ਸ਼ਾਹ ਮੁਹੰਮਦਸ਼ਾਹ ਮੁਹੰਮਦ

A poet of Vadala Viram

Shah Mohammad (c. 1780 to 1862) was a Punjabi Muslim poet who lived at Vadala Viram, near Amritsar. One reference gives his birth year as 1782 rather than 1780, and almost everything else remembered about him comes from the single long poem that carries his name. He is also said to have composed a kissa, a narrative poem of love, but it is the Jangnama that made him, in the words of the Encyclopaedia of the Sikhs, the national poet of the Punjab in the nineteenth century at least.

That judgement is striking because of who he was and what he sang. A Muslim villager of the Amritsar countryside, he wrote as the chronicler of the Sikh Empire in its last years, and he did not write as an outsider. SikhiWiki notes that he identifies himself with the Sikh elan and ascendancy, and recalls with pride the glorious days of Maharaja Ranjit Singh's empire. His poem opens in his own village, with the poet sitting at Vadala as talk of the English arrives, and from there it widens to the fate of the whole kingdom.

For over a century, his village was disputed. Some accounts placed him at a Wadala near Batala in Gurdaspur district. The Punjabi critic Maula Baksh Kushta, who himself came from Wadala Viram, first argued that the poet belonged to his own village. In 1973 a Languages Department team, checking revenue records, found an old marble slab on the well of the house where he was said to have lived. The Tribune describes Wadala Viram as a border village of Amritsar district, once Muslim dominated, with Majitha about six kilometres away.

The Jangnama

His celebrated composition is Jangnama Singhan te Firangian, the war chronicle of the Sikhs and the British. It is a long poem in Punjabi in the traditional baint metre, comprising 105 baints, each baint having four verses, and in the sung text stanza after stanza closes with his signature line, Shah Mohammada. Its subject is the decade that decided Punjab's fate: the events following the death of Maharaja Ranjit Singh in 1839, and above all the Sikhs' war with the English in 1845 to 1846, the first Anglo-Sikh war.

Structurally the poem falls into two parts. The first, running to some fifty stanzas, narrates the war of succession inside the Lahore court. The second, of fifty five stanzas, describes the battles between the Sikh and British armies. The Encyclopaedia of the Sikhs reads the whole as a multiple treatment of one theme: the decline of the polity after Ranjit Singh's death, and the uncertainty that gripped the sovereign identity of the Punjab.

The poem also belongs to an older Punjabi form. Writing for the London School of Economics blog, Raman Singh Chhina traces the jangnama, a verse history of a war, to the late sixteenth century, when it entered Punjab in response to Persian epics, shaped by Punjabi Muslim poets retelling early Islamic battles. Over time it turned toward wars the poets had lived through, and Chhina calls Shah Mohammad's poem the magnum opus of the genre. Its opening shows that character: the poet sits in Wadala as his friends Hira and Noor Khan bring talk of the English, asking how a third people had come among Punjab's Hindus and Muslims.

What does Shah Mohammad's Jangnama describe?

The Jangnama describes, first, a court destroying itself. SikhiWiki's summary follows its opening movement: the prime minister Dhian Singh Dogra set aside Maharaja Kharak Singh and had his favourite Chet Singh murdered in his presence; Kharak Singh, his son Kanvar Nau Nihal Singh, Maharaja Sher Singh and Sher Singh's son Kanvar Partap Singh all fell victim to intrigue, and Dhian Singh himself was killed by the Sandhanwalias who had murdered the reigning Maharaja. Shah Mohammad relates this tale of political nightmare, SikhiWiki says, with a historical precision and brevity of expression unusual in a popular poet. Then come the engagements of the war itself, in which he praises with admiration the heroism and sacrifice of sardars such as Sham Singh Atarivala and Ranjodh Singh.

How did Shah Mohammad know the war so closely?

He was not a soldier, and the poem is not a diary, yet historians treat it as close to an eyewitness record. Wikipedia and the Tribune both report that close relatives served in Maharaja Ranjit Singh's army, whose accounts helped him piece together the fighting. Sita Ram Kohli, who prepared a scholarly edition, held that he was well educated and descended from Sultan Mahmud, an artillery officer of the Maharaja. His form helped it travel: the baint, popularised by Waris Shah, is called the king of Punjabi folk metres in P. K. Nijhawan's edition, and the Jangnama was sung alongside Heer, in a restrained tone that seldom uses hyperbole or an extra word.

Pride and grief in one voice

The poem's power is that its praise and its blame fall on the same side. The defeat of the Sikhs draws full empathy from Shah Mohammad, who frames the war as one between the rest of India and the Punjab, and who draws a poignant picture of the lamenting mothers, sisters, wives and relatives of the dead. The internal treachery that undid the Khalsa army is named as plainly as the bravery that honoured it. A poet of the soil, writing in the people's own metre and idiom, he made Punjab's loss a Punjabi story rather than a victor's dispatch.

Legacy

SikhiWiki closes its account with a historian's compliment: the historical framework the poet laid out for those events has not so far been superseded. The Jangnama survives as both literature and record, a requiem for the Sikh Empire written by a contemporary who loved the world that was ending. His own Kosh book entry, Jangnama Singhan te Firangian, treats the poem in full.

Scholarship has kept it in print. Ganda Singh included it in Panjab dian Varan in 1946, Kohli edited it as Var Shah Muhammad at Ludhiana, and in 2001 P. K. Nijhawan published The First Punjab War, with the text in Gurmukhi and Persian scripts and renditions in English and Hindi. Critic Sant Singh Sekhon observed that his best lines are still on the lips of large numbers of Punjabis today. Historians quoted by the Tribune treat his descriptions as a primary source, and his facts, Dr Harbhajan Singh Bhatia has noted, can be checked against the Roznamcha, the court diary of Ranjit Singh's reign.