The social and intellectual discourse Waris Shah confronts in 18th century is defined by certain visible features; sanctity of class and caste, veneration of patriarchic family and emphasis on evolving an exclusive Muslim identity in a pluralistic society. His protagonist Ranjha quietly but quite firmly raises the class question through the choices he makes. He comes off an affluent land owning family but gives up his property rights and proudly stands dispossessed as a mark of peaceful protest against the system that deprives him of his due share, exposing the perfidy of his brothers, the Qazi and the village elders who represent society, religion and the state.

Disinherited, all Ranjha has is a piece of bamboo; a flute that stands out as a metaphor of a new world evoked in a dream-like sound. “With a flute under his arm, he started his journey, forgetting his home and land”. Cut off from his family and class he experiences the present as a lowly mortal with bleak future prospects. After meeting Heer, he accepts a job reserved for the poorest of the poor; he becomes a ‘Chaak’, the herder of buffalos that places him at the lowest rung of social hierarchy. “The herd belongs to my father but you the herder belong to me”, Heer spells out the terms and conditions of his job. Ranjha with stoic courage is ready to suffer all the rigors of being a social unequal of Heer to evolve a human relationship that emerges at the end as an ultimate symbol of gender equality. The relationship in fact reflects, to the great dismay of the traditionalists, the reversal of gender roles, making woman more dynamic than man. Heer through out the story has the initiative; she is the subject not the object, she is the leader not the lead. She knows the ways of the world as much as those of love. If Ranjha by becoming a worker rejects the constraints of his class, she too renounces her upper class privileges with her conscious decision to fall (in fact stand) for a man not her equal in social terms. Waris Shah in no uncertain terms expresses that one cannot have an authentic love relationship in a society based on human inequality born of economic and political coercion. Love is a choice made in freedom regardless of class and caste norms. Its essence in reality lies in defiance of narrow parameters designed by historically created hierarchical structures to control the imperatives of human potential.

The intellectual and social discourse in 18th century which justified the class distinctions as a social regulator was accorded metaphysical sanctity by ruling elite -- both the Muslims and the Hindus -- not withstanding their differences in faith. Waris Shah debunks this sacred myth, exposing the social regulator for what it is; a lever of social control used by upper crust to conceal and justify its excesses in an exploitative socio-economic system.

The second significant element of the discourse is the venerated patriarchic structure that seems to stand eternally stable on the unquestioned and unquestionable authority of the male elder or patriarch as a custodian of customs and norms. The head has to be male as he has come through a historical process to symbolise the power, physical initially, as a result of his bio-physical features which are different from those of female. The patriarch has an intrinsic incapacity to square the reproductive power of female, under-rated as it has been, with the physical power of male in a society that has not outgrown the confines of animal kingdom where instinctive reliance on force is a natural mode of existence. Hence the more the family is patriarchal, the more it is animalistic in the sense that it is not fully humanised entity informed by ethical consciousness. Heer refuses to submit to that patriarchal authority that in spite of having an emotional aura, is indifferent to the conscience and consciousness of woman, dictates her fate in accordance with the politico-economic needs of clan and family. “As wine-bibbers cannot desert the bottle, as opium-eaters cannot live without opium, so I cannot live without Ranjha,” says Heer when confronted by her father.

The last but not the least element of 18th century discourse is faith and politics driven search of exclusive Muslim identity by religious orthodoxy supported by a strong section of ruling class of foreign origins despite the historical fact of the Muslims being a minority in a society that has been pluralistic in its nature since the time immemorial. It is quite ironic that those who make out their faith as a mark of social distinction under the Muslim rule treat the convert Muslims having local roots as “Razeel” the riff-raff, devoid of dignity. Waris Shah not only accepts plurality or diversity but also indirectly celebrates it. ‘Jog’ (renunciation) forms an integral element of his narrative and becomes the way that leads to Ranjha’s meeting with Heer after her forced marriage, reminding us of a long standing spiritual tradition that has its origins in our Buddhist and Hindu past. The poet whose name suggests respectable Arabian ancestry owns our non-Muslim spiritual heritage as much as our Muslim mysticism.

Waris Shah is the most beloved of the poets of the Punjab because on the one hand he brings on to the cultural stage the protagonists who defy the class oppression and gender inequality and on the other portrays a holistic picture of society with all its conflicts, contradictions and complexities. No poet before or after him has grasped the essence of people’s culture and mass psyche the way he has. The socio-natural landscape he describes, when Ranjha after a night stay leaves the mosque at dawn, becomes an eternally haunting image of village morning in the Punjab:

“With the bird-song travelers take to the path and churners shake the churns

Those who enjoyed the pleasures of the beds (with their partners) run to the stream to wash their bodies clean”.

Waris Shah is acknowledged by the people and the poets as a superb craftsman with an unusually fecund imagination who remains unequalled in the history of Punjabi literature. Like all great poets he is master of the language. He knows the secret world of the words, choosing at will to reveal what is hidden and to hide what is already revealed. He can come up with the strangest of compound words and phrases and yet make them sound perfectly natural. He has such a firm grasp of the language that he can afford to borrow freely from Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit and Sadh Bhasha. He can make the borrowed words a part of the Punjabi language with no fear of burdening it with what otherwise is thought to be unwanted alien influence by the purists. He was perhaps conscious of what he had done with the story and the language. He started composing the story, as he tells the reader in the beginning, at his friends’ request but at the end throws a challenge: “Let the poets judge my verse, I have walked my horse in the mart”. Mian Mohammad Buksh, one of the great poets of 19th century, gifted with a formidable literary skill, while commenting on classical poets says:

“Waris Shah is the lord of verse, who can find fault with him It is beyond my grasp to point the finger at his words”.

It can safely be claimed that in order to know Waris Shah you have to know Punjab and to know Punjab you have to know Waris Shah.

(Concluded)