The poet of impossible dreams

“When we were born, first our mothers smiled, and then they cried. Smiled because the family’s inheritor had arrived; cried over the thought how they would survive in this dark world.” In his poem ‘Patar and I’, that is how Pash tries to visualise the scene around his birth. Had Pash — born on September 9 — not fallen to Khalistani Kalashnikovs three and a half decades ago, he would have turned 74. But Pash didn’t die, he lives on. He lives on in the words, he lives on in his poems, he lives in the dreams, the death of which he called ‘the most terrible’. He wove the dreams of the ‘wretched of the earth’ and kept them alive.

Perhaps that is why TC Ghai, English translator of Pash’s poems, says, “One can also see in him the makings of a complete rebel. (…)he comes very close to being someone who, shedding all illusions, all great, smooth, geometric constructions of life, is beginning to see through hindsight and in retrospect the march of civilisation with the complete bafflement and bewilderment of its victims, the ever marginalised, who can make no sense of this march of history and civilisation except that it has always worked against them.”

Pash’s distinction and uniqueness as a poet lies in his almost total subversion of the Punjabi literary tradition, its form and content, its aesthetics, its language and diction, and in charting out new ways of seeing, writes Ghai.

Pash was a born rebel. At the age of 17, when he shook the world of Punjabi poetry with his blank verses, an established poet junked his poems as “having no value more than just a red rag”. But it was only Pash who had the courage to hold the mirror to his towering contemporaries like Amrita Pritam and Prof Mohan Singh: “Don’t expect me to write about your rotten tastes.” He declared that it was time to write songs of the lost eyesight of the old cobbler; the burnt skin of the ironsmith; the cracked hands of the village woman who washed utensils. “I still have a lot to talk about before beauty comes,” he said. That was Pash.