ਹੀਰਹੀਰ

About the book

Heer, properly Qissa Heer Waris Shah, completed in 1766, is the supreme work of classical Punjabi literature and one of the great love epics of the world. Its author, the Sufi poet Waris Shah, took a folk legend that had already been told by earlier poets (Damodar Das, Muqbal and others) and remade it so completely that all previous versions were forgotten: when Punjabis say 'Heer', they mean Waris Shah's Heer. About 630 stanzas long, written in Punjabi in the Persian (Shahmukhi) script, it is often called the encyclopedia of Punjab, a storehouse of the region's customs, wisdom, humour and spiritual longing.

The circumstances of its composition are part of the legend. Waris Shah, born in 1722 in Jandiala Sher Khan (Sheikhupura district), educated in Kasur as a disciple of Hafiz Ghulam Murtaza, had settled in the village of Malka Hans, where he lived in a small room beside the mosque and served as a prayer leader. There, in 1766, corresponding to 1180 Hijri and 1823 Bikrami, as he himself records in the poem, he wrote Heer at the request of his friends, in sittings of shared recitation. Punjab around him was being torn apart: the invasions of Nadir Shah and Ahmad Shah Abdali from without, warring Sikh bands from within. He says so in the poem itself. There is no better time, he implies, to compile a love epic than in the midst of hate.

Waris Shah is often called the Shakespeare of Punjabi, for the same reasons: the vast cast, the mix of high and low, the proverbs that entered the language, the sense of a whole world held in verse. The qissa is traditionally recited in the bhairavi raga, and it is still recited today, at weddings, at melas, in drawing rooms on both sides of the Punjab border.

Plot and themes

Heer is the beautiful daughter of the Sial chief of Jhang; Ranjha, Deedho, the youngest son of a Jat chief of Takht Hazara, quarrels with his brothers over land, leaves home with nothing but his flute, and hires himself out as a cowherd to Heer's father. The two fall in love among the cattle and the riverbanks. When the family discovers the affair, Heer is married off to Saida of the Khera clan. Ranjha, mad with grief, becomes a jogi, a wandering ascetic, and the lovers' separation becomes the poem's great middle movement, full of disguise, pursuit and near-meetings.

The end is the legend's cruelest turn. On Heer's wedding day, her hunchbacked uncle Kaido, the poem's embodiment of spite, poisons the wedding sweets. Heer dies; Ranjha, arriving too late, dies beside her. They are buried together at Jhang, where their tomb still stands and still draws pilgrims. It is Romeo and Juliet two centuries before Shakespeare's lovers were translated into Punjabi, except that here the lovers' defiance is aimed not at two families but at an entire social order.

The themes are inexhaustible, which is why the poem has survived 250 years of retelling. At one level it is a Sufi allegory: human love (ishq majazi) as the path to divine love (ishq haqiqi), Ranjha's transformation from cowherd to jogi traces the classic Sufi journey from the worldly to the transcendent. At another it is a social document of devastating sharpness: Waris Shah satirises corrupt qazis, greedy mullahs, venal chiefs and the whole machinery of arranged marriage with a reformer's anger. At yet another it is simply the greatest love story Punjabis tell, the proof that love, fully felt, is worth more than life lived safely.

Running through all of this is Waris Shah's voice itself: earthy, witty, learned, compassionate. He interrupts his own story to moralise, to joke, to weep. The narrator is as much a character as Heer, the wise, amused, sorrowful companion who walks beside the reader for six hundred stanzas.

ਲੇਖਕ

Waris Shah (1722–1798) was an eighteenth-century Punjabi Muslim Sufi poet of the Chishti order, born into a respected Sayyid family in Jandiala Sher Khan. His father died when he was young; he sought religious and literary education in Kasur under Hafiz Ghulam Murtaza, who also taught Bulleh Shah, mastering Arabic, Persian, jurisprudence and the Sufi mysteries, before settling at Malka Hans.

He was an eyewitness to history: he saw Ahmad Shah Abdali's first invasion and the battle for Lahore in 1748, and the violence of his times bleeds into the poem's asides. His other works include short treatises and verses, but Heer is the mountain beside which they are hills. He died in 1798 (some accounts say 1799) and his shrine at Jandiala Sher Khan remains a place of pilgrimage.

Waris Shah's peculiar immortality is that he became a character in later literature. Two centuries after his death, Amrita Pritam addressed her Partition elegy directly to him, Ajj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu ('Today I Invoke Waris Shah'), begging the poet of love to look at what Punjab had become. That a twentieth-century woman poet would call on an eighteenth-century Sufi as a witness tells you everything about his stature: he is not just an author but Punjab's conscience.

Reception and legacy

Heer was popular from the moment it was completed and has never stopped being popular. For two and a half centuries it has been recited, sung, printed, filmed and argued over; more than seventy other poets tried their own Heers, and none displaced his. The poem's lines became proverbs; its characters became archetypes, every thwarted Punjabi lover is a Ranjha, every scheming relative a Kaido.

Scholars value it as a historical source unlike any other: a detailed, ground-level portrait of eighteenth-century Punjabi life, its agriculture, its crafts, its food, its weddings, its courts, its faiths, preserved in verse of extraordinary density. The 'encyclopedia of Punjab' tag is not flattery but description.

Its afterlife in modern media is vast: countless films, television serials, stage adaptations and songs on both sides of the border. But the living tradition matters more, the fact that in villages across Punjab, people who have never read a book can quote Waris Shah by the stanza. A classic, it has been said, is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say. By that measure, Heer is still speaking.

Read it if

Read it if you want the foundation stone of Punjabi literature, everything written in Punjabi since 1766 stands in this poem's shadow. Read it if you love the great tragic romances, Layla and Majnun, Tristan and Isolde, Romeo and Juliet, and want the Punjabi entry in that immortal company. And read it slowly, aloud if you can: this is a poem made for the voice, in the bhairavi raga, and it has been waiting two hundred and fifty years for your recitation.