The liberating spirit in Sufi saint Bulleh Shah’s poetry

Three centuries after the Punjabi Sufi poet Bulleh Shah (d. 1758) lived, he continues to speak to people. His poetry is part of a strong performative culture still alive around Sufi poetry, immortalised, among others by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Pathane Khan, Abida Parveen, Rabbi Shergill and others. It continues to find new renditions in the entrenched traditional forms like qawalli to more experimental western forms like rock. Punjabi is a biscriptal language, inscribed in Gurmukhi in Indian Punjab and Shahmukhi in Pakistan Punjab: a singular fact that marks both its pliability and its tragedy. However, it is through Sufi poets like Bulleh Shah that one can see the connect with the old syncretic, undivided Punjab. This is the one characteristic of Bulleh Shah’s poetry that integrates it deeply with the spoken idiom of rural Punjab, an idiom prominent in the medieval Punjab of Bulleh Shah’s time: a more inclusive, a more culturally resonant Punjab with a rich tapestry of references and a deeply syncretic ethos.

Bulleh Shah consistently comes down on formal boundaries between religions to appeal to a more universal core of humanity. The secret is therein: that he speaks, not like a pandit or a maulvi or an intellectual, he speaks instead, like the village wise man and often in a woman’s cadence. His motifs are derived from the home and the hearth. His name, too, a play on Abdullah, its various forms in common parlance being Bullah, Bulleh, Bulliya. He speaks like an elder matriarch: his’ is a mother’s chiding voice, a characteristic Punjabi idiom where children get an earful, are called names: but the abuses are reflective, not of disapproval but of intimacy and affection. Bulleh Shah’s poetry is steeped in a unique play of cultural meanings produced over a millennia. So marr jaana: literally “death be upon you” is not uncommon as a term of endearment, a faux rebuke that only packs in an intensity of love that can possibly not be conveyed through genteel expressions. The passion needs a little haul over the coals: Je chaah hai dil neu laavan da/ Sikh chajj koi yaar manavan da (If you desire true love’s sweet fruits/ Learn, oh naive one, the myriad ways, of pleasing your lover)

He is the wise one, sometimes echoing the experienced mother figure, who will put bookish intellect to shame with her homely commonsense. Therein lies the subversive power of his poetry: Jaag bina dudh nahi jamda/ Bhaave laal hove kad kad ke (The milk might go pink, boiling endlessly on the wood fires/ But unless you throw in a bit of rennet, it won’t curdle)

It is this constant desire to overthrow the tyranny of quotidian inanities that masquerade as the routine, the system, the convention and engage with true core that inform his poetry. It is the same voice that chides the maulvi: Sir te topi te neeyat khoti, laina ki topi sir dhar ke (You adorn your head with cap, what’s the point, when your intent is tainted). In the same breath, to the believer of in the holy waters of Ganges: Ganga geya gall mukk di naahi bhaven sau sau gote khaiye (Making pilgrimages to the holy Ganges will not mean a thing, you may take a hundred dips). He concludes by saying that “Bullah Shah, it’s only then, when, You shut out the “I” that it all begins to come ‘round.”

Bullah Shah is especially contemptuous of intellectuals who stuff their heads with arcane knowledge and consider themselves a cut above the “hoi polloi.” This disconnect with the flow of life ensures the end of their wisdom and also growth as knowledge seekers. His relationship with his own murshid teacher Shah Inayat of Lahore was one of passionate surrender rather than one steeped in hierarchical structures of teacher and the taught. 

There is a liberating spirit within Bulleh Shah that interrogates formal conventions of all kinds. In his “Bullah ki jaana main kaun” he systematically rejects religious clans and affiliations to myriad sects and ideologies. At other places, he challenges the conventions of social heterogeneous relationships finding sanction through marriage when he places love above formalised unions, even though it might bring him infamy: Nach nach ke yaar manavan de, bhaven kanjari banana pai jave (Let me dance and propitiate my love, let them call me a whore if they will)

And then again, with GhaDeyali devo nikaal ni, immortalised by Abida Parveen, there is a constant urge to get rid of the gong player who, in ringing the gong every hour disrupts the love making of lovers meeting after a long time. 

Bullah dwells in this liberated space, beyond the proscribed bounds of religion, social and ideological bounds. This is the liminal space, the space of creation. 

The author teaches English Literature and Cultural Studies