LAHORE: Punjabi scholar, poet, researcher and educationist Sharif Sabir, who passed away on Thursday, was laid to rest at Narang Mandi on Friday. He was 85.

Born at Pakki Saraan, Sheikhupura on May 18, 1928, Sabir was a towering personality in Punjabi literature as he had many feathers in his cap being a poet, translator, researcher and editor. He is known for editing the most authentic version of Heer Waris Shah.

According to his interview, available at folkpunjab.org, he had got master’s degrees in two subjects and started his career as a English language teacher in a government school. He became a headmaster before the Punjab government and the Waris Shah Academy got his services on deputation to complete his research on Heer Waris Shah. He also edited Bulleh Shah, Sultan Bahu, Mian Muhammad Bakhsh and Baba Farid’s poetry besides compiling Kalam-i-Qadiryar. Another important work to his credit was translation of Sheikh Saadi’s Gulistan and Bustan and Hazrat Ali Hajveir’s Kashful Mahjoob into Punjabi.

While teaching at the government school in 1971, Sharif Sabir had written a paper on the errors that he found in the available versions of Heer Waris Shah both in India and Pakistan and they included the one edited by Dr Faqir Muhammad Faqir.

“I spent 12 years looking for the original versions of Heer Waris Shah in earliest printed books but the painstaking work was not published in General Zia regime and it had to wait for the Junejo government when democracy was restored to some extent,” he had said in the interview. According to him, Waris Shah had completed Heer in 1766 but it’s earliest available print edition was of 1821 that was kept in Patiala. While working with the Waris Shah Academy, Sharif Sabir retrieved another very old edition of Heer from a hairdressers’ family of Chunian. He said poet Peeran Ditta had included 1,192 extra lines in the original Heer Waris Shah on his own and he had got one rupee for each line.

About five years ago, he worked with the Punjab Institute of Language, Art and Culture (Pilac) as a lecturer and taught Baba Farid’s poetry to students in three-month certificate course.

Published in Dawn, October 3rd , 2015

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