Shah Hussainਸ਼ਾਹ ਹੁਸੈਨ

Shah Hussain (1538 to 1599), also known as Madho Lal Hussain, was a Punjabi Sufi poet of Lahore who is regarded as the pioneer of the kafi, the short sung poem that became a central form of Punjabi poetry. A weaver's son who gave up a scholar's life for that of a faqir, he wrote in the voice of ordinary people, and his verses are still sung across Punjab today.

Early life in Lahore

Hussain was born in 1538 inside the walled city of Lahore, in the Punjab of the early Mughal era. His father, Sheikh Usman, was a weaver of the Dhudha clan of Rajputs, and his grandfather Kaljas Rai is recorded as a convert to Islam. The family trade stayed with the poet all his life: in some verses he signed himself Faqir Hussain Julaha, Hussain the weaver, and the spinning, thread and cloth of a weaver's daily work run through the images of his poems.

He was educated near his home, at a mosque in the city, and accounts of his life name Sheikh Hafiz Abubakar among his teachers. He then became a student of Shaikh Bahlol Daryai, the Sufi saint who founded the Bahlol Shahi branch of the Qadiriyya order. Before his death, Bahlol is said to have named Hussain as his representative in Lahore, a sign of how far the young scholar had already travelled on the Sufi path.

The scholar who walked away

The turning point of his life is placed at the age of thirty six. Accounts describe Hussain debating the meaning of verses of the Quran with his teacher, and then leaving everything behind to take up a non-material life. The valued name Shah, meaning a king, he kept only alongside the word Faqir, a mendicant: he is remembered as Shah Hussain Faqir, the dervish king, a man who held a title of rule and chose the life of a beggar saint instead.

From then on his classroom was the street. He sang and danced in the lanes of Lahore in a state his contemporaries struggled to explain, and his sitting place inside Taxali Gate in the walled city is still pointed out. To the keepers of respectable religion this was scandal. To Hussain, the later tradition suggests, outward respectability was exactly the trap: his poems return again and again to the gap between the religion of rules and the religion of love.

Why is Shah Hussain called Madho Lal Hussain?

The name by which Punjab knows him best is a double name, and it records the defining bond of his later life. Madho Lal was a Hindu Brahmin boy from Shahdara, across the River Ravi from Lahore. Hussain's devotion to Madho became the centre of his life: he celebrated the Hindu festivals of Basant and Holi with him, and Madho in time became his disciple and spiritual successor. After Hussain's death, Madho is said to have carried his legacy forward for forty eight years.

So complete was the fusion that the disciple's name was placed before the master's, and the two are remembered as a single figure: Madho Lal Hussain. Their shrine makes the same point in stone, for Madho's tomb lies next to Hussain's. In a Punjab often divided by creed, the joint name has long been read as a statement in itself: a Muslim Sufi and his Hindu disciple, inseparable in memory, held up as a picture of the universal love Hussain preached.

Poetry made to be sung: the kafi

Hussain's whole surviving work is made of kafis, and he is credited with giving the form its shape. A typical kafi is short: a refrain, then between four and ten rhymed lines, built to be sung to the rhythms and tunes of Punjabi folk music. Nothing in it is written for the page alone. His language is the simple, direct Punjabi of the street and the spinning wheel, and the Daily Times account of his work notes the other edge of that simplicity: the poems speak for the common man and condemn inequality based on caste.

His favourite device is a woman's voice. Again and again the soul speaks as a bride waiting for, longing for, or united with the beloved, who is God: the happily married suhagan against the deserted duhagan. In his best known verses he borrows the voice of Heer herself: Ranjhan mera, main Ranjhan di, Ranjha is mine and I am Ranjha's, let people say Heer has gone mad. Singers have never let the kafis rest. They belong to the traditional qawwali repertoire and have been performed by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Abida Parveen, Noor Jehan and Ghulam Ali, among many others.

Shrine and Mela Chiraghan

Hussain died in 1599 near the River Ravi. His tomb and shrine stand at Baghbanpura in Lahore, beside the Shalimar Gardens, with Madho's tomb next to his. His death anniversary, the urs, is kept there every year as Mela Chiraghan, the Festival of Lights, when devotees light lamps and a great fire at the shrine and dervishes dance the dhamaal to the beat of the dhol.

The festival carries his message in its own history. The urs at the shrine and the spring mela at the Shalimar Gardens were once two separate events, a Muslim observance and a festival Hindus loved. Maharaja Ranjit Singh combined them into the single Mela Chiraghan, and himself led the procession from his palace to the shrine barefoot, accompanied by thousands of Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus. It is still described as the biggest festival of Punjab, and as a symbol of love, devotion and harmony across its communities.

Legacy

Shah Hussain is regarded as the first major early modern poet of the Punjab, and the kafi he shaped became the vehicle later Sufi poets of Punjab, Bulleh Shah among them, made their own. His own collection, the Kafiyan Shah Hussain, has stayed in print for centuries in edition after edition, and in English his verses reached new readers in Naveed Alam's translation, Verses of a Lowly Fakir. More than four hundred years after his death, a Lahori who has never opened a book of poetry may still know his lines by heart, because Punjab never stopped singing them.