Text · Balochi oral epic
Hāni and Sheh Mureed
Also known as Hāni and Sheh Mureed — the Balochi ballads
Balochi literature was oral for most of its life, carried by professional minstrels in ballad cycles about the Rind–Lāsharī wars, and its central romance is Hāni and Sheh Mureed. Sheh Mureed, a Rind noble, is betrothed to Hāni and loses her to Mīr Chākar through a trick of words at an assembly; he leaves for Makkah, returns as a wandering dervish, and refuses her when she is finally offered back. The cycle was first written down by British officers collecting from singers in the nineteenth century.
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Confidence
- Not assessed
Worth knowing
The loss turns on a single spoken formula rather than a battle — Mureed answers a ritual question inattentively and thereby gives his betrothed away — which makes the great Balochi tragedy a story about the binding force of the spoken word.
Connections (2)
- Canonised by textMīr Chākar Khān Rind
The Balochi ballad cycle is about Mīr Chākar's war, and Hāni and Sheh Mureed is its central tragedy — Sheh Mureed loses his betrothed to Chākar through an inattentive answer at an assembly, leaves for Makkah, and comes back a dervish who will not take her when she is finally offered. The minstrels who carried the cycle sang the battles and the romance as one body of material, so the historical chief and the fictional lover belong to a single performance tradition, and the hero of the ballads is also its villain.
- Mythic displacement toHarmandir Sāhib (Golden Temple)
The Balochi ballads are about a war that ended with its losers moving east onto the Punjab plain. Mīr Chākar left Sibi after the Rind–Lāsharī wars, allied with Humāyūn, and took land near Amritsar; the Baloch tribes who followed settled the Derajat and the Punjab plains, where Baloch descent and Saraiki speech now coincide across a wide belt. Mīr Chākar's own tomb is at Satghara in Okara district.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Hani and Sheh Mureed” and “Balochi literature”. Mansel Longworth Dames, Popular Poetry of the Baloches (1907); Sabir Badalkhan on Balochi oral tradition.
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