Baba Bulleh Shah has remained on the top of the charts of Punjab Sufis. A peep into the growing interest in his life and poetry in the present times

Punjabi poets such as Bulleh Shah have also challenged orthodoxy and I wonder what would have happened had Bulleh Shah been alive today? Would mobs attack him also?

This was the question Raza Rumi, Paksitani policy analyst and columnist, had asked in his column some time ago. And last April Rumi Raza was shot at by a separatist terrorist group Lashkar-e-Jahangvi in Lahore but he was saved as he ducked in his car but his 25-year-old driver did not and died with eleven bullets in his young body. Raza, who fled Pakistan for some time with the mounting death threats for his writings, had got his answer.

The situation in the subcontinent as far as religious bigotry, communal strife and intolerance go has not changed much since the medieval times of Bulleh Shah to the so-called modern times of Raza Rumi. Bulleh Shah’s (1680-1757) times were those of turbulence in Punjab. With the death of Aurangzeb in 1707, the peasant movement led by the Sikh gurus strengthened.

These were also times that saw the increasing invasions from the North-West. Zubair Ahmad, Lahore-based writer and Punjabi activist, says: "He was very bold and criticised the clerics very bravely. He believed that religion was togetherness and there is no word against people of other faiths."

Togetherness, humanity and love are the very essence of Sufi poetry and other great Punjab Sufi poet-philosophers have imbibed these virtues in their verses like his great predecessors Sheikh Farid, Shah Hussain and Sultan Bahu yet it is Bulleh Shah who has captured the interest of modern mind.

The past two decades has seen many modern renderings of the poetry of Bulleh Shah and the engagement with his verses continues to grow.

Theatre director M.K. Raina and singer Madan Gopal chose the poetry of Bulleh Shah and Inayat Shah in a play called Karmanwali, to highlight the absurdity of communal violence in the late 1980s. Lahore-based theatre director Madeeha Gauhar’s musical play on the life of Bulleh Shah continues to attract audience on both sides of the border.

The younger generation connected emotively with the poetry of Bulleh Shah when it was rendered in the 1990s by Pakistani rock band Junoon. The verses of Bulleh Shah have been sung by the best Sufi singers of our times like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Abida Praveen, Pathaney Khan, Sabri and Wadali brothers among others.

Rabbi Shergil did a rock fusion singing of Bullah ki Jaana Main Kaun in 2004 and young listeners in India and Pakistan tapped their feet in ecstasy. Pakistan’s Coke Studio has featured the poetry of Bulleh Shah sung by Sain Huzoor and Arieb Azhar over two seasons His verses have been adapted into several Bollywood songs In films like Dil Se and Raavan.

It is not just the song and the singer, the poetry of Bulleh Shah has got serious academic notice internationally with Professor Christopher Shackle, formerly with the London University teaching modern languages and cultures of South Asia, assigned to do a volume on the poetry of Bulleh Shah for the Murthy Classical Library of Indian Literature in the US. Shackle places the verses of the poet thus: "In terms of literary history, Bulleh Shah represents the culmination of the tradition of Panjabi Sufi poetry, in which the spirituality of Rumi and the other great Persian Sufi poets finds an authentically Indian expression. Although the finest poems of this vernacular Sufi tradition match the power and beauty of the hymns of the early Sikh Gurus, it is much less coherently ordered or reliably transmitted than the carefully preserved Sikh scriptural literature."

A unique experience with the readings of the poet has been done over the past couple of years by Shumita Didi of Sanjhey Rang Punjab De in Delhi. "Inspired by Najam Syed’s Thursday Sangat at Lahore, few of us started meeting on Sundays to read together a kaafi of Bulleh Shah and interpret it besides listening to a musical rendering of one of his verses.

We call it "Baba Bulleh Shah di Baithak" and interestingly when we tried reading other poets the interest seemed to dwindle," she says.

Bulleh Shah seems to reach the hearts quicker with the sheer sincerity and simplicity of his verses and that is why Mahmood Awaan, a contemporary Pakistani poet, calls him the "ultimate liberator."