Lal Singh Dil

Lal Singh Dil (Punjabi ਲਾਲ ਸਿੰਘ ਦਿਲ) (11 April 1943 – 14 August 2007) was one of the major revolutionary Punjabi poets emerging out of the Naxalite (Marxist-Leninist) Movement in the Indian Punjab towards the late sixties of the 20th century. The Movement was a political failure and died down quickly, but it brought in revolutionary changes in the subject matter, language and idiom, tone and tenor of Punjabi poetry. Referring to the impact of the Naxalite Movement in Punjab, sociologist Paramjit S. Judge says, "The consequences of the Naxalite movement have been almost ephemeral and have hardly made an impact on the social and political spheres... Its positive contribution is that it has revolutionized Punjabi poetry which can never be traditional and romantic again." "The prominent poets belonging to this school are: Pash, Lal Singh Dil, Harbhajan Halvarvi, Darshan Khatkar, Amarjit Chandan and Sant Ram Udasi," says Paramjit S Judge. Prof Ronki Ram called him "one of the most popular and serious poets of the Naxal Movement in Punjab of the late 1960s." Lal Singh Dil was born on 11 April in 1943 in a Ramdasia Chamar, (an 'outcaste' community of tanners) family in Ghungrali Sikhãn (Punjabi text: 'ਜਨਮ ਸਥਾਨ: ਘੂੰਗਰਾਲੀ ਸਿੱਖਾਂ') near Samrala, a small town in Punjab (Malwa region) in then British India, now Indian Punjab. His was a family without money, without land, without education, without any financial and intellectual resources that could give Lal Singh a start for upward social or economic mobility. The family was fitted to perform only manual and menial agricultural labour, and Lal Singh's father, almost throughout his life, worked as an agricultural labourer on someone's land. The family, like most of the Ramadasia community in the Malwa region of Punjab, formally subscribed to Sikhism.