ABSTRACT
Bhai Vir Singh was a major figure in the colonial literary worlds of the undivided Punjab, and then the Indian Punjab; he is known today, perhaps most centrally, as a defining force in the forging of modern Sikh identity, grounded in a particular approach to the past. But the genre that he was most renowned for – which has been largely neglected by English-language scholarship, except for pioneering work by Harbans Singh and Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh – was his modernist poetry. Indeed, it was the modernist poetic compilation Mere Sāīāṅ Jīo (1953) that earned him the Sahitya Akademi award in 1955, in the first year that the award was ever granted, and a year before his death. This chapter explores aspects of Bhai Vir Singh's modernist poetic work to consider what examination of this body of poetry can tell us about his work as a whole, and its complex figuration of time, the past, and the future.
