It’s intriguingly interesting to note that most of Punjab’s poets, who wrote in their mother language, are saints as well. They exist at two levels; they are venerated, nay, worshiped by people more as holy men than poets and at another plain they are celebrated by intelligentsia more as poets than saints.
Ours is a unique tradition in the sense that its founding fathers and practitioners mostly chose to live with what Saint Francis of Assisi called “…the treasure of sublime poverty” which meant they were compelled by the logic of their own choice to live like ordinary people in penury or among the people sharing their unending sufferings. It also precluded the ever present and tempting possibility of enjoying royal largesse or court’s favour. Punjab’s classical poets (Sindh’s classical poets too) were quite unlike their Persian and Urdu counterparts who mostly depended for their livelihoods on the generosity of royal courts and thus were directly and indirectly dictated by the royal ethos and norms in terms of choosing their subject matter and its treatment. It was a kind of quid pro quo; the poets in their verses reflected rulers’ world view and rulers made the socio-material world a little comfortable for the poets by throwing a few crumbs at them from their gilded dining table. Baba Farid, the pioneer of Punjabi literary tradition, exposed the powerful that nourished their parasitic existence by taking away peasantry’s hard earned“crumbs”, by force of course. “O Farid, these stalks of mustard in the pan though sweet are poison / some toiled till they dropped raising the crop, others moved in plundering it”.
Internal evidence of their poetry suggests that these sagacious individuals in their life time were conscious of the multi-layered perception people had of them. They were adored for their socio-spiritual outlook and celebrated for their poetic outpouring which touched the hearts of common folks. Their simple and austere way of life brought them close to the people. And their poetic world, to borrow words from Karl Marx, reverberated with the “sigh of the oppressed”. “O Farid, black are my clothes, black my guise/ full of sins I walk about, people canonize (trans. Muzaffar Ghaffar)”, says Baba Farid in all humility while talking about what people thought of him. He rejected the saintly image that people had of him in order not to be placed among the religious and spiritual imposters who hoodwinked the people with their phony arcane power of other-worldly mantras for petite worldly gains.
Baba Nanak, a real Guru and profound thinker, rejecting his class and caste status declared: “I am the lowliest of the lowly (Nichihonattnich)”. It’s not just a declaration of modesty but also an explicit challenge to the ruthless rigidity of caste system as well as expression of solidarity with the wretched of the earth on the lowest rung of deeply entrenched socio-economic hierarchy that egregiously opposed the notion and practice of human equality.
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Madho Lal Husain, one of the most beloved of poets/saints of Punjab, who set the standard of literary Punjabi, despite being a high caste Rajput, abhorred the arrogance his caste traditionally had been associated with. He with lot of pride identified himself with weavers who were considered low caste. He called himself a “Julaha” (a weaver) simply because his father, it is reported, worked in a managerial position in a cloth-making factory during the reign of Emperor Akbar. People took him as a saint though he was publicly a “denier” (Malamti) of the ritualistic side of the faith. “I am a humble ascetic/ do not declare me a spiritual Guru/ the lie hurts me (ikk Shah Husain Faqirhai/ tussanaakhona koi peer hai/ asankurigall nabhawandi),” he declares.
Baba Farid, Baba Guru Nanak and Madho Lal Husain have been quoted by way of example to show the kernel of our literary tradition that demonstrates unity of word and action, and reality and ideal. Bridging the gulf between experience and dream, these extraordinary individuals practiced what they believed. Their poetry reflected their way of life and their way of life reflected their poetic world. We see that their lived experience transforms itself into creative expression at the imaginative level that on the one hand acts as a signifier of a concrete historical reality and on the other emerges as an emblem of transcendental ideal.