Batalvi—The bigger picture

Amarjot Kaur

Fifty photographs on display at Punjab Kala Bhawan paint a bigger, more personal, picture of Punjabi poet Shiv Kumar Batalvi. From his hand-written letters to an artist friend, Sohan Qadri, to the cover of his novel Aatte Diyan Chiddiyaan, the intensity of his character grows with every photograph.

Clicked in 1962, a picture shows him dressed in dhoti and kurta in front of a mike. Behind him, in a turley wali pag, is Yamla Jatt, but you probably won’t notice him first. There’s something attractively hypnotic about the way he looks, in every picture.

There’s a yellow house with green doors, now in Pakistan—the one he was born in, at Bara Pind Lohtian. There’s a picture of his house in India’s Batala too. But the ones that steal the thunder from almost every other photograph in the room are his hand-written letters to Qadri.

Sent from Prem Nagar, Phone 130, he writes to his friend urging him to meet him. In the other, he talks about a book he was to return to Qadri. He tells him how upset he had been for six months, and apologises for not being able to attend his exhibition.

An onlooker’s comment breaks the meditative state of mind. “Who writes letters these days? WhatsApp teh e-mails ne reh gaiyan hun!” says a 70-something turbaned Sikh man, who looks rather annoyed. But there was something very dignified about how Shiv picked up the first letter of the word while underlining it as he took that line upward to cover the letter that followed it.

Captioned in Punjabi, giving due credit to the contributor and the photographer, most of these pictures are marked with the year they were taken in. Even the ones in black and white, and sepia, give some colour to his disposition.

He looks like a doting father posing in two of his photographs, one with his son Meharban and the other with daughter Pooja. He strikes as an achiever humbled to receive the Sahitya Akademi Award by President Zakir Husain in 1967, making him the youngest recipient of the award for his verse play based on ancient legend of Puran Bhagat, Loona (1965).

A picture of his clicked in London of 1971 with Kailash Puri along with many others at mushairas brings out the brooding poet in him. You may spot a loving friend in more photos than one—photographed in 1960, he poses next to Sohan Qadri and Surjit Singh Sethi. In a yet another frame, he smiles for the camera (while looking away from it) with his former roommate Prem Kumar clicked in 1966. In this whole tryst with Batalvi’s life in letters and photographs, one is left wondering who to give the first compliment to—the one who clicked, or the one being clicked!

They did it

• These pictures have been contributed by Amarjit Chandan, Beeba Balwant, Zadid, Harbhajan Bajwa, Goldee Tara, Krishan Adeeb, Rajiv Batalvi, Vishav Bharti, Punjab Digital Library, Harpreet Singh Bhatti, and Pritam Singh Rupal.
• The exhibition has been compiled by Diwan Manna. 
• It’s presented by Punjab Lalit Kala Akademi and Punjab Arts Council. 

On till August 14 at Punjab Kala Bhawan, Sector 16.