Shadow Correspondent
Jammu, May 12:
All India Kranti Force Jammu and Kashmir remembered Shamsher Bahadur Singh’s ,Who was a bridge between Hindi and Urdu, Shamsher Bahadur Singh’s poetry has many dimensions He was called “a poet of poets” because his poetry had raised the bar of the art form so high that it seemed rather difficult to match it or to take it to any higher point. He was one of those few poets who successfully achieved the ideal of setting new aesthetic standards while also giving full expression to their political ideology and world view. All India Kranti Force Said he was One can have some idea of his place in the Hindi poetry of the 20th century from the fact that when Shamsher Bahadur Singh turned 60, his fellow poets and publisher got together to bring out a collection of his poems, extracts from his diaries and articles of critical appreciation written by them. This slim 144-page commemorative volume was simply titled Shamsher and contained full-length articles on his oeuvre penned by the likes of Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh, Vijay Dev Narayan Sahi, Malayaj, Ramvilas Sharma and Dr. Raghuvansh. Raghuvir Sahay too contributed a short piece that analysed and explained “Tooti Hui, Bikhari Hui” Broken, Scattered, perhaps the most celebrated love poem in modern Hindi poetry. Surprisingly, the book did not carry the name of its editor. One does not know if Shamsher possessed an ego as a poet but one can say with absolute certainty that he did not have any ego as an individual. It was difficult to find a more unassuming, self-effacing and humble man than him. I met him for the first time in early 1974 when he was living in Dayanand Colony in South Delhi with poet-journalist Ajay Singh, his wife Shobha and their little daughter Bhasha. My poet friend Pankaj Singh, whose untimely death nearly four years ago shook us all, had taken me along to meet the celebrated poet. I met Shamsher several times in the next seven-eight years but our interactions remained rather formal although his warmth and childlike simplicity always touched me.
