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An avant-garde poet THE yearly feature of holding a literary seminar, a poetical symposium and a rendering of folk songs and folk dances on the occasion of Prof Mohan Singh’s birth anniversary on October 20 has now gained historic significance.The credit ofcourse goes to the Prof Mohan Singh Memorial Foundation that came into being at the initiative of Jagdev Singh Jassowal. Now, besides him, Pargat Singh Grewal, Gurbhajan Gill and Kulwant Jagraon are keeping aloft the torch that was alighted 24 years ago. Prof Mohan Singh was an avant-garde lyrical poet, deeply imbued with the spirit of folk songs and folk melody. It was the meticulous choice of the right word that converted his poetic creation into a thing of rare beauty. He, however, never compromised with his ideological concepts for sonorous effects. He had a unique trait in his personality as a poet. He could recite his poems in poetical symposia with the same eclat as the professional poets of his age did. Still, essentially he was a learned poet and his poetic creations were of great interest for the emerging class of intellectual readers. He was wedded to a particular political creed and adhered to it all through his life. Ludhiana remembers Mahir (nom de plume of Mohan Singh, which he later discarded) as it remembers Sahir. These two poets have given to this commercial city the honour of being on the literary map of India. Prof Mohan Singh was a poet of exuberant feelings. His spontaneity of expression could transcend the present and connect him to the cultural heritage of this land of five rivers. At times he was attuned to the Sufi tradition of Bulle Shah who said, “Tere ishq nachaya kar thhayya thhayya”. His personal grief, with a passage of time, lost its entity in universal sorrow and he exclaimed, “Nijji pyar de thheke utte ruh meri nashiandi na” (No more my soul feels inebriated at the tavern of my intimate craving). Prof Mohan Singh was born in 1905 at Mardaan, now in Pakistan. He spent the early years of his life at Dhamial (Rawalpindi), his ancestral village. Later, he lived in cities like Amritsar, Lahore, Jalandhar, Patiala and Ludhiana. In this way he had in his personality both the traits of Punjabi life, rural as well as urban. Likewise, in his poetry he combines his love for the countryside with his liking for modern sensibilities. Folk motifs dominate his poems, whereas his ghazals depict the sophistication of the Urdu ghazal. He won many laurels during his lifetime but he is getting acclaim in no less degree even after his death on May 3, 1978 in Ludhiana. N.S. Tasneem 
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