Last year, I spotted star Punjabi poet Surjit Patar in Delhi. He looked lost. I had a ‘headlinish’ thought — ‘A poet of trees in the city of pollution’. Then I remembered he comes from Ludhiana, a city no less toxic. Not long ago, Ludhiana could be mistaken for the Dickensian industrial London, with its grime, smog, and utter inhumanity of money and machine. Its trees could be mistaken for smokestacks. Ludhiana is also home to the Punjab Agriculture University, the ruinous womb of the Green Revolution. Patar says when it gets so silent that you can hear even the sound of a falling leaf, the tree begins to recite its poems. How did Patar come to converse with trees in a clangorous city?

Walking near the Old Courts about two decades ago, Patar noticed the dried-up trees in the compound. They appeared human to him. They were once people who had come here for justice, he thought. And endless wait had turned them into trees. The nature in Patar’s poetry is not a romantic refuge but a confidant of the modern alienated man. In anthropomorphic folk-tales, trees spoke out or men and women turned into trees because they were considered a part of the human order. In Patar’s poetry, trees converse because they have been alienated in an industrial society. Both Patar and his trees are exiles of modernity. Unlikely for a literary work, his Old Court poem ‘Kujh keha taan hanera jarega kivein (how will the darkness tolerate if I speak out?)’ became so popular that Hans Raj Hans topped the charts when he sang it.

In his poems, trees sigh, wait, converse and reincarnate as flutes and sarangis. In the old poetic form of Barahmaha , the agony of the separated lovers grows with every change in season. Nature becomes an index of longing and pain. In Patar, nature is a whispering lover, a creative collaborator, and a secret sharer. He modulates the old Punjabi aesthetic of exile, biraha , into a song of modern man’s loneliness. The spiritual exile of Punjabi Sufi poet Baba Farid becomes the urban exile in Patar’s verses. Patar chose the romantic lyric to tap into the biraha aesthetic that comes down from Baba Farid to modern poet Shiv Kumar Balatvi, taking various forms. When Patar’s contemporaries were experimenting, he chose to write in the old literary form of ghazal, which was considered decadent in those times of the Naxalite revolution. But he says he does not write ghazals; his poetry is ghazalnuma (ghazal-like). Bah’r , the Urdu meter, is not a learnt and practised craft but his very breath. He says he doesn’t write in bah’r but lives in it.

In Patar’s lyrical fellowship with trees, there is no place for the green fields of Punjab. You don’t hear about the wheat turning golden, the shooting sap in tall sugarcanes, or the mirth of mustard fields. Though he has taught at Punjab Agriculture University for decades, there is no agriculture in his poetry. He says he cannot relate to crops because crops come and go but trees age like human beings. As agriculture turns nature into an industry, people grow distant from trees. Now you will see fewer local trees such as beri , jand , pipal, bohr , barota , toot and tahli . Fewer trees in a farm means more area for cultivation. Trees with commercial promise such as poplar and eucalyptus abound. Trees in his poetry are not just works of nature. They are cultural anchors too. They get consecrated by the Gurus and heroes in ballads rest under them. They are a benign presence in hot summers. Homes, streets and villages are known from them. With trees, whole cultural references vanish. Patar has written a popular poem, ‘Mar rahi hai meri bhasha (my language is dying)’ in which he names the words which have dropped from Punjabi over time. Soon, they will include names of many trees.

Patar may be a poet of the modern lyric but there is a folk undertone in his poetry. That’s why his literary poems too turn into popular songs. Today, very few poets have the distinction of being mass icons. Travelling in a taxi in Delhi, Patar found the driver staring at him from the rear-view mirror, again and again. He knew the driver had recognised him. In Punjab, he is a household name.

Poetry, he says, comes to him in rhyme. His poems are compressed and tightly packed in the Urdu meter but unfurl gloriously in his haunting voice. When he pauses to consider a question, he turns his face away, purses his lips, narrows his eyes and sits so still that he almost looks like a tree.

Dharminder Kumar is a Delhi-based journalist

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