SHIV KUMAR BATALVI

A Transcendental Agony - Shiv Kumar
By Dr. C.S.Chan
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I have adorned this poem since 1972 and I am proud of reproducing this great lyric written by the author in his own hand.

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Shiv Kumar was born on July 23, 1936 in Bara Pind Lohtian (Shakargarh tehsil), in Punjab (now Pakistan). His father was
a Patwari by the name of Pandit Krishan Gopal. After the partition his family moved to Batala. As a child Shiv is said to have
been fascinated by birds and rugged, thorny plants on the Punjabi landscape. Shiv was exposed to the 'ramlila' at an
early age, and it is to be expected that he received what was later to become his instinctive understanding of drama
 from these early performances.


Shiv passed his matriculate exams in 1953, from Punjab University. He went on to enrol in the F.Sc. programme at Baring
Union Christian College in Batala. Before completing his degree he moved to S.N. College, Qadian into their Arts program.
It is here that he began to sing ghazals and songs for his classmates. Shiv never gave the final exams he needed
to pass to receive his degree.

Around this period, he met a girl named Maina at a fair in Baijnath. When he went back to look for her in her
hometown, he heard the news of her death and wrote his elegy 'Maina'. This episode was to prefigure numerous
other partings that would serve as material to distil into poems. Perhaps the most celebrated such episode is his fascination
for Gurbaksh Singh's daughter who left for the US and married someone else. When he heard of the birth of her first child,
Shiv wrote 'Main ek shikra yaar banaya',perhaps his most famous love poem. It's said that when she had her second child,
someone asked Shiv whether he would write another poem. Shiv replied 'Have I become responsible for her?
Am I to write a poem on her every time shegives birth to a child?' Sounds much better in Punjabi
(main oda theka leya hoyaa? Oho bacche banayi jave te main
ode te kavita likhda rehma?). In 1965 Shiv won the Sahitya Akademi award for his verse-drama Loona.
He married on Feb 5, 1967


His wife Aruna was a Brahmin from Kir Mangyal in district Gurdaspur. By all accounts Shiv had a happy marriage.
He had two children,Meharbaan (b. Apr. 12, 1968) and Puja (b. Sep. 23, 1969) whom he loved immensely.

By 1968 he had moved to Chandigarh, but both Batala and Chandigarh became soulless in his eyes. Chandigarh brought
him fame,but scathing criticism as well, Shiv replied with an article titled 'My hostile critics'. Meanwhile his epilepsy got
worse and he had a serious attack while at a store in Chandigarh's section 22. In the early 70's Shiv came to Bombay for a
literary conference. In keeping with Shiv's outrageous behaviour there is a story about his trip to Bombay as well. Part of the
conference involved readings at Shanmukhananda hall. After a few people had read their work (one of whom was Meena Kumari),
Shiv got on the stage and began "Almost everyone today has begun to consider themselves a poet, each and every person
 off the streets is writing ghazals".

By the time he'd finished with his diatribe, there was not a sound in the hall. This is when he began to read
'Ek kuri jeeda naam mohabbat. gum hai, gum hai...'. There wasn't a sound when he finished either.

Shiv has been called a Bohemian. There were complaints about his drinking and some suggestions that his 'friends' had him drink so he
would exhibit his outrageous self.

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.

Jeet

It's very nice of you to bring to other friends knowledge
the life of Shiv Kumar Batalvi.

Indeed he is the greatest punjabi poet according to me.

His sad poems and ghazals are worth reading.

Rajbir

THNKS RAJBIR BRO!!!!!!