DADHERI: A pall of gloom descended on this native village in Fatehgarh Sahib of Punjabi writer Santokh Singh Dhir following his death on Monday.
Winner of several literary awards, Dhir had to his credit over 50 published volumes of novels and short stories.
Dhir was born on December 2, 1920. His father Giani Isher Singh Dard was a poet and mother Jamni Devi alias Gursharan” Kaur a housewife. Father of four daughters and a son, Dhir had lost his wife Surinder Kaur in 2001.
Punjabi writer and District Congress Committee secretary Kanwaljit Singh Dadheri, a close relative of Dhir, demanded a memorial. He said the body would be donated. It would be brought to Dhir’s Phase X residence in SAS. Nagar and then taken to CPI’s Chandigarh office for public viewing.
Guru Nanak Dev University in Amritsar had some time back bestowed Dhir with life fellowship in recognition of his contribution to Punjabi literature. “I never wanted to be a poet, but an affluent rich man,” Dhir had once said. “My father, a prolific poet and proponent of the progressive Communist ideology, used to publish his poems under my name. Although this won appreciation, it made me feel small as my standing as a poet was purely parasitic.”
He told a gathering that a symposium organized by Gulzar at Rawalpindi proved to be the turning point of his life and he soon found himself in the realm of literary writing. Dhir’s special talent lied in his ability to create realistic fictional images of a common man in his short stories, that too artistically.
SOURCE-HT
