By  Nardina Kaur

Few would deny that Bulleh Shah is a major poet, while the extensive use of his kafis by innumerable modern singers and musicians attests to his continuing popularity. Nevertheless, there has been relatively little sustained critical or scholarly work devoted to him. This matters because he is an important figure in three interlocked but distinctive contexts: Sufism as a very long-standing progressive current in Islam, the complications of the status of the Punjab within Pakistan, and the history of pan-Punjabi religious thought and culture. Sufism is often detached from Islam or even from religion altogether, but it can be part of a contemporary Muslim faith that is non-authoritarian, still intensely spiritual and not secularized in a way that simply imitates the West. As is well-known, Punjabis dominate the military and other elites in Pakistan today, but their language is still often treated as a poor cousin of Urdu in many ways. There are many affinities between Bulleh and the Sikh gurus, not simply in their attitudes to ritual and dogmatic religious affiliation, but in their complex pantheisms where a divine that is in part immanent to all creation is initially accessed by sensible percept and affect, rather than a purely transcendent one that can only be "leapt to" intellectually. Key concept-words in Sikhism, such as nam and shabad, are also important in Bulleh.

   Bulleh Shah A Selection first appeared in 1982. Taufiq Rafat, now dead, was a formidable poet, both technically and in his capacity to produce a very focussed and potent emotionality in his poems. He is credited with having established a Pakistani idiom in English language poetry. These qualities are evident in the seventy-one poems he translates, that is about two-fifths of Bulleh's work. The originals are given in  parallel in Shahmukhi script. Rafat keeps broadly to the stanza shapes and rhyme schemes, without being pedantic, mixing a flexible iambic metre with trochaic and anapaestic variations and frequent enjambement. The latter is not to be found in the original. He has a superb ear, and his use of subtle alliteration and half-rhymes is a delight. His treatment of the Punjabi text might seem a little cavalier, even if that text is admittedly often open to different readings.

   An example could be the last two stanzas of the famous kafi, "tere ishq nachaya", which he calls "The Follower". In the penultimate stanza, "ais ishq di jhangi wich mor bulenda/sanu qibla ton qaaba sonha yaar disenda" becomes "Although it is a peacock's squawk/in the wild, this love is all I ask". The Punjabi second line, where the lover (yaar) appears (disenda) as qibla and Kaba, is omitted altogether, as is the "ishq" in the first line, with "jhangi" providing the "wild" in the English second line, while "bulenda" is translated as "squawk", rather than "calls". "This love is all I ask" is a "filler", although it does pick up "ishq" and "yaar". In the last stanza, the second Punjabi line has the phrase "chole saave te suhe", which Rafat turns into "dressed like a whore". "Chole" could be a saint's garment or a female one, and translators of Bulleh have used both, with one relating the green (saave) and red (suhe) to bridal colours. There is though a story connected with the kafi: Bulleh dressed as a female dancer and performed in the street to soften the anger of his murshid, Inayat Shah. Clearly, this has coloured the translation, also affecting the next line: "I click my heels, and leap in glee".

   There are other more accurate and sedate line-by-line translations of Bulleh, with more detail about the content and circumstances of the kafis, with the excellent Bulleh Shah by J.R. Puri and T.R. Shangari being the best one. However, Rafat has deliberately sought to convey a rougher, more spontaneous and colloquial, even edgier voice that is definitely to be found in the original Punjabi, while still clearly communicating the poetry's spiritual meaning, indeed giving it a delicate but very intense immediacy. This effort is ably seconded by a critically perceptive and scholarly thirty page introduction by Khaled Ahmed. Bulleh's sources - Sufi, Hindu, Greek - are well covered, without any trace of communalism. Rumi is seen to be the most important influence on him. His rebelliousness is very subtly treated: he may have rejected bonds of family and caste, but he was deeply humble in relation to his murshid, and he may have criticized the social habits and political leadership of his day, but this was a relatively marginal element in his work. One thinks of the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of a nomad figure in a smooth space: freely subversive rather than aggressively confrontational, passing through structure to the more fluid connectivity that lies beneath it and so avoiding its reification.

   This reference to modern French philosophy is not fortuitous. One of its objectives was to question the rigid divisions the dominant Western philosophy of the rational subject imposed between the "properly" philosophical and the non- or no longer philosophical. Mysticism would very much fall into the latter category, but it could contribute immensely to any ontological or epistemological enquiry that explored the non-oppositional or interdependent relationships between connectivity and identity, chaos and form, nonsense and sense and truth and what is interesting. This is indeed what modern French philosophy does, and in this context, Bulleh would live again as a Punjabi philosopher contributing to world thought, as he lives again as an English language Pakistani poet contributing to world literature through Taufiq Rafat's splendid translations.

From : Journal of Punjab Studies", Vol 21, No. 2 (2014)