Rana Surat Singh
Bhai Vir Singh's epic in blank verse of a widowed queen's search for her dead husband and for God.
Rana Surat Singh, published in 1905, is a long narrative poem by Bhai Vir Singh, the father of modern Punjabi literature. Rani Raj Kaur, whose husband Surat Singh has died in battle, cannot be consoled. Through her grief, and through the teaching of a holy woman, she is led from attachment to an image of her husband towards union with the divine.
Written in the sirkhandi metre, unrhymed and flowing, the poem was the first epic in modern Punjabi and the first serious attempt to carry Sikh mysticism into a long literary form. It is full of hills, forests and moonlit rivers, and of the language of the Guru Granth Sahib.
Bhai Vir Singh also wrote the novels Sundri, Bijay Singh and Satwant Kaur, set in the eighteenth-century persecutions, which gave the Singh Sabha generation its heroes, and short lyrics such as the Kashmir poems of Lehran de Haar. His house in Amritsar is now a museum.
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