Worldwide NRIs Tribute to Padma Shri Awardee
'Surjit Patar' who died at 79
Los Angeles/May 14, 2024
NRIpress.club/ Prof. Pritam Singh Gill, University of Oxford, UK
It reflected the global reach of Surjit Pattar’s poetry, that his death has been mourned not only by the global Punjabi community but also by the lovers of poetry in many other languages in which Pattar's poetic work had been translated. An Odia scholar has communicated that she was planning to collaborate with Pattar to translate his poetry in Odia, but his death has deprived her of her dream project. In the multimedia world we inhabit today, Pattar sahib and I got connected and eventually became friends when a Chandigarh/Mohali based Punjabi academic Amandeep Kaur Brar invited me to speak as a keynote speaker and him to preside over a seminar on Punjabi language and culture. I met him last over a tea drinking session during my last visit to Punjab in 2023.
We talked for hours. I felt humbled by his sharing that he regularly read my articles carried by the Tribune group. Our discussion then veered around to the relationship between intellectuals and poets. He said that when reading my articles, he did not understand some of the economic concepts, but he was able to sense the feelings behind the economic arguments, and then he shared an amazing insight that behind every intellectual, there was a hidden poet who provided the emotional power for the intellectual endeavours. This was a distinctive and unique response I had ever received on my economics related articles, and responded instantly that his sensing the feelings behind economic concepts was precisely due to his poetic sensibilities. I shared with him that I considered the poets to be the soul of any society and that any intellectual exercise was bound to be influenced by that soul touching power of poetry.
I shared with him that during the farmers struggle against the three farm laws brought in 2020 by the central government, when I was struggling to conceptualise the social force empowering that struggle, his poem 'Eh Baat Niri Enni Hi Nahin' (This dialogue/struggle was not merely that) was a watershed moment in understanding that the farmers struggle was not merely against marketing and farm prices issues but an existential struggle against the attack by agro-business corporations on agrarian culture, civilisation and ways of life. I understood then that this struggle was an epochal one and not an ordinary agitation on economic demands. I was convinced, therefore, that it could not be defeated.
His poem, I suggested as a tribute to his poetry, was an intellectual breakthrough which demonstrated the complex interplay between poetic expressions and intellectual outputs. He seemed visibly touched. He gave me a signed copy of his latest anthology of poems as a present. We hugged each other affectionately and promised to each other that we will spend more time together during my next visit to Punjab. I will never meet him again now for another tea drinking session but would remain meeting him forever through his poems. Those meetings will acquire new and, perhaps, higher meanings.
A version of this article was earlier published by The Tribune.
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