ਕਿੱਸਾ ਪੂਰਨ ਭਗਤਕਿੱਸਾ ਪੂਰਨ ਭਗਤ

About the book

The story of Puran Bhagat is one of the oldest and most widespread legends of the Punjab, a prince destroyed by a stepmother's lust, mutilated, thrown into a well, and reborn as a jogi. Its classic Punjabi telling is the Qissa Puran Bhagat of Qadaryar, Qadir Yar (1802–1892), born Qadar Baksh in Machhike, Gujranwala district, who rose to be court poet of the Lahore Darbar in the reign of Maharaja Ranjit Singh.

Qadaryar's own life reads like a qissa. Village tradition holds that his sister-in-law Razia fell in love with him on her wedding day; rebuffed, she turned against him, and he was driven from his home to live in a hut by a well, the Pipal Wala Khuh. Reading qisse in his exile, he versified the story of Puran Bhagat, who had suffered likewise at a stepmother's hands. He later wrote of the episode himself: 'By narrating the story of Raja Puran, I got a well as reward', Hari Singh Nalwa, hearing the qissa, granted him the well and adjoining land.

Plot & themes

Puran is the son of King Salwan of Sialkot. His stepmother Luna conceives a passion for the young prince; when he rejects her, she accuses him of assaulting her. The king orders Puran's hands and feet cut off and has him thrown into a dry well to die. There he is found by the jogis of Gorakhnath, who heal him and initiate him into their order. Puran becomes Puran Bhagat, the devotee, and returns years later, unrecognised, to confront the court that condemned him.

The qissa's power lies in its terrible symmetry: the prince must lose everything, limbs, name, kingdom, to gain the only thing that cannot be taken. Qadaryar's telling, composed (by his own account) in sixteen days and 140 stanzas under a pipal tree, is prized for its direct, singing narrative line and its moral clarity. It is also, obliquely, autobiography: a poet wronged by a woman's accusation, vindicated by his art.

The legend belongs to the Nath tradition, Gorakhnath's jogis are the agents of Puran's rebirth, and versions exist across north India. Shiv Kumar Batalvi's celebrated verse play Loona (1965) retells the same story from the stepmother's point of view, a measure of how inexhaustible the material is.

ਲੇਖਕ

Qadir Yar (1802–1892) began his literary career with Mehraj Nama (1832), a 1,014-couplet poem on the Prophet's journey through the seven skies. His other works include Qissa Sohni Mahinwal, Hari Singh Nalwa Di Var and Var Rani Kokilan, besides the Qissa Puran Bhagat and a version of the Raja Rasal legend. The Sahitya Akademi's Makers of Indian Literature volume on him (N. S. Tasneem, 1992) and M. Athar Tahir's critical introduction (1988) secure his place among the major qissa poets between Waris Shah and the moderns.

Reception & legacy

Qadaryar's Puran Bhagat is the version by which Punjab knows the story, sung, recited and staged for nearly two centuries. Its well at Machhike became a small place of pilgrimage for lovers of the qissa. The tale's afterlife runs through Batalvi's Loona to modern theatre and television adaptations; every generation of Punjabis meets Puran in the well before it meets him anywhere else.

Read it if...

you want the Punjabi qissa at its most archetypal, the wronged prince, the well, the rebirth; you are interested in the Nath-jogi substratum of Punjabi legend; or you want to read Batalvi's Loona afterwards and see what happens when a 20th-century poet takes the stepmother's side.