Literary significance of Heer Waris Shah

Ashraf Naushahi

 Is Heer Waris Shah just a narrative of a romance?

Like any other classic work of literary significance, Heer Waris Shah has acquired diverse and different answers to this question. The diversity of the answers depends on the viewpoint (or context) through which an admirer of this classic work of poetry tries to understand it.

There are many viewpoints through which Heer Waris Shah has been admired since Waris Shah composed it around 1765. The most widely spread viewpoint is that through which its couplets are sung and heard just for enjoyment without any conscious effort to understand its subject matter.

It is no less a feat for a literary work that it is sung and heard in sheer enjoyment by the people for whom it was written in the first place. The common folk cannot pay a tribute more apt to a penman who wrote for them. However, in the world of literature, a literary work attains a significance only when looked through the glasses of literary parameters.

Heer Waris Shah has not gathered a sufficient amount of literary outlook in this regard. It has not been pondered over often as it should be as a literary classic. Instead, it is usually mentioned and interpreted as a romance only. Even a glance at some couplets in the Heer Waris Shah, makes it obvious that this work of literature is not just a romance. Especially those couplets need a literary interpretation in which the poet speaks in his own voice. In such couplets Waris Shah speaks to the people for whom he was writing. Understandably, he was speaking to the people of Punjab living around his times. In other words we can say that Heer Waris Shah is a literary narrative of the 18th century rustic living in the Punjab, depicting all of its pleasant and unpleasant aspects simultaneously.

Heer Waris Shah cannot be just a romance, simply because Waris Shah was not the first to compose the story of Heer and Ranjha. The story was well known and composed by many poets before his times. It does not matter whether the story had had any reality or just a fiction, as we know that Waris Shah just refined and did not invent it at all. There is no reason for a poet of  Waris Shah's stature to compose a romantic poem around the characters he did not invent.

Now another question arises: "If Waris Shah did not write his poem as a narrative of a romance, then why was it written?" 

Heer Waris Shah is an epic poem depicting the Punjab of the 18th century. More precisely we can say that this epic poem is a narrative of diverse aspects of the rustic milieu of the Punjab in Waris Shah's times. It was a period of significant historical importance for the region and hence Heer Waris Shah has an immense literary significance as its narrative.