The Making of a Voice: Satinder Sartaaj Before Sai

There are artists whose work feels carefully assembled—layered, produced, calibrated for reception. And then there are artists whose work feels inevitable, as if it could only have come into being through a particular life, a particular discipline, and a particular way of inhabiting the world. Satinder Sartaaj belongs unmistakably to the second category.

To listen to Sartaaj is to sense, almost immediately, that the music is not the starting point. The song is not the center. Something older, quieter, and more inward precedes it. His compositions feel less like performances and more like arrivals—as though the words existed long before the melody, waiting patiently for the right vessel.

Before Sai could be written, before it could be sung, there had to be a particular kind of preparation. Not the kind one finds in studios or conservatories, but the kind that unfolds slowly—through study, solitude, language, and restraint.

A Life Shaped by Language
Satinder Sartaaj was born in Punjab, a land where poetry is not an accessory to life but one of its native languages. Punjab’s cultural memory is carried not only through history books, but through verses sung in fields, shrines, gatherings, and homes. To grow up in this environment is to inherit a relationship with words that is intimate, oral, and embodied.

But Sartaaj’s engagement with language did not stop at inheritance. He pursued it deliberately, rigorously, and academically.

He studied Punjabi literature at Panjab University, Chandigarh, one of North India’s most respected centers for linguistic, literary, and philosophical scholarship. This was not a casual academic path. Punjabi literature—particularly its Sufi and folk traditions—demands immersion across centuries, languages, and metaphysical frameworks. To study it seriously is to move constantly between poetry and philosophy, between devotion and dissent.

Sartaaj did exactly that.

He went on to earn a PhD focused on Sufi poetry, grounding himself deeply in the intellectual and spiritual traditions of Punjabi mysticism. This is a crucial detail, often glossed over in popular introductions to his work. Sartaaj is not merely influenced by Sufi poets—he has studied them as texts, as philosophies, as worldviews. He has read them slowly, critically, and reverently.

Later, he returned to Panjab University not as a student, but as a professor, teaching Punjabi language and literature. This reversal—from learner to teacher—matters deeply when one listens to Sai. Teaching literature requires not just appreciation, but responsibility: the responsibility to transmit nuance, context, and depth without distortion.

Sartaaj’s writing reflects that responsibility. His words are never careless. They do not rush toward effect. They arrive measured, considered, and restrained.

Scholar First, Performer Later
In an era where artistic credibility is often measured by visibility, Sartaaj’s trajectory is almost anomalous. He did not begin as a performer searching for depth; he began as a scholar who eventually found song.
This inversion shapes everything about his work.
His compositions do not rely on spectacle. They rely on attention. They assume a listener willing to stay, to sit, to return. His lyrics do not explain themselves. They trust the listener to meet them halfway—or not at all.

That trust comes from scholarship.

To study Sufi poetry seriously is to encounter a tradition that resists simplification. Punjabi Sufi poets such as Baba Bulleh Shah, Shah Hussain, and Waris Shah did not write devotional verse in the narrow sense. Their work braided together theology, love, social critique, rebellion against orthodoxy, and deep interiority. They wrote in a voice that was at once intimate and confrontational, tender and uncompromising.
Sartaaj absorbed this tradition not as style, but as method.

When he writes, he does not “reference” Sufism. He operates within its assumptions:

• That truth is experiential, not declarative
• That repetition deepens meaning rather than diluting it
• That the ego is the primary obstacle, not ignorance
• That love is not sentiment, but annihilation

These assumptions are everywhere in Sai, but they are already present—quietly—in Sartaaj’s broader body of work.

The Hostel Years: Routine, Community, Containment
For many years, Sartaaj lived in the Panjab University hostel. This detail might appear mundane, but it is essential to understanding the discipline that precedes Sai.

Hostel life is communal, structured, and repetitive. Meals arrive at fixed times. Days are shaped by institutional rhythms—classes, discussions, reading, sleep. There is little room for indulgence, but also little room for isolation. One lives among others, sharing space, time, and routine.
For a scholar, this environment can be both containing and constraining. It provides stability, but it also limits solitude. It supports regularity, but discourages deviation.
During these years, Sartaaj’s life followed a predictable academic cadence. He studied. He read. He taught. He ate at the mess like everyone else. Creativity existed, but it lived within a container.

That container would eventually dissolve.

Leaving the Hostel to live on his own
When Sartaaj began teaching full-time, he made a quiet decision: he moved out of the university hostel and rented his own room. There was no narrative of rebellion here. No romantic break from the institution. It was a practical step—one that many academics take without consequence.

Except this one came with an unexpected condition. He did not know how to cook.
In another life, this would have been solved quickly—by learning, outsourcing, or adjusting routine. But Sartaaj chose a different response. Instead of immediately filling the gap, he allowed it to exist.
That choice matters.

Creation Before Consumption
In a Lallantop “Guest in the Newsroom” interview, Sartaaj recounts how he structured his mornings during this period. Before going to the university to eat breakfast, he would sit down and write. Only after writing would he allow himself to eat.
The rule was simple and uncompromising: creation before consumption.
What he did not anticipate was how long this phase would last.
Almost as an aside, he mentions that this practice resulted in him skipping breakfast for nearly one and a half years.
This is not a detail to be romanticized, but neither is it accidental.
For a year and a half, hunger was not an event—it was a condition. It accompanied the act of writing. It sat in the body while the mind worked. It was not dramatic enough to be heroic, but persistent enough to be formative.
The body waited. The words arrived anyway.

Hunger as Discipline, Not Suffering
It is important to be precise here. This was not hunger as protest, poverty, or crisis. It was hunger as byproduct of discipline. And that distinction places it squarely within a long spiritual lineage.
In Sufi philosophy, hunger is not valued for its pain. It is valued for its clarity.
Practices such as faqr (voluntary simplicity or poverty) and riyazat (discipline of the self) are not about deprivation for its own sake. They are about reducing noise—physical, mental, emotional—so that attention can sharpen. Excess dulls perception. Restraint awakens it.

Hunger, in this tradition, humbles the ego without argument. It strips away entitlement. It reminds the self that it is not the center.
Whether consciously or intuitively, Sartaaj entered this state.
And it was within this condition—quiet, hungry, disciplined—that Sai began to take shape.

Before the Song, the State
Sai did not begin as a composition. It began as a state of being.
Long before the invocations, before the repetitions, before the plea to erase the “I,” there was already an erasure underway—small, daily, unremarkable. A man choosing to write before he ate. Choosing discipline over convenience. Choosing restraint over immediacy.
By the time Sai speaks of surrender, humility, remembrance, and annihilation of ego, those ideas are no longer theoretical. They have already been rehearsed in the body.
That is why Sai does not explain itself. It does not persuade. It does not argue theology.

It remembers.

Where does this Movement Leaves Us
Before we can read Sai as a prayer, a zikr, or a Sufi text in modern Punjabi form, we must understand this much:
The song did not emerge from abundance.
It emerged from containment, study, restraint, and hunger.

In the next Movement, we will step fully into that condition—examining hunger not as biography, but as spiritual method, and tracing how it transforms Sai from a song into an act of remembrance.

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