ਕਾਫ਼ੀਆਂ ਸ਼ਾਹ ਹੁਸੈਨਕਾਫ਼ੀਆਂ ਸ਼ਾਹ ਹੁਸੈਨ

About the kafis

The Kafis of Shah Hussain are the founding songs of Punjabi Sufi poetry. Shah Hussain of Lahore (1538 to 1599) composed no long epic and left no prose. His whole surviving work is a body of short sung poems called kafis, and with them he is regarded as the pioneer of the kafi form in Punjabi and the first major early modern poet of the Punjab. A widely used Lahore edition, prepared with the scholar Najm Hosain Syed, prints 163 kafis, and the collection has stayed in print for centuries as one of the best loved books in the language.

A kafi is built to be sung. Each poem carries a refrain and a small number of rhymed lines, usually between four and ten, set to the rhythms of Punjabi folk music. That simple frame holds an unusual range: longing for God, the pain of separation, mockery of pride and learning, and a weaver's plain talk about death. Because the poems lived first in voices rather than on paper, they belong as much to the qawwali hall and the shrine courtyard as to the printed page.

What is a kafi?

A kafi is a short Punjabi lyric poem made for singing, with a refrain that returns after each verse. Shah Hussain took the rhythms and stories of Punjabi folk song and filled that small form with Sufi teaching, so that a song a village audience could remember also carried a complete account of the soul's journey: its love, its separation from the beloved, and its hope of union. Later poets, above all Bulleh Shah in the next century, inherited the form from him and made it the central vehicle of Punjabi Sufi verse.

Themes: the bride, the weaver and the road to Ranjha

Hussain most often speaks in a woman's voice, as a bride speaking of her bridegroom. In that voice God is the beloved, called by names such as Sajjan and Saiyan, and the soul is by turns a girl who does not yet know her fate, a bride waiting for the wedding, a happily married suhagan, or a deserted duhagan longing for reunion. The red dyed bridal cloth, the spinning wheel and the wedding preparations of an ordinary Punjabi home become, in his hands, signs of the soul's deeds and its journey.

He also borrows Heer, the heroine of Punjab's great love story. In one famous kafi the speaker refuses to hear of the Khedas, the family who took Heer away, and answers: Ranjha is mine and I am Ranjha's. Folk romance becomes a statement of devotion: the beloved is already chosen, and what people say about it does not matter. Against these love songs stand the kafis of self knowledge, in which Hussain calls himself simply a weaver, a faqir, a nobody, and reminds the listener that the body is ashes and the road after death is unknown.

The author: a weaver of Lahore

Shah Hussain was born in 1538 inside the walled city of Lahore, the son of Sheikh Usman, a weaver. He studied as a young man and became a learned scholar, a student of the Qadiri Sufi Shaikh Bahlol Daryai, who named him his representative in Lahore. Then, in his mid thirties, he turned away from the scholar's life. Tradition remembers him in red clothes, singing and dancing in the streets of Lahore, a malang who had chosen blame over respectability. That choice is the key to the poems: they speak the language of the street and the spinning room, not of the seminary, because their author had deliberately left the seminary behind.

Why is he called Madho Lal Hussain?

He is called Madho Lal Hussain because of his bond with Madho Lal, a Hindu Brahmin who became his disciple and successor. Hussain placed Madho's name before his own, and the two names have been inseparable ever since. Madho carried the shrine forward for 48 years after Hussain's death in 1599, and the two are buried side by side at Baghbanpura in Lahore, beside the Shalimar Gardens. For Punjabis the joined name itself has become a sign of a love that crossed the boundary between communities.

How have the kafis been kept and sung?

The kafis survived the way they were made: by being sung. They entered the traditional qawwali repertoire and have been performed in modern times by singers including Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Abida Parveen, Ghulam Ali and Noor Jehan, so that lines written in sixteenth century Lahore are still heard by audiences who may never open the book. In print, editors and scholars in Lahore have kept the text in circulation, and in English the poems reached new readers in Verses of a Lowly Fakir, Naveed Alam's translation published by Penguin in 2016.

The living centre of the tradition is the shrine itself. Every year the Mela Chiraghan, the Festival of Lights, marks Hussain's urs at Baghbanpura with lamps, singing and crowds from across Punjab. In the time of Maharaja Ranjit Singh the maharaja himself is remembered to have walked barefoot in procession to the shrine, joined by Sikhs, Muslims and Hindus together, a picture of the mixed audience the kafis have always gathered.

Reception and legacy

Later Punjabi poetry is difficult to imagine without him. Writers on his work point to his direct influence on Bulleh Shah, whose most famous question, who am I, grows out of a short kafi of Hussain's, and on the Heer tradition that Waris Shah would bring to its height two centuries later. As a book, the Kafis of Shah Hussain offer the shortest road into classical Punjabi literature: one poet, one city, one small sung form, and inside it the whole emotional world of old Punjab: love, blame, humour and the nearness of death.