THE MAN AND THE POETThe poet in the East has traditionally been regarded as a person possessed. He is the odd man abroad, spinning on a precarious pivot, tending to shoot off the tangent into oblique fantasies and ambivalent uttering. In more acute cases, his quest ends up in a kind of “divine frenzy”, and thereafter his signatures become almost cabbalistic. He achieves a supra-rational state of mind wherein the singer striving becomes the song.Such a species is not extinct in the West, though a Blake or a Whitman is becoming more and more archetypal image no longer holds or satisfies, and the difficult to come by. Even here in the East, the poet is more likely to look like a suburban commuter, or a confidential clerk hammering away his heart -beats between chores over a muffled typewriter. But fortunately, the Oriental reservoirs are not quite spent, and time and again, the mystic East throws up a poet who operates more on the vertical than on 4 the horizontal beams. In the highest state, like a-Kabul Gibran or a Bhai Vir Singh, he becomes the logos, the Word incarnate.Puran Singh unreservedly belongs with such a spiritual fraternity. Both his life and work issued frown that vital and mysterious energy which informs the suns and the stars, which rock the oceans and the continents into being. He had from the beginning an unmistakable sign in his aspect and stance. A strikingly handsome person, he overwhelmed the people with his presence. Both as child and man, he created an aura of fragrance and charm around him­self. No wonder, in the plenitude of his youth, his face shone like a diamond. Even in his declining years, with his flowing locks and patriarchal beard, he was a face to reckon with. There was a degree of sovereignty about his person this compelled notice and adoration.In her “Reminiscences”, recently published, his wife, Maya Devi, speaks of many an apocalyptic story from his crowded life, but I think none of these is more revealing of the man and the poet than the simple facts relating to his spontaneity and humanity. He was often seen embracing trees and shrubs, strangers and outcasts, birds and beasts. At times, he would roll naked on green velvety lawns and munch blades of grass like the goats browsing around. He felt a long, deep, primordial calling within his bowels which tied him to all animate beings. In the final analysis, man and animal, fruit and flowery became an indivisible entity for him. In one of his poems, called ‘The Grazing Cattle”, Puran Singh writes:Dekh dekh mur mur lochan,Main mur pashu theen noon,Admi ban ban thakeya!Seeing them graze, I longto be an animal again.I am tired of donning man’s mantle!This is not to say that the poet was alienated from mankind – nothing could warrant such a conclusion – only he felt keenly the loss of communication and empathy in modern life where the intellect of man tended to insulate him from the unitary springs of being.Again, it was typical of the man to care nothing for money or fame or position. In fact, he consider­ed “the accretion of lucre as the accretion of muck”, if it served no better purpose than self-advancement and creature comforts. He would dispense largesse like a prince. Nothing ever stopped that open and large hand. A man who could walk out in a feudal Maharaja in an open court telling him roundly what he thought of him, was certainly not looking for earthly honours !It would appear odd to think of Puran Singh in the role of a scientist, and yet for the better part of his life, he was experimenting with one thing or another. His interests comprehended a variety of things such as the Rosha grass farms, pharmaceuti­cal industry, sugar technology, etc. And in each of these fields, he left the imprint of his genius behind. Wordsworth, who came close to his heart. And bosom, has defined poetry as “the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science”. I am inclined to think, Puran Singh fully realized the truth of it in his own life. For him, poetry and science were not the two opposite poles of reality as is often believed; he saw the inner identity which eludes the critical eye.Puran Singh’s thought was shaped by three climactic events in his life, and these were his Japanese experiences, his discipleship of Swami Ram Tirath, and his meeting with Bhai Vir Singh: Each of these had something to do with his pilgrimage and arrival. Together, they formed the human and temporal basis of his spiritual Odyssey.As a student in Japan, he imbibed the ethos of a beautiful people, wholly charmed by their ritual and ceremony, their industry and integrity, their innocence and insouciance. Flower-symbolism in his poetry may owe a great deal to that period, when his youthful imagination came into contact with the delicate cunning and tracery of Japanese life and art. In any case, the openness of their nature and the holiness of their hearts’ responses made him for ever a worshipper of life’s largeness and generosities.It was again in Japan that he came under the powerful spell of Swami Ram Tirath. It was in fact not a meeting, but a realization and a homecoming. The two spirits had indeed been struck out of the same flint. No wonder, till the end, Swami Ram Tirath regarded Puran Singh as an echo or image of his own self. The poet turned monk now roamed abroad, robed in saffron and steeped in the Vedanta. This interlude was to last for more than a decade, and though eventually he graduated to the discipline of Sikhism, this was much too traumatic an experience to be washed out of his consciousness; He subsumed it in the dialectics of his Guru’s creed.The meeting with the great Sikh poet and savant, Bhal Vir Singh, took place in 1912 at Sialkot, and this was the final turn of the wheel which had come ful1 circle. He was never the same man again. A touch on the head put him on the pristine path again, and he could never bear to have it touched by anyone else again. The great hymn to the mystic lair with which the present volume opens is a direct evidence of the soulful change wrought in him. He had strayed only to return with greater vigor and conviction. And he lived on for another 19 years or so to attain to the status of the complete Sikh. His poetry in the interval suffused with Gurbani or the Guru’s word acquired fresh dimensions and wide horizons. In short, Puran Singh, the poet of Guru-Consciousness and of the peasant-Punjab had arrived.To direct our attention to Puran Singh’s poetry per se would perhaps amount to some kind of a criti­cal heresy. The very first line of his famous book, The Spirit of Oriental Poetry (Kegan Paul, London, 1926) enjoins on the reader to look for the soul of. the poet, not for his artifact alone. We love our poet rather than his poetry, our artist rather than his bit.” Obviously, the poet here is the privileged being taking his place with “the Guru, the Master, the Buddha, and the Christ.” To our modern minds attuned to what has come to be called “the New Criticism” in America and elsewhere the primacy of the poet is something suspect. The poet’s perso­nality is neither here nor there; all we should be interested in is the end-product. It is certainly a helpful corrective to the excesses of the old historic-romantic criticism, but the writ does not quite run in the domain of Bhakti and Sufi or devotional and mystic poetry. There the poet is all or nothing; His whole being is distilled in verse till the scented lines begin to glow with his presence. The fragrance could, in short, scarcely exist without the rose. Thus the poetry of Puran Singh is nothing but a vessel for his spirit, a house for his soul. To read it is to evoke overtures to his wide and warm embrace. Inevitably, every line here leads back to the great dreaming heart. It helps construct the spiritual graph.And yet paradoxically, this type of poetry is also the least individualistic in as much as the poet is not a sovereign voice, complete unto himself, but an echo of the cosmic consciousness, an infinitesimally small link in the chain, a moment in the eternal continuum. In the widest sense, his work ensures “a continual extinction of personality”, though not in the manner T.S. Eliot understood the phrase.This sort of confusion occurs because of the two separate approaches to poetry. Much of modem poetry seeks to be cerebral and ratiocinative, courting ambiguities and complexities, it is mocking and ironical in tone, troubled and torn in spirit, it is poetry of doubt and protest, of interrogation and indirection. But a great deal of Eastern Poetry has been poetry of respect and integrity, poetry of synthesis and realization. It seeks to reach the inner truth of this though self-surrender and sacrifice. What interest it is not the appearance but the energy behind it. In short, it is poetry of acceptance, of the big yea. Puran Siugh’s poetry, like that of Walt Whitman who fertilized his mind and ‘provoked him into song time, and again, is fundamentally and finally the poetry of man’s soul. Here, the act of creation proceeds from an inner certitude. The imponderables of life are resolved through a process of spiritual alchemy.A poetry such as Puran Singh’s would chafe under tags and labels; being free as the winds of the skies, but if there is one word that comes nearest to expressing it, it is amplitude. I can think of no other poet, Eastern or Western, except, of course, Walt Whitman, who is so much taken up with the vastness­es and richness of life. Puran Singh rejects all that ************* existence, all that causes a clausmophobic c feeling in the mind. The titles of his collection of verse, Khule Maidan, Khule Ghund, Khule Asmani Rang, are all bound by the leit-motif, Khule, which in the Punjabi language means “open” or “Vvide”. The breathless miracle of life—its terrors as well as its ecstasies—fascinate~s him endlessly. There is a Lawrentian readiness in his salute to life. It is no accident that almost all hi. Poetry is written in’ vers libre.Great poets achieve universality when they transcend frontiers of self, home and state. They become cosmic citizens, owing allegiance only to vaster and higher truths. Puran Singh’s Poetry is assuredly in tune with these eternal harmonies which make him an organ of oceanic consciousness. How ever, despite this transcendence, he remains ineluctably a regional poet, rooted in the rhythm of his native soil. It is difficult to imagine a poet more spiritually bound to a geographical entity than Puran Singh. Since Waris Shah who composed the immortal Punjabi love-epic, Heer KinjIia, around 1766, no poet has orchestrated so soulfully the wash and swing, the quick and plume, of Punjabi life as Puran Singh has done. The element of nostalgia for the sights and smells of the Punjab is almost overwhelming in ‘its quality and pervasiveness.But finally, Puran Singh’s’ work becomes an unceasing hymn in praise of the Ten Sikh Gurus, more particularly of Guru Gobind Singh whose revolutionary Weltanschauung or world-view was wholly in consonance with the compulsions of his psyche. Thereafter, its dynamics and metaphysic stem from one homing centre on which all the flights of fancy converge. The highest Point is reached when the poet’s consciousness merges in “Guru Consciousness” and the Guru’s Word is all.In these Reflection and Offerings, one finds a most emphatic avowal of Puran Singh’s surrender to and intoxication with the Guru’s Personality. His whole being is now an aching emptiness yearning to be filled with “nectariain’ ruin, In Guru Gobind Singh’s creed of the hawk and the sword, he fluids a vision of he Ultimate Principle. The armed, puissant and covenanted race which the Guru raised at Anandpur the City of Bliss became for him an embodiment of the Essential Man. And he sings thus:In the Name of God did fashion.Anandpur and the New Order,The Khalsa is verily the E** of the Lard!How deeply Puran Singh felt the truth of this convict ion can be gauged from the brie of the lyric intensity of his feeling for the Guru-given tresses. The hair, he avers, puts the Sikhs on the side of elemental forces of nature. Thus the images invoked are those of the swaying trees and forests of the gathering storms and clouds, of the majestic eagles and lions. This is not to say, the “unkempt exterior” proclaims an untamed or uncultivated heart; it is only a symbol of the mystic compact with the Master and the Lora. Otherwise compassion is very nearly the highest virtue in Sikh ethics. And as Purai₁ Singh knew, only the Strong and the brave were of capable of tempering justice with mercy’.In culling the hair, the iron ring and the sword “wedding-gifts from the bride*** is only using the traditional Indian concept of the Lord’s consort. The devotee in Sikh scriptures is often cast in the image of a woman supplicating to her lord, and surrendering herself wholly to his enticements and embraces. In fact, there is a feminine and sensuous apprehension of reality in much of Puran Singh’s work. The Creative Force is seen here as the male principle, whereas the human variant is seen as the female principle. Thus the “wedding­ gifts” become a token of the married state; their violation would amount to spousal infidelity. It is difficult for the Occidental mind to realize fully the spiritual inebriation of the Eastern bride, and thus the intensity of the sentiment may strike it as some­thing whipped-up and overblown. The luxuriance or opulence of the idiom, however, is simply a sign of the enchanted heart. Here, even the excess is not enough!And this brings me finally to the language of Puran Singh. He catches superbly the unique sounds and inflections of the Punjabi tongue–its lilt and flow, its sinewy and muscled strength, its ruggedness and resilience, its built-in rhythms and undulations. Something of this can even be felt’ in his English prose style. The language becomes highly metaphorical and evocative. When in passion – and it’s nearly always so– it become a river in flood. The imagery inevitably turns symbolical. ‘Puran Sinah could seldom achieve urbanity or even elegance, or restraint, simply because his, terms of reference were different and wider. It is a style that spends itself in giving; it does not with - hold its hand. It swells up to the condition of music to preserve the integrity of vision. Of course, there is always ‘a danger here of the language taking the bit in its mouth, and sheering off in precipitate flight–the feeling of vapidity and amorphousness lingers in some of Puran Singh’s compositions–but there will be a greater risk in breaking it to discipline.For in the latter event, the spell would be broken and the riches spilt. No arid or lean’ idiom could ever describe the splendour of things. And Puran Singh above all was concerned with the dizzy heights and reaches of life. If the words glow and sparkle dance and leap, it’s because Puran Singh was a “Pilgrim of Eternity!”