Ox­ford Brookes Busi­ness School -Dr Pri­tam Singh pays a trib­ute to the scholar par ex­cel­lence.

There is no field of Pun­jab Stud­ies – pol­i­tics, his­tory, de­vel­op­ment, lit­er­a­ture, re­li­gion, di­as­pora etc., etc. – to which he did not make a con­tri­bu­tion. He was a walk­ing en­cy­clopae­dia on the sub­ject. No one study­ing the Pun­jab in any cor­ner of the world es­caped his at­ten­tion. He was a multi-tal­ented scholar and a saintly man with a smile on his face even in ad­ver­sity. His health had not been good for over two decades, but it de­te­ri­o­rated sharply in the last few months.

He was born in the vil­lage of Bharowal, Lud­hi­ana and com­pleted his un­der­grad­u­ate stud­ies in sci­ence at La­j­pat Rai Memo­r­ial Col­lege, Ja­graon and a Mas­ters in Eco­nom­ics with dis­tinc­tion from Pun­jabi Uni­ver­sity, Pa­tiala. He moved to the UK in the 1970s where he com­pleted an­other com­bined BA and Mas­ters in Eco­nom­ics and So­ci­ol­ogy at Fitzwilliam Col­lege, Uni­ver­sity of Cam­bridge, where he had the op­por­tu­nity to in­ter­act with Dr Ajit Singh, the ris­ing star of the Cam­bridge Eco­nom­ics Fac­ulty. He fol­lowed this with an­other Mas­ters in Eco­nom­ics at the Uni­ver­sity of Birm­ing­ham in 1977.

The multi-di­men­sional na­ture of his aca­d­e­mic in­ter­ests in the study of Pun­jab led him later to com­plete his PhD in 1994 at War­wick Uni­ver­sity in the field of Pun­jab and Sikh stud­ies. His book The Sikh Di­as­pora: The Search for State­hood (1998) based on his doc­toral the­sis has ac­quired the sta­tus of a clas­sic in the field of di­as­pora stud­ies.

Dar­shan Tat­la’s vi­sion was the prime mover be­hind the found­ing of the Pun­jab Re­search Group (PRG) in April 1984. From its be­gin­nings as a small group of like-minded PhD stu­dents in April 1984, the PRG has ex­panded and be­come the most well-re­spected re­gional study group from South Asia, where es­tab­lished schol­ars, as well as young re­searchers, come to­gether to share their re­search in a mu­tu­ally sup­port­ive re­search en­vi­ron­ment.

The PRG’s work con­tributed to the or­gan­i­sa­tion of the First In­ter­na­tional Con­fer­ence on Pun­jabi Iden­tity in 1994 at Coven­try Uni­ver­sity, at which the first is­sue of the In­ter­na­tional Jour­nal of Pun­jab Stud­ies was also launched. The jour­nal has con­tin­ued since (as the Jour­nal of Pun­jab Stud­ies and more re­cently as the Jour­nal of Sikh and Pun­jab Stud­ies).

The pa­pers pre­sented at the con­fer­ence were brought to­gether in a book; Pun­jabi Iden­tity in a Global Con­text edited by Pri­tam Singh and Shin­der Thandi and pub­lished by Ox­ford Uni­ver­sity Press in 1999. In 2016, the PRG launched the Best Doc­toral Stu­dent Pre­sen­ta­tion Award, con­sist­ing of a cash award as well as a cer­tifi­cate, which is given to a doc­toral stu­dent whose pa­per is judged to be the best pre­sented at the PRG con­fer­ence. To date, seven such awards have been given. The PRG will for­ever re­main as a memo­r­ial to Dr Tat­la’s con­tri­bu­tion to its found­ing and sub­se­quent multi-di­men­sional de­vel­op­ment in the early years.

In re­cent years Dr Tatla was a Re­search Fel­low at Pun­jabi Uni­ver­sity, Pa­tiala where he pro­duced and pub­lished orig­i­nal re­search on the in­de­pen­dence move­ment, in­clud­ing some vi­tal work on the Gadar Party Lehar. He guided the uni­ver­sity in set­ting up the dis­ci­pline of World Pun­jabi Stud­ies. Though he did man­age to carry out work in his ar­eas of in­ter­est for which he moved back to Pun­jab, he was also dis­ap­pointed with the lack of in­ter­est showed by Pun­jab’s po­lit­i­cal and aca­d­e­mic lead­er­ship in de­vel­op­ing re­search in­sti­tu­tions and ca­pac­i­ties in Pun­jab.

The mem­bers of the Pun­jab Re­search Group had de­cided be­fore the out­break of Covid19 to ho­n­our him with a Life­time Achieve­ment Award for his dis­tin­guished con­tri­bu­tions. The PRG had hoped to pre­sent this award to him in per­son at one of its con­fer­ences once the pan­demic was over and he had re­cov­ered from his re­cent ill health. This award will now, un­for­tu­nately, have to be awarded posthu­mously.

Dr Tatla was in­volved in many prac­ti­cal char­i­ta­ble tasks in the com­mu­nity in Pun­jab and Eng­land. He es­tab­lished the Dr Dar­shan Singh Tatla Trust to take care of his re­main­ing work and to place his rich col­lec­tions ap­pro­pri­ately in Eng­land and Pun­jab. Dr Tat­la’s re­search pub­li­ca­tions and col­lec­tions will con­tinue to serve as an in­valu­able source of knowl­edge, ex­per­tise and guid­ance for Pun­jab Stud­ies re­searchers across the world. He joins those great schol­ars of Pun­jab and Sikh Stud­ies whose con­tri­bu­tions re­main en­light­en­ing and in­spir­ing long af­ter they have gone.

Pho­tos cour­tesy: Fam­ily of Dar­shan Singh Tatla
Note: An ear­lier ver­sion of this obit­u­ary ap­peared in asi­asamachar.com.

Dr Pri­tam Singh has a DPhil from the Uni­ver­sity of Ox­ford and is Pro­fes­sor Emer­i­tus at Ox­ford Brookes Busi­ness School. He is the au­thor of ‘Fed­er­al­ism, Na­tion­al­ism and De­vel­op­ment: In­dia and the Pun­jab Econ­omy.’  In June 2015, he was awarded the Dis­tin­guished Achieve­ment Award in Po­lit­i­cal Econ­omy For The Twenty-First Cen­tury by the World As­so­ci­a­tion of Po­lit­i­cal Econ­omy at its Tenth Fo­rum held at Jo­han­nes­burg, South Africa, and in May 2021, the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia (River­side) ho­n­oured him with a ‘Life­time Achieve­ment Award for his dis­tin­guished con­tri­bu­tion to the Pun­jab Re­search Group in the UK to pro­mote Sikh and Pun­jab Stud­ies.’