ਸੱਸੀ ਪੁੰਨ੍ਹੂੰਸੱਸੀ ਪੁੰਨ੍ਹੂੰ

About the book

Sassi Punnun is a Punjabi qissa by Hashim Shah (1753 to 1823), the verse romance of Sassi of Bhambore and Punnun of Kech, and it completes the set of four great Punjabi folk romances, alongside Heer Ranjha, Sohni Mahiwal and Mirza Sahiban. In Sindh, the same story is counted among the Seven Queens, the seven heroines of Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai. Christopher Shackle, who translated Hashim's poem into English verse, calls it undoubtedly his masterwork and one of the finest of the Punjabi qissas, the verse romances that are a most important part of the popular cultural heritage of Punjab.

It is also one of the shortest and simplest of the classic qissas, and that is part of its power. In Professor Harnam Singh Shan's edition, on which the standard translation rests, the poem consists of 124 stanzas of four lines each, 596 lines in all, each stanza unified by a single rhyme running through it. It is written in the common ballad metre known as baint khurd, or davaie, and Hashim places his pen name at the opening of the last line of every stanza, a formal device that draws his audience into the action with him or marks his own reflection on what has just been told.

What is the story of Sassi Punnun?

The story begins before Sassi can speak. She is the daughter of the king of Bhambore in Sindh, cast adrift on the river Indus as a baby after it is foretold that her love will bring disgrace on her family. A washerman of Bhambore finds the child and raises her as his own daughter, and she grows up famed for her beauty. Word of her reaches Punnun, son of the ruler of the Hot tribe of Baloch, whose capital is at Kech in the Makran desert, and he travels to Bhambore to see her. The two fall in love. Her washerman father sets the prince a test of worthiness in the washerman's own trade, which Punnun, who has never washed a cloth in his life, fails, until the gold coins he has hidden in the clothes he returns win the household over and the marriage is agreed.

Punnun's brothers, opposed to a prince marrying a washerman's daughter, come to Bhambore pretending to join the celebrations. They make him drunk, and while he sleeps they carry him away on a camel's back to Kech. Sassi wakes to find him gone, and her suffering from that moment is the heart of the poem: she pursues his tracks barefoot into the burning wastes, crying his name, until the desert takes her. In Hashim's Punjabi retelling, Sassi dies while crossing the desert. The Sindhi telling differs at the end, with both lovers buried in the same mountain valley, where their legendary grave is still shown near Lasbela in Balochistan.

Themes: a love story read as a Sufi path

Like so many of the qissas, Sassi Punnun is a tale of tragically thwarted love, but Punjab and Sindh have never read it as only that. Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai sings the story in his Sufi poetry as an example of eternal love and union with the divine, and Hashim, himself a hakim and a spiritual leader of the Qadiri order, wrote for listeners who heard the same double meaning in it: Sassi's faithfulness, unturned by toil or strain, is the seeker's faithfulness, and the desert she crosses is the world between the lover and the beloved.

Shackle points to the story of the Prophet Joseph, to which Hashim returns again and again, comparing the grief of parents to Jacob's grief for his lost son and recalling Joseph hidden in the well and sold into slavery. These references bind the tightly organised narrative together and lend a perspective of timelessness to the love of Sassi and Punnun. Around them, Hashim keeps the classical clarity he is praised for: his effects are romantic, but his form is economical, quite different from the exuberant prolixity of Waris Shah, the master of the generation before him.

ਲੇਖਕ

Hashim Shah (1753 to 1823, with other dates also reported) was a Sufi poet of Jagdev Kalan in Amritsar district: a hakim practising traditional medicine, a spiritual guide, a carpenter by trade, and, by popular tradition, a poet patronised at the court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. He wrote three complete qissas. His Shirin Farhad is said to be the first Punjabi telling of that Persian story, and his Sohni Mahiwal is a fine poem that was later overtaken in popularity by Fazal Shah's telling, the version in this Kosh. His full story is in his Kosh entry, and Sassi Punnun stands as the work on which his fame chiefly rests.

Reception and legacy

The tale itself is older than any one poet: its earliest mention is in the texts of Qazi Qadan, and it appears in the Risalo of Shah Abdul Karim of Bulri and in Shah Jo Risalo, before Hashim retold it in Punjabi. English readers first met Hashim's poem in the third volume of R. C. Temple's The Legends of the Punjab (1886), in a short and mangled version taken from a bard in Hoshiarpur district that, as Shackle says, gives no idea of the poem's literary quality. Shackle's full verse translation, published by Vanguard Books, Lahore, in 1985 and based on Shan's vetted edition, is the version through which the wider world now reads it.

The lovers have never left Punjabi and Sindhi culture. Painters took them up early: the cover of this page is built around a Punjab Hills painting of Sassi and Punnu on a camel by Prabhu, from about 1780, and a still earlier composite painting by Chitarman II, from about 1735, shows the two in conversation. The story has been filmed many times, including Punjabi films in 1965 and 1983, and it lives in song, from a verse of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan to Panjabi MC's Jogi (2003). With this entry, the Kosh holds all four of Punjab's great romances together for the first time.