Puran Singh - The Sikh Poet

BY S. P. SARMA, B.A., B.L.

India is truly said to be the home of spirituality. In spite of her apparent diversity, there, is a fundamental oneness underlying all her thought and action. Particularly is this so in the field of religion. The number of religions practised within her borders is legion, but her Religion has been only one. Hindu and Muslim, Sikh and Parsee, Brahmin and Pariah, have all sung different tunes but they have sung the name of the same Lord and, what is more important, fully recognised the fact. It is only the pedestrian that is bewildered by the number and the variety of the trees surrounding him. But he who rises in spirituality even by a few steps will gain the proper perspective and assign the trees to their proper places. Hence it is that the mystic is the same all over the world. Indeed, he speaks almost the same language everywhere. Whether it is the Christian mystic of the middle ages in Europe, or the Persian Sufi singing his ecstatic vision of the Lord, or the Pariah Nanda immersed in contemplation of Nataraja, almost the same figures of speech are used and almost the same words. The devotee, for instance, is always the beloved and the Lord is always the Lover. Supreme Bliss is spoken of in terms of conjugal felicity, and union with the Divine like the union of the lover and the beloved. The parable of Sree Krishna and the gopis is eternally true, only the application naturally varies with time and country. Besides, the true mystic invariably recognises that the various religions are only the different editions of the same Book of Truth. Only those who do not know wrangle. Thus Kabir could not see any distinction between Ram and Rahim and Puran Singh too feels the same noble difficulty. Thus he sings, he a follower of the Sikh religion:-

"The world met Him in Krishna, Buddha; in Christ, in Mahomed; but I know him as my Lord and Father,–Baba, Guru Nanak. Him I have seen not once, but for ten generations. He in a thousand ways gave signs to us of Nam, the Holy one."

Puran singh was born in 1881 in Abbotabad in the North Western Frontier Province. His father was a subordinate Government official who was out on tour for the greater part of the year. The upbringing of the children fell solely to the lot of the mother, a woman of rare courage and simplicity. Puran Singh speaks lovingly of how she did everything for the children, particularly of her taking them to the hill-streams and giving them a daily plunge in the crystal, biting cold water. The family lived in a village and every evening, she repaired with the children to the Sikh temple where they all listened to the hymns of the Guru every morning as they were sung by the village priest. Puran Singh was a good student, for the sake of whose education the family soon moved to Rawalpindi. Thence he moved to Lahore for the college, this time alone. The separation between the mother and the son was very painful but the lady had a rare way of reconciling herself to the inevitable and she soon composed herself. Not so, however, the loving son. At Lahore he constantly thought of his mother and spent many an anxious hour in that way. But ambition was rapidly growing in him. While not yet a graduate, he secured a scholarship to go to Japan and study Applied Chemistry there in the Imperial University of Tokyo. This was in 1900. Academic honours however were not for the young Sikh whose heart was full of poetry and whose soul was longing for God-realisation. The only benefit he derived from his Japanese tour is thus expressed in his own words: "I was in the Tokyo Imperial University studying Applied Chemistry for more than three years and learning a good deal of the industrial life of that country. I came in contact with the leading Japanese people and was a friend of many a family, where I found the love of flowers, of nature and of Buddha. I met men of silence, men of joy, poets and artists, and I always sought for the hidden riches of the soul wherever I went. Towards the close of my stay there, I gained the new joy of freedom from self and everything dropped from my hands. I turned a monk. Tears of joy rolled from my eyes. It seemed that I loved everyone and that everyone loved me." This was an extraordinary turn in the life of an Indian student of Applied Chemistry in Japan. But that was not all. Soon Puran Singh came into contact with a Hindu Sanyasin who "touched him with Divine Fire" and made him a Sanyasin also. Before long the characteristic ideas of Hindu Renascence today like Nation-making, awakening India to its ancient greatness and so on, filled the mind of the young initiate. The call of the Motherland became more and more urgent until at last it could no longer be left unheeded. Puran Singh left Japan and reached Calcutta–donning the yellow robes of the Hindu Sanyasin. The circumstances of his family, in the meanwhile, had grown from bad to worse and his parents came to Calcutta to find him out and to take him . With much difficulty they detected him in his Hindu guise and took him to Abbotabad with them. As a Sikh, he had violated a very strict religious injunction in having cut off his hair and removed his turban. But forgiveness was ready and he soon went to his fold and to the bosom of his family, yet the fire that had been kindled in him by the Hindu Sanyasin was not extinguished but was burning bright, as ever.

To most of us, the poems of Puran Singh can be available only in their foreign garb, and what beauty and what imagination do they reveal! Like Tagore, Puran Singh also has the gift of conveying in English a faint echo of the music which must be thrilling in the original. His songs are all based on the Sikh Scripture, the Granth Sahib, and display the reaction of such a noble book on a sensitive, poetic and God-intoxicated soul. He has a rich imagination and a. great gift of expression. And yet the thoughts and feelings in his mind are so far removed and elevated, that ordinary words fail him and he has oftentimes to resort to parables in order to convey what he feels. Difference of opinion there might be as to his greatness as a poet or as a mystic, but every one of his songs has the true ring of the seer. Tagore probably has a richer imagery or loftier heights of spiritual realisation but Puran Singh also unmistakably belongs to the same category of saints and seers.