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Footloose darwesh Satyarthi is dead,
Lak Tunnu Tunnu will ring in heaven

S P Singh

For decades, that incomparable collector of folk songs and folklore, polyglot Devendra Satyarthi's black pen scribbled relentlessly, recording for posterity the folk heritage which would necessarily have been lost otherwise. And for years, his wife's sewing machine rattled incessantly, making sure the family had enough to at least survive. 

Satyarthi's pen stopped writing finally; he died two days ago. The sewing machine still works. 

"I confess that it was the sewing machine which saved the family, I just scribbled on paper," Satyarthi had said some four years ago, summing up his life. The entire literary world however has been much more kind, prefixing forever the epithet of darwesh (saintly) to his name. 

They made a perfect couple: Satyarthi spent most years loafing about, measuring the country's length and breadth and recording its cultural diversity, his wife bringing up children, then grandchildren, and greatgrandchildren. 

Born in the summer of 1908 in Sangrur's Bhadaur, Satyarthi was the quintessential roamer, leaving his education midway to take to the road in 1927, meeting the humblest of Indians, middle-class people, traders, farmers, tribals and the mightiest too in various fields. Among the people he ended up befriending were Gurudev Rabindra Nath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi. 

And along went the work of collecting folk songs. In 1935, Giddha was published, and remains a seminal treatise, even today.  

Recalls Panjab University professor and folklore expert Nahar Singh, who himself has spent a lifetime in the same field: "Many were foresighted in those times of the Raj and talked about the importance of recording the country's cultural diversity, but few had the courage to step out of the cushioned life and do it. It required a lifetime, and Satyarthi dedicated his life to it."

Of his 95 years, Satyarthi gave too little to his family, sparing most of his time for the written word. Aloofness was his hallmark, and the Spartan lifestyle came naturally. 

He was hardly able to speak in his last two-three years. When Balbir Parwana, that relentless pen pusher wedded to the strange addiction of keeping adulterating dullheaded journalism with meaningful literature, convinced a couple of scribes last December to try to get one last interview of Satyarthi in Delhi, there was little coherent that he could say. Ironical for a man who had spent a lifetime building up a reputation for being a loquacious raconteur. 

Nirmal Arpan, who wrote the racy but enriching Satyarthi – Ik Dant-katha, recalled what a wonderfully pestering guest he could be, and fashioned enough material from his interaction with the great man to write an entire volume of anecdotes about Satyarthi. 

Satyarthi initially wrote in Urdu, Hindi and English, but after Tagore advised him to write in his mother tongue, he started using devnagri script to write in Punjabi. "My first essay in Punjabi was published in Preetlarri and since then, I have been considered a Punjabi writer," Satyarthi once said. 

His books kept appearing with unfailing regularity: Murrka Te Kanak, Dharti Diyan Vaajan, Paris Da Aadmi, Kung Posh, Devta Dig Piya, Tinna Buhiyan Wala Ghar. 

Many a litterateur recalled that he was perhaps the only man who got a recommendation for a job – editorship for the Hindi literary journal Aaj Kal – from none other than Mahatma Gandhi. Okay fine, Nehru too was his nominee, but that is disputed. 

He took pride in being ghumakkar (a roamer, loafer), but in his later years had a regret for not being responsible towards his family. "I wasn't there when my daughter Kavita was born, and I wasn't there when she died. It is a burden that will lighten only with my death, but when you are afflicted with a junoon, this is what happens,'' he once told litterateur Prakash Mannu. 

It was in the writing of the novel Ghorra Baadshah that Satyarthi said he was able to forget some of his lifetime pain. But the fact is that with his death, one of the last links between the pre-Independence Punjab and now has snapped. Satyarthi belonged to the generation of, and was friends with, Saadat Hasan Manto, Krishna Sobti, Gurbaksh Singh Preetlari, Mohan Singh, Ismat Chugtai, Rajinder Singh Bedi and Nanak Singh. 

When AIR wanted to pay him royalty for folk songs, Satyarthi refused saying copyrights were vested in Bharat Mata, just as Satyarthi's memories will always be vested in the lovers of the written word, and the country's folk heritage. Who can forget Lak Tunnu Tunnu?■ 

February 14, 2003

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