It is quite amusing to find Waris Shah declaring at the end of his immortal tale that what he wrote, represents an unending struggle that goes on between body and spirit, and different characters created by him are mere symbols of good and evil, suggesting he believes in the duality of matter and spirit which all the internal evidence negates. It seems Waris in dead pan humour plays a trick on his readers who overwhelmed by the magic of his poetry, can be expected to believe anything he utters. He seems to be mocking his readers the way he mocks everything, sacred and profane, that we come across in the indescribable poetic world he creates. Another reason may have something to do with the ubiquitous clergy, ultra conservative and highly intolerant, which relentlessly hounded his predecessor Bulleh Shah till his death. By declaring his acceptance of traditional world, Waris consciously makes an attempt to hoodwink the clergy in order to keep it at bay.

Waris being a realist and historically conscious writer knows the dialectics of socio-cultural politics and is fully aware of the so-called moral power the clerics wield in collusion with custodians of the established order. Both in their blood lust pounce on anyone and everyone who, in its opinion, deviates from the “right track” which unambiguously implies conformity. And conformity is the last crime Waris can be accused of. He can be ungenerous (he is sometimes judgemental in his description of traits of castes, for example) at times in his narrative but in no way a conformist.

Explanatory verses at the end of Qissa Heer have led or misled many of his readers and fans to believe that the story penned by Waris is a spiritual odyssey, a journey from the mundane to the sublime presented symbolically. They find other-worldliness in the worldliness of Waris’s world. What they do is sheer cherry picking. Philosophically speaking, the duality of matter and spirit, and body and soul is an anachronism. We know that there is no clean break between material and non-material, and mundane and celestial in the real sense. All the things tangible and intangible are linked in a process that sustains the world and cosmos as series of visible and invisible interconnections. Compartmentalization or exclusion is alien to life and nature. That’s perhaps the reason that much before the scientists, poets and sages conceived life as a totality, not an aggregate of fragments.

Waris like all great poets portrays life in totality. In exploring life he employs dialectical tools instead of notion of duality. Contradictions and conflicts are what constitute social and individual life. Concrete forces without divine intervention in a state of perpetual conflict determine the course of events. This is what Waris shows us starkly in the historical socio-cultural context of the Punjab. In the story we see two “spiritual interventions”; first by “Panj Pirs” (five Muslim saints/guides whose spiritual status is beyond doubt according to the Muslim tradition) and second by Balnath, the Hindu ascetic/Guru, heir to the illustrious spiritual tradition of Yoga. Both approve the relationship that exists between Heer and Ranjha and prophesy that the lovers will be blessed with union against all odds. But what ultimately happens contradicts their wishful prophecy; both the lovers are destined to live in an eternal separation. Away from each other, both are killed by their families. Spiritual backing and blessings of Muslim Pirs and Hindu Guru cannot change or subvert the course of events. The logic of social forces affects the outcome of non-traditional man woman relationship. Spiritual power faced with social forces loses ground which is not something unusual if we look at the evolution and history of social life.

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Waris Shah in fact very skilfully exposes the inefficacy of the supernatural wrapped in attractive colours of transcendental which in popular imagination is linked with spirituality. Beatitudes of spiritual Gurus can be understood in the sense of support for humanised man woman relationship formed in freedom that is an anathema to a social order that glorifies class-based relationships in a patriarchal framework.

Georg Lukacs in his criticism of novel has said somewhere that great novelists of the West produced enduring monumental works for the reason that despite their bourgeois outlook they were individuals of high moral and intellectual integrity. They let their characters grow as dictated by their internal logic and demands of situations and events even if they came in conflict with their personal worldviews. Same applies to the work of Waris who was an iconoclast and incorrigible doubter. He in reality ridicules the sacred and the profane by exposing the hollowness they hide behind their facade. The credulous and the superstitious though guileless try hard to make him a saint but when one challenges them to recite his verses on religious rituals and an intimate meeting in a garden between the lovers, we see long faces all around.

Waris Shah is neither a spiritual Guru nor a communist. Some people try to paint him that way. Why can’t they be content with what he is: a poet with immense social consciousness and vast imagination.

Postscript: Waris Shah composed his masterpiece 250 years ago. The event is being celebrated all over the world. But there has been neither a function organised by the Punjab government nor a commemorative stamp issued by the federal government. Awfully worse has been the attitude of the Auqaf Department which decided last week to defer the annual “Urs” celebrations of Waris Shah on the pretext of inclement weather. When people raised a pavilion to organise sessions of Heer singing, the toughs of Auqaf demolished it and lathi-charged the peaceful crowd to disperse it. “Monkey, the sailor, rows the paper-boat (Bedi kaghaz di, baandar malah hoya….),” says the bard about the times we live in. — soofi01@hotmail.com