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In Yugan Yugantaran di Sanjh Puran Singh emphasises the
dialectical relation of form and content. While presenting a
profile of the Sikh persona, he says that Sikhism always gives
due importance to conventional signs and symbols, without which
no cartography of the Sikh personality is possible. In fact,
signs in a religious formation are worshipped since they are
never devoid of content. Sign without a semantic dimension is
lifeless like a body without soul. No religion can survive
without its semiology. The father of modern linguistics
Ferdinand de Saussure has also expressed such views in a
different context when he defines sign as a signifying ensemble
of the ‘signifier’ (form) and the ‘signified’ (content),
which are inseparably associated with each other in the manner
that they always appear simultaneously in the process of
signification.
Kesel has brought
forth such postulates in the writings of Prof Puran Singh. Even
the sun, the moon and the stars appear as the personification of
the cosmic power in his poems. At one place he addresses the sun
thus, "My sun, my darling. I am a pearl of dew resting on a
leaf of grass, waiting to be soaked up, consumed and ingested by
you."
Puran Singh gives
his unique characterisation of a true Sikh. He affirms that in
the struggle for existence the Khalsa never foregrounds his own
selfish interest in order to boost his own tiny ego since with
the grace of the Guru his own "I" has transformed into
the vast "I" of mankind. Nobody should be afraid of
the Khalsa of Guru Gobind Singh since "he never sucks the
bones of material things." The categories of the universe
for him are the variegated forms of the inscrutable Divine Being
pervading the cosmos. Guru Granth Sahib, he states, is
the history of the Sikh spirit and "the Khalsa is the ideal
future international state of man…."
Puran Singh has
meditated over every school of thought that developed in India,
though he was more captivated by Advait Vedanta. He
states, "Vedanta’s fascinating philosophy of Maya—Illusion,
is the prior condition of every Indian mind, and no Sikh can
escape, even if he so desires, the fascination of the Vedantic
theory of Maya—so entrancingly put in Yoga Vashishta.
Vedanta is the background of all religions of
India." Guru Granth Sahib for him is "the new Veda
and the new Gita and new Upanishads, if they are
to share in the great life-urge of the modern world."
Time and again,
Puran Singh castigates empty ritualism and religious fanaticism.
He believes that religious ritualism is a heavy burden on the
shoulders of an average Indian that does not let him follow the
path of true religion that leads to salvation (mukti).
The first few decades of the 20th century is the time of India’s
cultural renaissance. Swami Vivekandanda, Rabindra Nath Tagore,
Aurobindo Ghosh, Swami Ram Tirath, Mohammad Iqbal, Bhai Vir
Singh and Prof Puran Singh are the main exponents of this
cultural resurgence in North India. Prof Kirpal Singh Kesel,
despite his blindness for many years now, has done a marvellous
job by making these wonderful works available to Punjabi
readers.
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PROF
Puran Singh, born in 1881 in Pothohaar, now in Pakistan, in an
Ahluwalia family, is universally acclaimed as one of the founders of
modern Punjabi poetry. As a poet he was deeply influenced by English
Romantics and the American poet of vitality Walt Whitman. In the
beginning of the 20th century he went to Japan for higher studies in
pharmaceutical chemistry, where he came in contact with Swami Ram
Tirath and some Buddhist theologists. Thus, Vedanta and Buddhism
became the basis of his philosophical meditations, which he carried
along, when inspired by Bhai Vir Singh he came back to the Sikh
fold.
