The village that became a name

Few writers carry their birthplace in their signature as literally as Surjit Patar did. He was born on 14 January 1945 in Pattar Kalan, a village in the Jalandhar district of Punjab, and the surname by which the whole subcontinent came to know him was simply the name of that village worn as an identity. His parents were Harbhajan Singh and Harbhajan Kaur, and he grew up as the youngest child with four elder sisters, in a rural Punjab that was about to be torn open by Partition and then remade again by the Green Revolution.

That doubled experience, of a countryside both ancient and violently modernised, sits underneath almost everything he wrote. The trees, wells, courtyards and field paths of his poems are not decorative rural scenery; they are witnesses. Patar's Punjab is a place that remembers what has been done to it, and his verse gave that memory a voice that was intimate rather than declamatory.

Education and a life in teaching

He took his first degree at Randhir College in Kapurthala and then a master's degree in Punjabi at Punjabi University, Patiala. His doctoral work, completed at Guru Nanak Dev University in Amritsar, examined how folklore is transformed within the compositions of Guru Nanak, a subject that placed him at the meeting point of oral tradition and scriptural literature. It was an appropriate apprenticeship for a poet whose own work would keep folk cadence alive inside modern forms.

Patar spent his professional life as a teacher, joining Punjab Agricultural University in Ludhiana and retiring from there as Professor of Punjabi. Ludhiana became his home for the rest of his life. Generations of students encountered him in a classroom before they encountered him in print, and many later recalled that he read poetry aloud as though it were a shared act rather than a performance.

The poems

He began writing in the mid-1960s, in the shadow of a Punjabi literary scene dominated by revolutionary rhetoric on one side and older romantic conventions on the other. Patar found a third register. His characteristic mode was the ghazal, a form borrowed from Persian and Urdu tradition, which he naturalised into Punjabi with such fluency that it came to seem native to the language. The result was a poetry that could hold private grief and public catastrophe in the same couplet without raising its voice.

His collections include Hawa Vich Likhe Harf, words written in the air; Birkh Arz Kare, in which the tree makes its plea; Hanere Vich Sulagdi Varnmala, an alphabet smouldering in the dark; Lafzaan Di Dargah, the shrine of words; Patjhar Di Pazeb, the anklet of autumn; and Surzameen. The titles themselves indicate his method, in which an ordinary object is asked to carry an unbearable weight. He wrote through the years of militancy and state violence in Punjab, and his poems of that period register the horror of a society killing its own without descending into partisanship for any side. Many of his lines entered common speech, sung by musicians and quoted by people who could not name the collection they came from.

Patar was also a translator of unusual range, bringing Federico Garcia Lorca, Pablo Neruda and Bertolt Brecht into Punjabi, and rendering Girish Karnad's play Nagamandala for the Punjabi stage. He wrote for theatre and television as well, and his adaptations were staged widely.

Honours and acts of conscience

Recognition came steadily. The Sahitya Akademi Award was conferred on him in 1993 for Hanere Vich Sulagdi Varnmala. In 2009 he received both the Saraswati Samman and the Gangadhar National Award for Poetry, and in 2012 the Government of India awarded him the Padma Shri. He served as president of the Punjabi Sahit Akademi in Ludhiana and later headed the Punjab Arts Council in Chandigarh, positions from which he worked to support younger writers and to keep Punjabi letters institutionally alive.

He also returned two of those honours. In October 2015 he joined the writers across India who gave back the Sahitya Akademi Award in protest at what they described as a climate of intolerance and the failure to protect thinkers who had been killed for their views. Five years later, in December 2020, he announced that he would return the Padma Shri in solidarity with the farmers protesting against the central farm laws, saying that he could not hold a state honour while the government treated the demands of Punjab's cultivators with indifference. For a poet whose imagery was rooted in the soil, the gesture was not symbolic decoration but the logical extension of his subject matter.

Death and legacy

Surjit Patar died of cardiac arrest at his home in Ludhiana on 11 May 2024, at the age of seventy-nine. The response across Punjab was immediate and unusually broad, crossing political lines, because he had somehow remained a figure whom almost everyone could claim without anyone being able to appropriate him.

His achievement was to make a regional literary language feel entirely contemporary and entirely capacious. He proved that Punjabi could carry Lorca and Brecht, that the ghazal could speak about state violence and ecological loss, and that a poet could be widely loved without simplifying. Pattar Kalan, the village that gave him his name, sent into the world a writer whose lines are still recited at protests, weddings and funerals across Punjab, and whose voice remains one of the defining sounds of Indian poetry in the second half of the twentieth century.