‘I have to add my feeble voice to the noise of the world,’ says late Majeed Amjad in one of his poems. The world’s noise is what has rattled the artists throughout millennia.

Shah Husain, the 16th century poet and mystic, poignantly described it; “Mother, the noise in the world has driven me mad”. Creating some order in the maddening noise of the world has been/ is an obsession with poets. Efforts to find some symphonic order in the ever-increasing cacophony can perhaps make the world we have built less scratchy. Poets make such an effort with the tool of language if language is a tool. Of all the things language is the key that separates us from other species on the planet and distinguishes us as conscious of the past, the present and the future.

Language and cognitive process are inseparable. That’s perhaps why language has played such a fundamental role in helping us to understand the world and ourselves.

Ludwig Wittgenstein had something like this in mind when he wrote; ‘the limits of my language means the limits my world.’ Poets are known for doing what no one else can do; expanding the boundaries of languages.

Surjit Patar, who died recently was one such poet, who expanded the boundaries of creative expression in our language. Patar was born in 1945 in district Jalandhar. He got his early education in his home town. Later, he studied at Kapurthala College and Punjabi University Patiala. He did his doctorate from the Guru Nanak Dev University Amritsar. He joined a college as a lecturer in Amritsar in 1969. Later he joined the Agricultural University Ludhiana. After his retirement he was appointed the head of the Punjab Sahit Academy, Chandigarh in 2013.

Patar’s passion was poetry that kept him engaged all his life. He published seven collections of poetry and two books of prose. From the volume of verses he produced one can infer that he was not prolific. But he continued to compose poetry all his years. When it comes to poetry or for that matter any creative expression, it is the quality that matters, not the quantity. It’s not mass production. If it’s a rehash of what has already been produced it would cease to be creative.

Creative expression is never a matter of more of the same. Patar was versatile; he employed multiple genres for his poetic utterances such as modern poetic form, traditional poetic structure, lyrics and Ghazal. It seems he is at his best in his poems and lyrics. The former gives a poet greater freedom to express himself/herself as the structure in relative terms is not restrictive as it does not force you to use traditional prosody that demands strict rhythmic patterns and fixed acoustic effects. It allows the poet to bend the language, coin new and compound phrases and cross the traditional linguistic barriers.

Patar has a wide range of experience and an impressive array of imaginative thoughts which he handles with artistic simplicity and intensity of feelings. Among the diverse themes in his poetry we find a humanistic vision, compassion for the ordinary people, love of land and local flora and fauna, and deep concern for the environment that is being destroyed recklessly endangering life on our planet which in the words of Nietzsche ‘has a disease called man.’ His is a sane poetic voice directed at man to shake him up.

It’s interesting to note that Patar also uses folk meters and structures we come across in our Punjabi lore which has a long history. Such meters as used in popular Qissa (storytelling in verse) and folk poetry titillate the imagination. A tantalizing glimpse of the unseen in his verses effects the senses of the listeners and the readers. His songs/ lyrics can easily be manipulated into musical tunes. A fundamental quality of a good song/lyrics is its simplicity that can easily be transformed into a musical form. In my opinion Patar’s weakest expression is found in his ghazals, a borrowed genre that still has to create its space in our literary world. Apart from being a major poet of our times Surjit Patar was a compassionate man gifted with imaginative empathy, a rare quality among today’s poets and artists. I will conclude this piece on a personal note. I took my younger brother, who suffered from liver cirrhosis, to Delhi in 2010 for his liver transplant. The facility wasn’t available in Pakistan at that time. Low and behold, one day when I was greatly stressed I got a telephone call from Patar sahib. He expressed his good wishes for my brother’s health and asked if he could do something for me. I thanked him. His call cheered me up. He, I think, got some information from US-based writer and intellectual Dr. Manzur Ejaz about my arrival in Delhi. He perhaps hadn’t forgotten that in the last decade of 20th century I had published a selection of his poems titled ‘Dhukhda Jungle’ from Lahore. The book was sponsored by Dr. Rashpal Singh’s the Punjab Heritage Foundation on the recommendation of Dr. Manzur Ejaz. The former is no longer in the world. He was a highly civilised man and very successful surgeon, and a good poet too. Dr. Manzur recently met a road accident and is recuperating in the USA. Get well soon, Dr. Manzur.

Some months later when I had returned to Lahore Patar sahib again called me to inquire after me and my brother. Let’s have a feel of his verse: “…She scanned my poem/ and said—Look, people, look / despite having mother who gave him birth from her womb / the son tells his grief to the papers / then she took the paper to her breast/ hoping perhaps it’s the only way of getting near to her son (translator not known).” Departing this life is always a matter of grief but the grieving ones must celebrate those who leave the world after having added to its beauty. Patar made us and our language richer with his poetry, a creative act that would keep him alive. — soofi01@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, May 20th, 2024