Punjabi Poetry by Rajab Ali

It was at the funeral service for one of my father's aunts (the wife of a brother of his mother's) that I heard the kathhaa-vaachak (preacher) recite a few couplets by Rajab Ali. It was my first encounter with his poetry and I was enthralled. The departed lady's oldest son i. e. my father's cousin later promised to collect as many of Ali's verses as he could and put those down in a notebook, for me. I never found out whether he was able to do that as he succumbed to cancer a few years down the line and, somehow, I did not get a chance to meet him in-between.

Apparently, the poet was an overseer in the irrigation department, posted in the Malwa region of Punjab, before 1947 (after which he moved to the newly-formed Pakistan, along with his family), and he spent a good part of his tenure at my paternal grandmother's ancestral village and a few surrounding ones. Many of those from my parents' generation and those preceding it still recite and listen to his kavishari over there, probably not as often as before though. So, it was quite a pleasure to come across some of his poems posted online, in the Gurmukhi as well as Roman scripts.

One does wish that the great man had been treated better by the country of his birth and provided with adequate security at the time of partition to protect him and his family against the violence that took place, so that he could stay and practise his craft in India, or by his adopted country, where his services to the Punjabi language never really received due recognition.