ਅਬਿਆਤ-ਏ-ਬਾਹੂਅਬਿਆਤ-ਏ-ਬਾਹੂ

About the book

Abyat-e-Bahu is the Punjabi verse work of Sultan Bahu (1630 to 1691), the Sufi poet of Shorkot in Jhang district. It holds a singular place in his writing. More than forty books on Sufism are attributed to him and at least a hundred are assumed, but most of his writings are in Persian, and the Abyat is the work in Punjabi verse, the one composition in the language ordinary people spoke. That choice of language is the first fact about the book: a scholar who could write treatises in Persian chose Punjabi quatrains for the teaching he wanted carried from mouth to mouth.

An abyat is a set of verses, and Bahu's are built as four line units in which every line closes on the same sounded word: Hoo, the name of God breathed out as a sigh. Editions differ in how many verses they gather and in what order, because the verses lived by being sung and memorised long before they were fixed in print. The University of Pennsylvania Libraries summary of Jamal J. Elias's English translation puts the result plainly: Bahu remains highly popular in Pakistan and India today, and even Punjabis who cannot read can recite his poetry by heart.

What are the Abyat about?

The Penn Libraries summary answers in two strokes. The poems teach unrestricted devotion to God, and they are sceptical toward the legalistic, institutionalised elements of organised religion. Inside that frame the verses return to a small set of great subjects: the murshid, the spiritual guide who plants faith in the heart; the self, which must be defeated before God can be found; and death, which the true seeker is told to meet early. Elias titled his translation Death Before Dying, taking the phrase from Bahu's own teaching, and a verse quoted in AE Magazine ends on the same line: we died before death, Bahoo, only then attained the objective.

Alif Allah: the jasmine seedling

The best known verse opens the alphabet and the book at once. In the rendering discussed by scholars of his poetry, it runs: Alif Allah chambe di booti, mere mann wich murshid laaee Hoo, which is to say that the name of God is a jasmine seedling that the guide has planted in the poet's heart, watered by the remembrance that negates the self and affirms God, until the plant flowers inside and its fragrance cannot be hidden. It is the whole of Bahu in four lines: a village garden image, a guide, an inner change, and the closing Hoo that turns a statement into a breath of prayer.

Against empty ritual

The Abyat are not gentle with religious pretension. AE Magazine, surveying his poetry, quotes verse after verse in which Bahu censures scholars who memorised the Quran while the veils were not lifted, and who studied thousands of books while the tyrant self did not perish. Another verse asks what use a rosary is if moving its beads does not move the heart, and what use knowledge is if it brings no humility. The magazine reads him as a poet of resistance, against unjust authority in the state and empty ritual in religion alike, whose simple, direct style kept the verses accessible to the widest audience and made them a plea for compassion and brotherhood.

ਲੇਖਕ

Sultan Bahu was born on 17 January 1630 at Shorkot, in what is now Jhang district, the son of Bayazid Muhammad, an officer in the Mughal army, and Mai Rasti, who was also his first teacher. He belonged to the Qadiri Sufi order and founded its Sarwari Qadiri branch. Around 1668 he travelled to Delhi for further training under Syed Abdul Rehman Jilani Dehlvi, then returned to Punjab for the rest of his life. He died on 1 March 1691 at Jhang, and his shrine stands at Garh Maharaja, where the annual Urs draws pilgrims from far off. His name itself, Bahu, is traditionally read as With God.

Reception and legacy

No Punjabi book of verse has had a longer singing life. Wikipedia's account records that his verses are sung in many genres of Sufi music, including qawwali and kafi, and that tradition has established a unique style of singing his couplets. In 1998 the University of California Press published Jamal J. Elias's Death Before Dying, which the Penn Libraries catalogue describes as the first translation of the Abyat to appear in English outside South Asia, presenting 115 poems alongside the Punjabi text. For a reader meeting Bahu for the first time, the Abyat are not a chapter of his work. They are the work, the form in which Punjab has kept him for more than three centuries.