Greet­ing the dis­tin­guished poet Gajin­der Singh liv­ing in ex­ile on his sixty-sixth birth­day, World Sikh News ed­i­tor pre­sents an analy­sis of his po­etry which touches the mind and soul of the reader. It’s time to re­visit his verse in let­ter and spirit.

Iknow of very few rev­o­lu­tion­ary po­ets amongst the Sikhs. Po­ets who speak against in­jus­tice, po­ets who poke fun at Sikh lead­ers, po­ets who talk about pol­i­tics, fun­da­men­tal rights and not about soft is­sues of ro­mance and en­vi­ron­ment.

In the late sev­en­ties and early eight­ies of the last cen­tury, due to the mis­sion­ary work of the sem­i­nary -Damdami Tak­sal, Pun­jab was bid­ding good­bye to com­mu­nist com­rade­ship and athe­ism and re­dis­cov­er­ing its love, affin­ity and re­gard for the fun­da­men­tals of Sikhism. Sant Jar­nail Singh Bhin­dran­wale and Sir­dar Ka­pur Singh were revered by those keen to see com­mu­nism fade away. 

While a large sec­tion of the masses was happy at par­tak­ing Am­rit, bap­tis­ing them­selves and oth­ers, there were some young vi­sion­ar­ies who wanted to go be­yond. Groups of well-mean­ing Sikhs in Lud­hi­ana and Chandi­garh, en­gaged them­selves in de­bate and di­a­logue in their mis­sion to re­dis­cover their roots and re­design the des­tiny of the Sikh na­tion.

Guru Nanak has taught his fol­low­ers the spirit of re­bel­lion against tyranny. In 1971, when the then Prime Min­is­ter In­dira Gandhi vis­ited Dera Bassi in Pun­jab on the Pun­jab-Haryana bor­der, a group of young­sters led by an en­gi­neer­ing stu­dent rose from the au­di­ence and cried hoarse.  Held, re­leased and dis­missed from his job, this stu­dent dis­cov­ered po­etry in him. He was Gajin­der Singh.

He learnt to be out­spo­ken and brave from his brave mother –Ran­jit Kaur. His mother was per­haps one of the first few in­di­vid­u­als who in con­tem­po­rary times goaded his son to take up the cause of the Sikhs, to rise above the mun­dane and more sig­nif­i­cantly to rebel. She too died a rebel. Show­ing his hu­mane side, Gajin­der Singh fondly re­mem­bers his fam­ily in his po­ems, par­tic­u­larly his sis­ter Bholi –with whom he had a keen rev­o­lu­tion­ary re­la­tion­ship. His re­call of fam­ily ties is al­ways in the spirit of a rad­i­cal who has cho­sen to love a life in which fa­mil­ial bonds have due re­mem­brance but hardly find any place in the life pat­terns of a rev­o­lu­tion­ary. He re­spect­fully and fondly ac­knowl­edges that in his po­ems ad­dressed to his mother, sis­ter, wife and daugh­ter.

“Nis­hana Paak hai isda, Kalam eh jang lar­regi -As the goal is pure, my pen will fight.”

Gajin­der’s un­der­stand­ing of Sikh his­tory and of the de­ceit and chi­canery of the In­dian lead­er­ship was ac­quired through read­ing and ac­tive in­ter­ac­tion with Sir­dar Ka­pur Singh in Chandi­garh and Harb­ha­gat Singh in Lud­hi­ana. Apart from his close Dal Khalsa col­leagues, he rel­ished the com­pany of In­der­jit Singh Narang­wal, Prof. Sukhjin­der Singh from San­grur, Jogin­der Singh Mann and Gurtej Singh. Hav­ing lis­tened about and wit­nessed gov­ern­men­tal in­ter­fer­ence in Sikh re­li­gious and po­lit­i­cal af­fairs, he un­der­stood the gen­e­sis of the Indo-Sikh con­flict. Teenaged Gajin­der was seething with anger, rage and re­bel­lion.

He im­bibed the words of the writer of Prachin Panth Prakash –Raaj Karein Ikke Lar Mar Hain –a Sikh is ei­ther a king or a rebel. Gajin­der Singh chose to be a rebel. He be­came a rebel, rev­o­lu­tion­ary poet. 

 

It is time to re­visit the rev­o­lu­tion­ary po­et’s words and un­der­stand the mean­ing in each one of them, lest Gajin­der Singh write again in a dif­fer­ent id­iom, what he wrote decades back, Dos­ton, saath deo, dur khadhe ho ke na dekho assi ki karde haan, Assi taan raat din dar­dan de doonge sagar tarde haan. –Come join us, don’t stare from a dis­tance and see what we do, we dwell in pain, day and night.”

In his pre­lim­i­nary work, pub­lished in 1975, he be­seeched his Guru to grant him the boon of five new ar­rows as the tenth mas­ter -Guru Gob­ind Singh had be­stowed on Banda Singh Ba­hadur –Panj Teer Hor. He asked for this so that he could sway the course of his­tory of his peo­ple and set it on the path of sov­er­eignty –”Tere Teeran Naal Chaldi Hawa da assi rukh mod­hange, Jina sangla’ch jakd­hya Qaum nu, oh san­gal tod­hange.”

His style was un-par­don­ing. Like all youth of those times, he too was dis­gusted with the Akali lead­er­ship. He spoke dis­parag­ingly about them and sought their com­plete re­moval from the po­lit­i­cal spec­trum, as in his view they were guilty of cheat­ing the Sikhs and com­pro­mis­ing their in­ter­ests.

“Assi iti­has duhra­vange, oh takhto taaj lehn lahi, assi iti­has duhra­vange, murr oh hi raaj lehn lahi, jang hind-pun­jab da murr hosi, sathon khusiyan bhaven sar­dariyan ne, Oddon tak nahi jang eh khatam honni, jad tak jit­diyan nahi jo haariyan ne. –We will re­peat his­tory to re­gain our lost glory, to re­gain our lost self-rule, even though we have lost our king­ship, there will again be an Indo-Pun­jab bat­tle and this bat­tle will not end till we have won what we have lost.”

Gajin­der’s rem­i­nis­cence of the events of 1947 is also in his char­ac­ter­is­tic style. In the poem en­ti­tled 1947, his fa­ther –Manohar Singh tells him, while nar­rat­ing the bar­barism of the times, –Nahi af­sos si honna, nahi beete te si rona, je chadh ke ghar aapne, kaum da koi ghar vasa lende. –We would not have re­gret­ted, had we built a home for the Sikh na­tion, af­ter los­ing our own home and hearth.

Some forty years ago, Gajin­der Singh wrote, ‘sun­nya tusi savid­han te daskhat nahi keete, pata nahi sa­tai vare kiven lange kive beete’ –I have heard that you did not sign the In­dian con­sti­tu­tion, then how come we have lived this far? Well, add an­other forty more to­day and ask one­self the same ques­tion. Are we not where we were? Aren’t these lines as rel­e­vant to­day as they were decades ago?

While politi­cians and ac­tivists in Pun­jab would mince words while talk­ing about Sikh-Hindu unity or dis­unity, Gajin­der Singh was cat­e­gor­i­cal and straight­for­ward, “Gangu Hi Gangu Ne, hor ithe ki hai and that “Gangu de nave varsaan di vaari hai.” –There are cheats all around (like Gangu, the ser­vant of Guru Gob­ind Singh, who de­ceived the Gu­ru’s sons and mother) and that, “it is now time for the new in­her­i­tors of the legacy of Gangu.” How ap­pro­pri­ate, even to­day! 

He does not just lament. He pro­vokes his read­ers into ac­tion. He says that it is a now or never sit­u­a­tion. It is time to “tear apart the dis­cor­dant note with the Guru” –Be­dava Paaddh Aaiye. He does not stop at that. He says, “it is time to work to put up a bridge across Sabhraon –Sabhraon’ch Tutte Pull nu judwa aaiye.

His man­ner of rec­ol­lec­tion of his­tor­i­cal events is par ex­cel­lence. How else can you ex­plain the hoist­ing of the Kesri Nis­han Sahib atop the Red Fort? He metaphor­i­cally says, Main Dilli de Lal Kille de samhne lang re­han haan, par aj isne sees nahi jhukaya –To­day I walked across the Red Fort, but it did not bow be­fore me. Main vi taan Baghel Singh Nahi Reha –He be­moans that “I too am not Baghel Singh.” He does not stop there. He says, “I will come again as an in­car­na­tion of Baghel Singh –Main Baghel Singh Bann ke murr aa­vanga.

His primers for young rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies in­clude Panj Teer Hor, Gangu Di Rooh and Wasi­hat­nama –each a vast col­lec­tion of po­ems on var­i­ous re­li­gio-po­lit­i­cal as­pects of Sikh iden­tity and a re­flec­tion of con­tem­po­rary de­vel­op­ments of­fer­ing a deep in­sight into the char­ac­ter of Sikh lead­er­ship. Gajin­der Singh de­votes an en­tire an­thol­ogy of po­ems to his or­gan­i­sa­tion which he mod­elled on the lines of the his­toric Dal Khalsa, both in name, spirit and ac­tion. The work, Jang Jari Hai is de­voted en­tirely to each and every ac­tiv­ity car­ried out by the Dal Khalsa. 

Liv­ing in ex­ile, cut-off from his home­land, his lat­ter-day po­etry is not as pop­u­lar as the one writ­ten in the eight­ies. Suraj te Khal­is­tan, Jang Jari Hai, Salakhan Pichhe, San­garsh, Salakha ate Sajni are more a com­men­tary on re­cent de­vel­op­ments as he learnt about them be­hind the four walls of a prison and his in­ner thoughts about the fate of the Sikh strug­gle.

I won­der if some young uni­ver­sity stu­dent would do a the­sis on the verse of this rev­o­lu­tion­ary poet, the like of which the Sikh strug­gle has not pro­duced con­tem­po­ra­ne­ously. 

His mis­sion is clear, Assi iti­has duhra­vange, oh takhto taaj lehn lahi, assi iti­has duhra­vange, murr oh hi raaj lehn lahi, jang hind-pun­jab da murr hosi, sathon khusiyan bhaven sar­dariyan ne, Oddon tak nahi jang eh khatam honni, jad tak jit­diyan nahi jo haariyan ne –We will re­peat his­tory to re­gain our lost glory, to re­gain our lost self-rule, even though we have lost our king­ship, there will again be an Indo-Pun­jab bat­tle and this bat­tle will not end till we have won what we have lost.

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As he grows old, his res­olute­ness shows no signs of bend­ing. He is clear to­day, as he was years ago, when he wrote, Nis­hana Paak hai isda, Kalam eh jang lar­regi –my pen would surely fight this bat­tle as my goal is pure.  More power to his pen, more days to his life and may he re­turn to his pure and free fa­ther­land Pun­jab in his life­time.