Person · Punjabi poet
Wāris Shāh
Born about 1722 at Jandiāla Sher Khān and trained at Kasur under Hāfiz Ghulām Murtazā, Wāris Shāh wrote the Heer in 1766 and settled the shape of Punjabi literature with it. The poem retells the romance of Heer of the Sials and Dheedo Ranjhā in a stanza built for singing, and uses it to take apart the authority of the qazi, the panchayat and the family. He is claimed by every side of the Punjab's later divisions, and read in Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi alike.
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Confidence
- Not assessed
Worth knowing
He is said to have written the Heer while in love with a woman named Bhāgbharī and to have put his own complaint in Ranjhā's mouth, which if true makes the central poem of Punjabi a personal grievance that got out of hand.
Connections (2)
- Samadhi atJandiāla Sher Khān
Wāris Shāh was born at Jandiāla Sher Khān about 1722 and is buried there; the tomb was rebuilt in tiled Punjabi idiom in the 1970s and its annual urs draws singers rather than only pilgrims, because the Heer is sung and not recited. Amrita Pritam addressed this grave in 1948 in “Aj aakhaan Wāris Shāh nu”, asking the poet to rise and speak from it about what the Punjab had just done to itself — so a tomb in Pakistan is the addressee of the best-known Punjabi poem written in India.
- Canonised by textHeer (Wāris Shāh)
Wāris Shāh finished the Heer in 1766, some six hundred and thirty stanzas in a metre built for singing, and the poem settled the shape of Punjabi literature. He did not invent the story — Damodar had written it before him and others after — but his version displaced them all, because of what he put into it: an exact, unsparing account of village authority, and a contempt for the qazi, the panchayat and the brother who poisons that the romance is the vehicle for rather than the point of.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Waris Shah”. Wāris Shāh, Heer, Sheikh Ghulam Ali editions; Christopher Shackle, “Transition and Transformation in Varis Shah's Hir”.
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