By: Harbir Kaur

“HAZARON BARAS NARGAS APNI BENOORI PE ROTI HAI

BADI MUSHKIL SE HOTA HAI CHAMAN MEIN DEEDAWAAR PAIDA”

Dr.Mohammad Iqbal

It takes thousands of years for a hero to take birth and 17 Feb.1881, witnessed the birth of one such.

Born on 17 Feb. 1881, in Rawalpindi, in the household of doting parents, Smt. Parma Devi and Sd. Kartaar Singh, Puran Singh was a man with distinct features and capabilities.

His early education included the teachings of Urdu and Gurmukhi from, Maulavi in the mosque and Bhai Sahib Bela Singh Ji in gurudwara, respectively.

Where, in 1885, he cleared his middle school with French as one of the subjects, in F.A, he studied English, Mathematics, Sanskrit and Chemistry.

He evolved into a man of letters. The profundity became inevitable. He was still reading for his B.A. in D.A.V College, Lahore, when he got a scholarship to study abroad. In April 1900, he proceeded to Japan to specialize in Industrial Chemistry.

It is said, God is with you in all your chores if you have insight to do the good for a larger number of people. Puran Singh was not just an ordinary man. He had a larger motive to be in this world. His existence became a relief to many of them in India and abroad.

Four crucial events in his life—his Japanese experience, his encounter with the American poet Walt Whitman, his discipleship of Swami Ram Tirath, and his meeting with the Sikh Savant Bhai Vir Singh—left permanent marks on his impressionable mind.

He stayed at Tokyo and learnt German and Japanese. In Tokyo, science was taught in German in those days. All these months he visited many factories. Moreover, as a student in Japan, he had imbibed the ethos and aesthetics of these beautiful people. He had been wholly charmed by their ritual and ceremony, industry and integrity. The openness of their nature and the holiness of their heart’s responses made him forever a worshipper of life’s largeness and generosities. He was greatly influenced by the romantic aestheticism of Okakura Kakuzo, Japanese artist and scholar. This stay at Japan brought him so close to Japanese culture that one could see echoes of the ‘spirit’ of Japanese culture in his poetry and prose. He also went on a pilgrimage to Fujiyama and became an active member of Oriental Club. Probably, that developed in him a deep concern for his own country, India and its freedom struggle. He started giving lectures about the Indian freedom.

In 1902, Jan-Feb, he contracted Typhoid and had to get his head shorn off. It was, here in Japan only, that he came under the spell of Ram Tirath, who regarded him as an echo or image of his own self. The power of this spell was so strong that Puran Singh turned not only a Buddhist monk but a Vedantist also. It was just a chance encounter with Swami Ram Tirath who was on a lecture tour of Japan in Feb.1902. He formed an Indo-Japanese Club in Tokyo and started a revolutionary Journal called “Thundering Dawn” to focus on the plight of Indian masses under the British rule. He expatiated on this theme in a novel that he wrote in English (unfortunately, its copy has not been restored).

Puran Singh also met other revolutionaries here in Japan, for example Kulkarni and Ramakant Roy from Bengal etc. Therefore, when Puran Singh landed in Calcutta, he was captured and imprisoned by the British. His parents got him released and took him to Lahore on the pretext of his sister’s illness. His emotional faculty forced him to agree to follow Sikhism first, and marry Maya Devi, later.

We see a socialite, a dormant politician, an academician, a writer, a scientist, an art lover, and an aesthetic in just one man, i.e., Puran Singh.

From March 1904 to May 1904, he lived in Lahore (Anarkali) and discovered rosha grass in partnership with Bhagat Ishar Das and Rai Bahadur Shiv Nathh.

Life came in full circle for Prof. Puran Singh. He went from India to Japan, back to India from Japan and then America. Each experience and encounter made him rich philosophically and spiritually.

Walt Whitman, the American poet, had left a deep impression on his poetics and practice as on his worldview. His poetry echoes the thoughts of Whitman.

Then his meeting with Bhai Vir Singh in 1912 at Sialkot proved the final turn of a spinning soul in search of certitude: it was after this meeting that he regained his lost faith in Sikhism. Although he eventually graduated to Sikhism after a highly influenced life of a monk and Vedantist, this was much too profound an experience to be entirely washed out of his consciousness: he subsumed it in the dialectics of his Guru’s creed. Perhaps he had strayed to return with greater vigour and conviction; his bursting creative energy had now found its focus and meter.

Puran Singh commuted between science and literature with ease. His achievements in both fields are equally significant. He spent a great deal of his time on his scientific experiments like, making odourless oils, opening soap factory, growing rosha grass etc. and gave his time freely to visitors, monks and revolutionaries, who thronged his hospitable home from different parts of the world.

Besides all this, it seemed his wandering soul needed a refuge in something unearthly. He was a lover of nature and beauty, and wrote beautiful and tender poetry both in English and in Punjabi. Among his famous works in English are The Sisters of the Spinning Wheel (1921), Unstrung Beads (1923), The Spirit of Oriental Poetry (1926); in Punjabi, Khulle Maidan, Khulle Ghund (1923), Khulle Lekh (1929), and Khulle Asmani Rang ( 1927) .

In July-August 1928, a huge flood ruined the whole of Chakk and he had to face heavy losses. Yet he rejoiced that he had been able to salvage the manuscripts of his books. He took his losses in a philosophical spirit and danced singing a poem by Bullah Shah expressing relief at the devastation of his property, which had rid him of many worries.

“bhala hoya mera charkha tutya

te jind ajaibon chhutti”

In November 1930, he came to Dehradun for the treatment of Tuberculosis.

On March 31, 1931, this man of extreme genius went to heavenly abode forever.

Though we can just pay our homage to this great soul through these articles, we bow before this great man who sacrificed his Nobel prize so that it could be given to Sri Rabindra Nath Tagore for ‘Geetanjali’.