Person · Sindhi poet & mystic
Shāh Abdul Latīf Bhittāī
Also known as Shah Latif, Shah Abdul Latif, Bhittai
The great Sindhi poet, whose Shāh jo Risālo is organised into thirty surs, musical modes, and tells the tragic folk romances of Sindh — Sassui, Sohni, Marui — as Sufi allegory. The sur names are rāgas, so the book is a musical as well as a literary structure.
- Date
- 1689 – 1752
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Tradition
- Shah jo Risalo
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
The heroines carry the argument: it is the women in his romances who walk into the desert, swim the river and refuse the king, and the soul in his poetry is female throughout. Faqirs still sing the Risālo at his shrine nightly.
Connections (3)
- Monastic foundationBhit Shah
Shāh Abdul Latīf is buried at Bhit Shah, the sandhill he chose and settled, and faqirs have sung the Shāh jo Risālo at the shrine nightly since. The book is organised into thirty surs named for musical modes and tells Sindh's tragic folk romances — Sassui, Sohni, Marui — as Sufi allegory, so most Sindhis know the text as something heard at a tomb rather than read in a room.
- Canonised by textShāh Jo Risālo
The Risālo is not a book Shāh Abdul Latīf wrote so much as the compiled record of what he sang, gathered after his death in 1752 and arranged into surs named after the musical modes rather than the subjects. Its organising decision is his: the Sindhi folk romances supply the material, and their women — Sassui walking into the desert, Sohnī swimming the river, Mārui refusing the king — carry the mystical argument, while the men are mostly what the women are moving toward. Ernest Trumpp printed the first edition at Leipzig in 1866.
- Teaching lineageSachal Sarmast
Sindhi tradition makes Sachal Sarmast the successor Shāh Abdul Latīf named, reporting that Latīf saw the boy at Daraza and said he would take the lid off the pot Latīf had only lifted. The distinction holds up in the poetry. Latīf argues the unity of being through figures — the heroines of the romances, the desert, the river — and leaves the doctrine implicit. Sachal states it outright, praises Mansūr al-Hallāj who was executed for saying it, and invites the same charge in six languages.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai”. The subject’s own writings where they survive, and the standard biographical literature.
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