shiv kumar batalvi Life Story.

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shiv kumar batalvi

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Shiv Kumar Batalvi (1936-1973) Born in a village in the Shakargarh tehsil of the district of Sialkot (now in Pakistan), Shiv Kumar Batalvi was brought up in Batala where his father was an official (Kanungo) in the revenue department. After passing the matriculation examination, he joined the Baring Union Christian College at Batala and then Khalsa College, Kadian. But he left the second college also after about a year and joined a school at Baijnath in Kangra district for a preliminary course of engineering. There he fell in love with a girl Meena. Meena died of typhoid fever and like Mohan Singh, Shiv Kumar became a victim of unending bereavement. But whereas Mohan Singh was able to outgrow his sorrow, Shiv Kumar kept it alive in his breast until his death. At his father's insistence he passed a course of land and revenue accounts and actually joined service as a Patwari. Shiv Kumar seems to have acquired an intimate knowledge of the rural scene in a rather isolated corner of Punjab, through his brief experience as a Patwari but it is his Brahmanical culture that links his poetry to the urban Hindu ritual and its picturesque catholicity. His first collection of poems was published in 1960 under the tide Piran da paraga (The Scarf of Sorrows). Shiv Kumar's repeated disappointment in love is poignantly reflected in these poems. The tone is one of bereavement and despair. The most relished poem in the collection is "Kandiali Thohar" (Thorny Cactus); Kumar compares himself to this plant which grows in the wilderness and on which no human care is bestowed. In this collection as in all his subsequent work, Shiv Kumar takes sorrow to its last limit. The next collection of poems followed in 1961 with the title 'Lajwanti' (Touch Me Not). In these poems the poet starts from his own experience to an objective realisation of the human situation. It has been called a pleasant combination of tradition and experimentation. In this collection, "Garbhavati" (A Pregnant Woman) is one of Shiv Kumar's great poems. The next collection came in 1962 with the title Atte dian chirian (The Sparrows of flour). In these poems, the poet's vision pierces the colourful curtain of romance to the stark reality of life and gives an indication of his deeper acquaintance with human grief and sorrow. In 1965 was published Shiv Kumar's masterpiece, a dramatic poem, "Luna". In this poem Shiv Kumar has taken up the legend of Puran Bhakta which has been called an expression of a significant aspect of the Punjabi psyche. It is the story of Puran, son of Raja Salvahan, resisting the solicitations of his youthful stepmother Luna, who perverts the truth into a big lie and accuses the innocent Puran of having attempted to outrage her modesty. Shiv Kumar changes the legend to an extent, by justifying the youthful Luna's solicitation of her stepson, because she has been married against her will to the old Raja Salvahan. So beautifully has Shiv Kumar advocated Luna's case that beside the iniquity of an unequal marriage, Puran's dutiful rejection of Luna's advances appears as a cruel, ascetically insensibility. The poet has woven the tapestry of Puran's rejection in such a way, that it remains inexplicit till the end, whether the rejection is being presented as a compulsion of Puran's role as an ascetic, or as a rejection of beauty and youth by a cruelly motivated social order. Main Te Main (I and I) published in 1970 is a long poem of seventy-five pages, which is unique in modern Punjabi poetry in both its conception and execution. In the introduction the poet himself writes, "The legend in this poem is not mine, nor is its truth my truth...whatever is mine in the truth of this legend is the truth of my being not of my person. Its psychological background is only a phenomenon of the intellectual and moral scepticism of the present generation. The truth of the hero of this poem is a protest against the false and hollow moral values of today. It is the revolt of modern man's disintegrated personality against the death of his true being." The narrator describes his birth as the result of his mother's sexual hunger even when she is an unmarried woman. This hunger is, according to the poet' sunk deep in the being of every woman, who is basically an unmarried mother. What the poet actually means by this formulation is not quite clear, except on the understanding of the poet's own experience of the basic unmorlity of woman's desire for man as her ravisher and her son as the culmination of her innermost sexual urge. Another collection of poems was published in 1971 under the tide Arti (Prayer). The poems included in it were written between the years 1963 and 1965. Thus they are chronologically later than both Luna. and Main Te Main. Shiv as the traditional poetical phenomenon was born out of the literary conjugation (Kalmi sanjog) of Amrita Pritam and Mohan Singh, to whom he appropriately dedicated his most important creation 'Briha too Sultan'. Both Amrita and Mohan had personally suffered in their respective love lives on account of circumstances beyond their control. In their romanticism therefore, a personal tinge of desperation was in-evitable. Punjabi character is far more emotional, both in happiness as well as sadness, than all other peoples' of the Indian subcontinent. To succeed as a poet, therefore, one must succeed in making people cry as well as bursting into hilarious laughter with the flow of the lines. In contradiction to Amrita and Mohan, Shiv therefore, developed the most superb art of recitation. He will be long remembered, like Heer Warris Shah, for this emotional rendering of whatever he wrote. I was deeply impressed by his exposition of this vivid magic in the very first Kavita that he gave at our house - 'Ki puchde ho hal fakiran da'. This ren-dering has the touch of Sehgal's voice - '])ukhh ke Aab din bitad nahin' Shiv like Sehgal had the inborn gift of soul-touching expression. He needed words and lines and in this he had the help of his creators more than anyone else past or present. I feel that in her enthusiasm to present her 'poetic-child' to the world Amrita herself became too emotional in giving an unnecessary notoriety to Shiv as a heart-throwing lover (dil-pheank ashiq.). Any healthy child experiences love-stings like Shiv and dreams love dreams like he did, but every child cannot be a poet. In the lines that are attributed to this side of Shiv's creation there is the show of an irksome mockery. Every effort had been made to present him as a love-torn lover; as a half living, babbling corpse of love's treachery. True to his creators he was expounding all his life a love-lost theme, which was not, his own but was someone else's. He was never allowed to grow up beyond this slippery, muddy stage of deception with alcohol and tob5cco in his body and love-potions in his mind.