PUNJABI POETS-6

PROFESSOR PURAN SINGH

  
 SHORT LIFE SKETCH

Professor Puran Singh (17 February 1881 - 31 March 1931) was a famous Sikh poet and scientist born on 17 February 1881 at village called Salhad in Abbottabad District (now in Pakistan) in an Ahluwalia Khatri family. His mother's name was Parma Devi while his father was Kartar Singh who worked in the revenue department at Salhad, though their ancestral home was in the village of Dera Khalsa in Rawalpindi district, also now in Pakistan.
Puran Singh’s whole life was passed in writing activity that may be called ‘feverish’ without the implication of a mere metaphor. A vast mass of work poured out from his pen in various fields – on the science of biochemistry in which he held a professorship at the Imperial Forest Research Institute, Dehra Dun; English belles; letters expressive of fervent devotion to the holy Gurus of Sikhism and their teaching, and of warm humanitarianism.
In addition, towards the last decade of his life cut short so cruelly, he poured out loads of writings in Punjabi, prose and poetry, that have acquired the status of classics in the language. The total mass of what he wrote is truly astounding and it might be said that his entire working life was devoted to writing, while no doubt in his sleeping hours his mind must have lived with his themes in dream.
Unfortunately, too soon he caught the fatal disease of tuberculosis during the last years of the decade of the 1920's; and this assuming ‘galloping’ character passed away at the end of March, 1931.