By: Ikramul Haq
Khwaja Ghulam Farid brought the previous part of this series to a distinction essential for any discussion of culture: one may belong without enclosing. Language and land give human beings memory and rootedness, but identity becomes dangerous when belonging is converted into ownership. Farid’s Rohi could therefore remain intensely local while its poetry travelled far beyond the desert. Before returning, in the concluding part, to the poet whose presence has hovered over this entire inquiry, we must consider two contemporary Punjabi intellectuals who helped us understand why these old voices remain politically and humanly alive: Najm Hosain Syed and Mushtaq Soofi. Neither treated Punjabi poetry as an ornamental inheritance to be admired safely from a distance. For them, language carries memory; literature records conflicts suppressed by official histories; folklore preserves the consciousness of people whom courts and chronicles rarely considered worthy of remembrance. Their work asks a question inseparable from the theme of this series: who possesses the right to describe reality? That question takes us directly to power. Najm Hosain Syed’s Recurrent Patterns in Punjabi Poetry, first published in 1968, changed the terms on which classical Punjabi poetry could be read. Its essays ranged from Shah Hussain and Baba Farid to Waris Shah, Bulleh Shah and other classical voices. Zubair Ahmad describes the book as foundational for modern Punjabi literary criticism. Najm’s method was crucial. A poet did not inhabit an abstract mystical universe detached from history. Images emerged from material surroundings: fields, workshops, rivers, markets, household labour, hunger, class relations and the routines of ordinary people. Rethinking development—IX From prescriptions to a constitutional development compact The Tragedy of Murree: A Crime Against Humanity by Design Squeezing the space of thinking New provinces The poet could criticise that environment but could not remain indifferent to it. Najm consequently recovered social history from poetry without reducing poetry to sociology. This approach has informed much of our own journey through this series. The spinning wheel in Shah Hussain was not merely a mystical symbol; it belonged to an artisan world. Heer’s tragedy could not be separated from property, family authority and marriage. Farid’s flour and salt revealed material inequality. Bahu’s attack on accumulated learning exposed the possibility that religion itself could become possession. Khwaja Ghulam Farid’s Rohi was simultaneously landscape, memory and consciousness. Najm taught readers to see those connections. His own creative work went further. He took inherited Punjabi forms and forced them to encounter contemporary reality. Zubair Ahmad shows how his poetry brought common people, disappearing professions, urbanisation, class contradiction and political repression into Punjabi verse. Najm’s plays likewise revisited Punjab’s rebellions: Takhat Lahore engaged the memory of Dulla Bhatti, while Ikk Rat Ravi di reconstructed Ahmad Khan Kharal’s resistance during 1857. Jungle da Rakha satirised the process by which the powerful persuade weaker people to follow them, and Harh de Phull reflected upon the failure of Pakistan’s Left. The important point is that Najm did not simply manufacture heroes. A particularly revealing reading of Takhat Lahore notes that Dulla Bhatti himself is removed from the dramatic centre. Attention moves instead towards marginal figures—women, mendicants and the socially oppressed. The rebellion is not allowed to become another cult of the Great Man. History returns to those whose collective action makes resistance possible. This is history from below in poetic form. Conventional history remembers coronations, wars, treaties and rulers. Najm repeatedly turns towards what he calls the ordinary days—the innumerable days on which anonymous people labour, suffer, love, resist and disappear without acquiring monuments. His poetry after the collapse of the Soviet Union did not simply mourn a defeated ideological project; it returned to ordinary lives in search of meaning. Anne Murphy has perceptively described this dimension of Najm’s work as remembering against sentimentality. His engagement with Punjab’s past does not invite nostalgic retreat. He brings past and present into conversation precisely so that memory remains politically alive rather than becoming a museum piece. This distinction is fundamental. Nostalgia says that everything valuable belonged to yesterday. Historical consciousness asks why yesterday’s conflicts remain unfinished today. The connection with Mushtaq Soofi is intellectual as well as personal. As a student at Government College Lahore in the 1970s, Soofi entered Punjabi literary circles almost accidentally. The Punjabi Adabi Sangat brought him into contact with Najm, who persuaded him to write in Punjabi. Mushtaq Soofi later recalled that the encouragement he received for his first rather ordinary Punjabi poem was deliberately generous: an older generation was trying to bring a younger writer into the linguistic and cultural struggle. That invitation became a lifelong commitment. Mushtaq Soofi emerged as poet, critic, cultural activist and, through his long-running Punjab Notes, one of the most persistent public interpreters of Punjab’s language and civilisation. His central proposition is uncompromising: language and power are inseparable. A dominant group does not merely impose political institutions; it can elevate its language while degrading the speech of those it governs. Punjabi presents a peculiar historical paradox. Punjab has frequently exercised enormous political and institutional weight, while Punjabi itself has remained distant from the centres of formal power. Persian dominated successive courts; colonial administration privileged Urdu and English; postcolonial upward mobility continued to reward languages other than the mother tongue of most Punjabis. Sara Kazmi, presently Assistant Professor of English in Pennsylvania University, had been teaching at Gurmani Centre for Languages and Literature, Lahore University of Management Sciences and was involved in parallel Punjabi theatre, in her well-researched comprehensive article [Mind your language—The movement for the preservation of Punjabi] discussed the history of the Punjabi language movement, demonstrates how British administrators chose Urdu rather than Punjabi for provincial administration. Mushtaq Soofi rightly insists that writing in Punjabi is itself politically consequential. His own journey from English literature and Urdu poetry towards Punjabi illustrates a form of decolonisation occurring within the educated Punjabi mind. His poetry can compress an entire political economy into a few apparently simple lines. Inheritance as Constitution Shahmukhi Roman Punjabi Literary English translation جس دے پیو واہیا سو
