II. Bulleh Shâh is rightly regarded as one of the greatest poets in Panjabi language (Panjab is the north-eastern region of West Pakistan). And in the specific field of muslim mystical poetry (sûfiâna shâ‘irî) in Panjabi literature he is no doubt the most outstanding figure.

Bulleh Shâh was born in Pandoke village, a few miles from Lahore in 1680. His original name was ‘Abdullah Shâh and his family is reported to have been of Sayyed stock. Driven by a mystical bent he moved to Lahore and became a disciple (murîd) of the reknowned Pîr (Spiritual Guide), ‘Inâyat Shâh. Bulleh Shâh’s relatives, being Sayyed, strongly objected to his placing himself under the guidance of an Arâ’în (low caste of agriculturists). Bulleh did not pay much heed to relatives’ grievances on family prestige and gave himself totally to the guidance of ‘Inâyat Shâh.

According to the traditional pattern of murshid-murîd [= maestro-discepolo] relationship in Indus Valley sufism, ‘Inâyat Shâh had a tremendous bearing on the religious experience of Bulleh and evident traces of this are extant in Bulleh Shâh’s verses. Under ‘Inâyat Shâh’s guidance he gave up seeking after human knowledge (‘ilm), learnt the lesson of love (sabaq-e-‘ishq) and “entered the ocean of Unity” (wahadat dâ daryâ); by ‘Inâyat’s grace he was able to go safely through the “whirling-pool” (kafi no. 79). When finally his Spiritual Guide disclosed “the secrets” (bhet), only then were “divine mysteries” made known to Bulleh Shâh (tân khulle sab asrâr; kafi no. 152). The “triangle” pattern of mystical path (God, murshid, murîd) so common in Panjabi sufism is poetically rendered by a masterly stroke of that symbolic process of materialization which seems to be one of the most striking formal devices of Bulleh Shâh’s poetic genius:

One could go on listing the peculiarities of Panjabi stific poetry that find unrestricted place in Bulleh Shâh’s writings: superiority of love over knowledge, of intuition over reasoning, an acute sense of the inwardness of religious experience, disregard for merely external faithfulness to the sharî‘at, mockery of the self-appointed guardians of Islàm, celebration of the presence of God everywhere, relativeness of positive religions, etc. And one can easily see the common themes of Persian sufism whose influence on Indus Valley islamic mysticism can hardly be overstressed.

Bulleh Shâh was endowed with a keen sense of observation and as a poet he assumed into his verses  -  not as flat subject-matter but as potentially symbolic vehicles of expression  -  all that makes up the simple daily life of a Panjabi village. This was possible, however, in a poetry of religious interests, only if a well refined and daring mental process of materialization had been worked out to transfigure trivial dealings of villagers’ life into highly symbolic references by a touch of creative imaginativeness. It is just what Bulleh Shâh does with an extraordinary mastery of language techniques. The most abstract, immaterial notions and perceptions of mystical insights are unexpectedly embodied into a concrete, palpable symbol which springs up from the immediate experience of daily life. The initial sense of disconfort at the twisted mental process in Bulleh Shâh gives way to an enjoyable poetic wonderment. Time, life and destiny, for instance, are subtly alluded to by a cotton spinning-wheel so common in Panjabi villages; bewilderment in face of the future and the unknown is vividly evoked in the tense psychological state of a girl on the eve of the marriage; a highly dramatic scene of a woman (the sufi) searching for the thief (God) is depicted by the image of a cloak (bukkal) from whose folds the thief took his flight; the concealment or revelation of God is symbolically cast into the familiar image of lifting or removing the ghunghat by a Panjabi woman (the ghunghat being the border of the veil Panjabi women raise up to cover their face while passing by men).

III. But the most striking linguistic technique of Bulleh’s poetry lies in a kind of antithetic parallelism carried out by a sequence of double negation in either member of a dichotomy. One can easily guess that at the origin of such a linguistic device there is a deep awareness of the radically ineffable nature of God and mystical experience. This, however, would be still nothing new in either muslim or christian mystical literature. But the “solution” of the experience of the ineffability, at the linguistic level, into a pattern of bold, puzzling, stubborn sequences of contradictory negations is an extremely genial characteristic of Bulleh Shâh’s sufic poetry. An altogether new logic is imposed on the human mental process; the presumption of capturing the Ultimate Reality within the ground of usual patterns of human reasoning and words is blown up by positing the absurd of statements both assessed and rejected at one and the same time. And yet a flash of light is thrown on the Unknowable by prompting the meaningfulness of grammatical discourse beyond the orbit of direct referential value of verbal symbols and by recovering an unheard of area of verbal meaning: a zone of meaning detected  -  or created?  -  either in referents to which words analogically allude or in a “third one” evoked by denying both contradictory terms out of fear of betraying the meaning with a direct  -  and therefore inadequate  -  connotation.

Hence sufic poetry itself  -  and I chiefly refer to Panjabi sufic poetry  -  appears to be more a privileged moment of experiencing the Divine than a literary otium which would turn into an unsuccessful attempt to communicate anything divine to other humans. Moreover, the intimate link between such poetry and music and qawwâli (the bulk of Panjabi sufic poetry has been handed down orally in qawwâlis) would be a further external evidence to support the idea that poetic activity was taken up by sufis primarily as an attempt to experience the Divine than to speak of it.

The kâfi (favourite form of Panjabi sufic poetry) translated here (kâfi no. 27) is an evident specimen of that sort of syntactically and logically complex and intricate type of mystical poetry which is peculiar to Bulleh Shâh.

To realize the intricacy beyond the apparent simplicity of the text one has to admit, as a zone of meaningfulness, the allusiveness of the counterpart standing beside what is negated and the evokativeness of the grammatical “nothing” which appears to be the only outcome of the devastating apophatic procedure involved in the linguistic pattern of double contradictory negation.

IV. Two more specific remarks may be useful for the understanding of the kâfi:

1. The refrain, which gives formal and logical unity to the sequence of antithetic propositions, offers a wide scope of polyvalence if one would refer to the original:

But it might be as well understood in a moving stream of meaning gaining new and deeper insights as the poet-mystic goes on probing his own reality which finally appears to be nothing but God’s. Moreover the enigmatic last verse might support well the exegesis of an implicit assessment of God as Unique Real “standing” (kharâ) (left over?) when all human and worldly beings have been drowned in the unrestrained universal negation. This view would help to see somewhat through the intricacy bound up with the apparent fluctuant referent for which the grammatical subject stands: a gradual shifting from Bulleh Shâh’s Self (main) to God’s is produced  -  in my opinion  -  so that in the end God himself becomes the subject of any negation as well as affirmation. The first verse of the last stanza would otherwise be too bold a statement to be palatable for a muslim mystic and milieu:

If such an interpretation of “dynamic” meaning is true, then it would do justice to the deep insight of the kâfi as a whole, better than any attempt to assign a fixed meaning to the refrain, as Najm Hosain Syed has done. He lists three possible literal translations (op. cit. infra, p. 71):

a) How do I know who I am?

b) How do I know who He (God) is?

c) How can I know the whoness?

And one could easily add a fourth one:

d) What do I know about the Self ?

2. That the message of Bulleh Shâh’s poetry is not entrusted to the words as such but to what they allude to either by denying or by evoking, is unequivocally made sure, to my mind, by the last verse of the above translated kâfi:

Bulleh Shâh, kharâ hai kaun?

It would give a great headache to any interpreter who presumed to render the “exact meaning” of it. The conciseness of the sentence, the extreme simplicity of grammatical structure, the looseness of syntactic links suddenly breaks through linguistic representation towards an almost immediate, a-linguistic apperception, say, a sort of interjection. And interjection is just as untranslatable as meaningful. No translation (and I mean by translation a reduction of meanings into a linguistic form of expression) can claim to render its meaning, where meaning is just a little more than the apperception itself and transfer into paralinguistic forms of the very simplicity of the unspeakable, indeterminable experience of the One, before any determination whatsoever, when “there was neither the Lord nor the Prophet nor Allah” but only the One (jad ahad ik akallâ si)  -  as Bulleh Shâh himself says elsewhere (kâfi no. 152).

I shall only reluctantly give some exegetical hints to probe the depth of the last verse, on which depends the understanding of the whole poem, but whose plenitude of meaning, however, can be seized only by re-experiencing that same poetico-mystical frustration of being forced to cast the Ineffable into verbally structured forms of knowledge.

Bulleh Shâh, kharâ hai kaun?

a) Who stands up as the Other?

b) Who can stand up and rival me?

c) Who else is (can be) standing there?

d) Does anyone remain?

e) If there is anything remaining of my Self  -  what is it? Who am I now after all?

Scheda "Bulleh Shâh"

1. Bulleh Shâh is buried in Qasûr (few miles from Lahore) where his annual celebration (‘urs) is held in the month of Muharram.

According to the text of Kullyât (Opera Omnia) published under the auspices of “Panjâbî Adabî Akâdamî” (Lahore 1967), Bulleh Shâh’s work consists of:

no. 156 Kâfi

no. 1 Athwâra (composition on the days of the week)

no. 1 Bârân Mâh (composition on the months of the year)

no. 49 Dohre (couplets)

no. 3 Sî Harfî (composition of quatrains whose first line begins with and follows the letters of the alphabet).

2. In the confusion of transliteration from Panjâbî, a middle-way method has been adopted: English value for consonants and Italian for vowels; more arabic symbols having the same sound in Panjâbî have been represented by one symbol; long vowels are marked; dentals and liquids are palatal.

3. Bibliographical references.

Kullyât Bulleh Shâh, edited by Dr Faqîr Muhammad Faqîr, Panjâbî Adabî Akâdamî, Lahore 1967 (with introduction and notes in Panjabi).

Lajwanti Ram Krishan, Panjâbi de Sûfi Shâ‘ir, Lahore 1966 (in Panjabi from the original English: Panjabi Sufi Poets, Calcutta 1938).

A.H. Ahmad Kuraishi, Panjâbi Adab kî Mukhtassar Târikh, Lahore 1964 (in Urdu).

Shafi’ ‘Aqil, Panjâbi Rang, Lahore 1968 (selected Panjabi poems translated into Urdu with short introductions).

Najm Hosain Syad, Recurrent Patterns in Panjabi Poetry, Majlis Shâh Hussain, Lahore 1968 (in English).

[ precedente ] [ successiva ]