Ishar Singh (poet) - Further Background

Further Background

Although his family name was Chandhoke, he employed the common poetic construction of using his first name as a suffixed pen name. Thus he was known as Ishar Singh ‘Ishar’. In practice, however, he came to be so closely identified with his best known comic creation that the name ‘Bhaiya’ was usually tagged to the end of his full title.
He was married to Sita Wanti (died 1975), and had five sons and three daughters, who were all born in the Rawalpindi district.

In 1946, a year before the Partition of India created Muslim Pakistan, the entire family – by this time including grandchildren – moved over to live in Delhi, which would soon become capital of the new Hindu-majority India.
Ishar Singh transferred to the Post Office in Shimla in 1949, before retiring back to Delhi in 1954. He was to spend the rest of his days in the city, where he died of a heart attack on 15 January 1966, at the age of 73. The circumstances of his death were almost identical to those he described years earlier in Mera Marna.
As a man, he paid little respect to the standing and reputation of others. He would keep ministers of state waiting if he felt too tired to see them at social gatherings, while he was known to ridicule the hosts of the very events he was speaking at.
Even those who knew him best said it was difficult to get too close, as he was so entirely absorbed in his writings. His relatives recall how on one occasion, while staying with his son in Kenya in 1959, he journeyed to a park to work on his poetry. He removed his turban, jacket and shoes, and placed them beside him on a bench, before immersing himself in his notebook. It was only when he stopped writing, several hours later, that he noticed his clothing had been stolen. And when his son subsequently took him to report the theft at the police station, Ishar Singh could not even recall the colour of his own turban, jacket and shoes - such had been his dedication to his art that morning.
Several of his descendants became well-known in their own right. His eldest son, Hardit Singh (1919–1993), set up the successful Delhi-based firm Ditz Electricals, which still manufactures and supplies household appliances around India to this day.
Ishar Singh's second son, Narinjan Singh ‘Narinjan’ (1921–1991), was the only one of his children to carry on the family poetic tradition. Narinjan Singh regularly recited his own compositions - as well as those of his father - at social gatherings and kavi darbars, first in Delhi, then in Nairobi where he later moved, and finally, towards the end of his life, when he lived in Derby in the UK.