IndiaStar: A Literary-Art Magazine Varis Shah's Hir-Ranjha by Suzanne McMahon
The influence of the Hir-Ranjha folk romance in pre-modern Punjabi secular literature is unrivalled. Even in contemporary Punjab the story continues to enjoy enormous popularity. Varis Shah's Hir is widely regarded as the most brilliant rendering of the Hir-Ranjha tale and it is most likely this Hir that Insha refers to when he writes:
Critical Interpretations of Hir Varis Shah: Varis Shah's poem is a qissa, a Punjabi narrative form related to the Persian masnavi. Because Hir Varis Shah does not follow the traditional qissa formula of love untainted by sexuality, critics have speculated about the nature and intent of the poem. In earlier poetic versions of the Hir folktale, the story clearly tells of the union of the soul, Hir, with the Lord, Ranjha. Bulleh Shah's couplet describes the soul's merging or annihilation (fana) in God through repetition (zikr) of the His Name.
Varis Shah's presentation is very different from Bulleh Shah's and the frank carnality of Hir Varis Shah might lead us to believe that Varis Shah has abandoned the spiritual theme altogether and yet spiritual interpretations of the poem persist. Commentators seem to agree that contradictory forces are at work in the poem but each has offered a slightly different interpretation of what's going on. Denis Matringe asserts that the sensual aspect of the relation between Hir and Ranjha is not in contradiction with spiritual purity but instead partakes of the ironical world view which runs throughout the qissa. Christopher Shackle refers to the ironically ambiguous power of the poem. Ziya Muhammad offers only two possible views of Hir Varis Shah, those of the orthodox Muslims, for whom Hir is impious rubbish and those of the ignorant sufis for whom it is their Masnavi, a Quran in Punjabi. But if Varis Shah wanted to write a poem in the tradition of the mystical romance then why has he adopted such a worldly tone. One the other hand, if his intention was to produce impious rubbish surely there was ample scope for that outside of the Hir-Ranjha tale.
In this article, I examine one aspect of opposition in Hir Varis Shah, the juxtaposition of the intensely spiritual and the intensely sensual, as a modeling of the sufi concept of paradox. Taking up a consideration of paradox is a little problematic since the concept has fallen into disrepute after New Critics like Cleanth Brooks tried, ambitiously if unsuccessfully, to define this special case of opposition as the driving force behind all poetry. But my ambition is much more modest. I am looking specifically at how Varis Shah uses paradox, as one oppositional tool among many within his poem.
Paradox has played an important role in the sufi tradition, resolving the seeming conflict of two elements of a binary pair by affirming both elements. Ayn al-Qudat said the very conjunction of opposites is reflected the concept of God in Islam shown in the shahadah, or confession of faith--la ilaha illa Allah . To pass from la ilaha [there is no god, that is, the realm of the malevolent divine attributes] to the realm of illa Allah (but God) requires the sufi wayfarer to confront God's chamberlain, who stands guard at the threshold of illa Allah. Who is the chamberlain? None other than the devil Iblis. The use of paradox as a hermeneutic tool is common in sufi thought. Al-Ashari (d. 935) settled the question of free will vs. predestination by affirming both as true. Interestingly, he also denied the intrinsic goodness or badness of human actions, maintaining that an action is considered good or bad only because God has determined it is so. In the eleventh century, Ansari of Herat went so far as to claim that the relationship of lover and Beloved moves them to a level where even the five pillars of Islam seem superfluous.
This emphasis on paradox, and an ethic of love that contradicts the orthodox code, is reflected strongly in the Persian Divan-i Shams-i Tabrizi by Maulana Rumi. Inspired by Rumi's love for his Master, Shams i-Tabriz, the work draws on all the elements of human experience, using a traditional mystical vocabulary as well as shocking elements of anger, cruelty, and sexuality to describe the spiritual experience of annihilation (fana). Varis Shah was almost certainly familiar with this work and with many of the concepts of paradox described above.
Background: Varis Shah, a sayyad of Jandiala, completed Hir in 1767. It is set in the districts of Multan and Sahival. Varis Shah uses bhagbhari , meaning fortunate one, as an epithet for Hir throughout the poem and conjecture has arisen that Varis Shah had an unhappy love affair with a Jat woman named Bhagbhari, but any autobiographical implications are pure speculation. While Varis Shah, a devotee of Baba Farid Shakarganj, was grounded in the sufi, particularly Chisti, tradition (his pir was Makhdum Qasuri), he had not yet lost his taste for the sensual world:
Paradox in Hir Ranjha: A number of renderings of the Hir-Ranjha tale preceded Varis Shah's. Annemarie Schimmel says that the romance of Hir-Ranjha has been elaborated in more than a hundred versions in Punjabi, Urdu, Sindhi, and Persian. In early versions of Hir-Ranjha, the characters are Hindu, but the story slowly took on secondary Muslim accretions and by the time of Ahmad Gujjars 1693 version, Ranjha, now a Muslim, is defending the sufi concept of love against the asceticism of the Naths. Varis Shah, as we will see, synthesizes a number of Hindu and Muslim elements. In Persian style Varis Shah tells that his friends have come and asked him to tell anew the tale of the love of Hir, reciting a poem of that marvelous spring, make us meet with Ranjha and Hir, so whenever friends assemble we may relish the taste of the love of Hir.
The subject of Varis Shah's poem is love and he gives it primary importance in his invocation to God in the first stanza, the hamd, of the poem.
The reference in the hamd is to true love. The basic ideology of the qissa form is the establishment of an analogy between isq-i haqiqi and isq-i majazi. Isq-i majazi , always untainted by sexuality, is a symbol or reflection of the higher true love, isq-i haqiqi. While Varis Shah does not totally abandon this idea, he emphasizes isq-i majazi and isq-i haqiqi as two elements of a paradox, it is not through the rejection of the sexual elements of symbolic love, isq-i majazi, as in the tradition of asceticism, but through their total acceptance that the soul finally experiences the true love, isq-i haqiqi and attains fana or annihilation in the beloved.
The first meeting of Hir and Ranjha sets the course of their love. After being cheated out of his inheritance by his jealous brothers, Ranjha, who is also addressed by the name Dhido, abandons his family in Takt Hazara and sets out for Jhang, the home of Hir, to seek his fortune. On the way he encounters opposition from a narrow-minded mullah who refuses him shelter in the mosque and from Luddan the ferryman, who refuses to take him across the river Chenab. But Ranjha effortlessly seduces the two wives of the ferryman, and, in the end Luddan is happy to take him across the river to be rid of him. On board the ferry, Ranjha falls asleep on a comfortable couch, which turns out to be the property of Hir. When she hears her couch has been defiled by some unknown Jat, she marches wrathfully towards the ferry to beat him. But her anger evaporates with Ranjha's first words: vah sajjana. In the meeting of the eyes they both are lost. Ah, Varis, nothing can help when eyes meet on the battlefield of love! Ranjha explains to Hir that life is like a dream and that she must abandon pride of youth and beauty, give up attachment to possessions, and be ever prepared to leave the world. He asks Hir to take an oath to love so that she will not desert at the first assault for the way of love is the hard, strait way. This is isq-i majazi, but it will be experienced fully, embraced fully. Hir and Ranjha are willing to sacrifice everything for love; in the end they even lay down their lives. This kind of love raises them to the status of the pirs and fakirs. The worldly people, following an orthodox ethical code, may decry the actions of the lovers and oppose their union. But in sufism, as Sant Singh Sekhon tells us, the fakirs regard themselves as exceptional for having attained, through some kind of spiritual discipline or divine grace, the privilege of transcending social convention and restraint.
Keeping this in mind, sanctioning of the love of Hir and Ranjha by the Five Pirs is a pivotal event. In order to keep Ranjha near her Hir entreats her father, Cucak, to accept him as a cowherd, and immediately after Cucak agrees, the Five Pirs appear to Ranjha, and tell him that the Lord has granted him the love of Hir. Each of the Pirs give him a gift, traditional for a betrothal-- a tuft, a shawl, a ring, a dagger, and a cow of light brown colorindicating that the union of Hir and Ranjha is sealed through divine grace.
Varis Shah has described Ranjha in images that could just as easily refer to Krishna.
The similarity of Ranjha to Krishna in the poem is in line with a whole system of double cultural reference, partaking of both of Islam and Hinduism, that was a part of the social system in rural Punjab during Varis Shah's time. (This system of double reference shows up in other events in the poem, for instance, in the fixing of the wedding date for Hir and Saida by the Brahmins and in the acceptance of a yogic vows by Ranjha.)
After Ranjha becomes a cowherd, he and Hir meet secretly each day and the scenes by the River Chenab are reminiscent of Krishna and the gopis. At noon Ranjha takes the buffaloes to the river for water and Hir comes with her companions to swim. Ranjha plays on his flute; Hir and her attendants sing along. Their water sports are very pretty. One wrings the water from her hair over Ranjha, one draws him close to her. One encircles his waist with her arms, and another rubs her cheek against his. This invoking of the Krishna image, besides reflecting the social realities, also points to the Chisti affinity with Krishnaite Bhakti, where the erotic love of Krishna and Radha is a comfortable concept. Varis Shah is moving this concept into a Muslim context using a vocabulary of Krishna very familiar to the Chistis.
Of course, the clandestine meetings of Hir and Ranjha are soon discovered causing great scandal. Cucak suggests to Hir's mother Malki, that since she did not strangle Hir at birth, ( female infanticide was not unknown), she should strangle her now and bury the scandal deep. But the Five Pirs appear again to reassure the lovers and counsel Hir and Ranjha not to degrade their love.
If the point of their injunction is that Hir and Ranjha not sully their love with sensuality, then it is a little late in coming. Degrading love here seems to have nothing to do with sensuality and the Pirs remain pleased with the lovers. The worldly people are not so understanding. Cucak dismisses Ranjha from his service and Hir is quickly married off against her will to Saida, the son of a neighboring Khera chieftan. After Ranjha is separated from Hir he becomes a yogi, taking initiation from the guru Balnath, and, in this disguise, escapes with Hir from Rangpur, though the two are quickly recaptured. After a plague of fire is visited on Rangpur all opposing parties relent and agree to the marriage of Hir and Ranjha. But when Ranjha returns to his own home to bring the bridal procession, Hir's family, afraid of public shame, poison her and send word of her death to Ranjha, who on hearing of the murder of his beloved, dies of grief.
In this the verse describing the death of Ranjha re we would expect to see verification that paradox has a resolution. As Ranjha explained to Hir at their first meeting, the world is a place of dreams, and their time to leave it came very quickly. Varis Shah tells us that the lovers were firm in this earthly shape of love, the mizaji which had the character of the erotic love of Krishna and Radha. At this point you might expect some affirmation that through symbolic love Hir and Ranjha also achieve true love and rise into fanah, annihilation in the beloved, the goal of true love for the Sufis. In death the two lovers are united, but here Varis Shah throws in an intriguing twist, almost deconstructing his own model. Fana appears in the verse but in the phrase dara fanah, the destructible world, which he contrasts with dara bakai, the imperishible world. Finally, Varis Shah comment that after the fanfare of this life many have left for nowhere. His word is vanjhare, and it leaves the reader wondering, have the lovers achieved sufi annihilation, or in Buddhist fashion have they gone into the Void, or in fact was the sufi model itself was just a dream leading not to ecstasy but a wasteland beyond.
Gender: Usually the description of the ideal appears as narrative, while the coarser elements are introduced through dialog. One of the most intriguing dialogs in the poem is the case of gendered opposition portrayed in the bawdy exchange between Ranjha and Sahiti, Hir's sister in-law, that comprises nearly one third of the poem. The badinage could be interpreted as a battle of the sexes, and I will follow it up as a continuation of the 9th century debate started by Rabia Basri and Hassan, but it also shows elements of a clash between the orthodox and unorthodox, a proud daughter, defending the privilege of her family and the pride of her station against an unknown itinerent yogi. Another aspect of the interchange could be the bhabhi-nand relation of Hir and Sahiti. Or taking a different approach, Sahiti could also be viewed as an alter-ego for Hir, much as Sandra Gilbert has described Bertha Rochester, Madwoman in the Attic, as the darker half of Jane Eyre.
Translation: This section with Ranjha and Sahiti was almost totally expunged by Charles Frederick Usborne, a member of the Indian Civil Service, who served in the Punjab, when he translated the poem at the beginning of the twentieth century. Usborne's handling of the poem raises some interesting questions about the translation in general that deserve futher investigation. He skipped some of the more difficult sections of Hir and the version contains many mistranslations. A misguided Victorian fastidiousness impelled Usborne to edit out most of Varis Shah's more earthy banter, imposing an uncomfortable propriety on the poem and doing violence to both the mystical and secular themes. The cynical irony of some of Varis Shah's characterizations, contrasting the ideal with the actual, is lost. For instance, the coarser jibes of Ranjha's exchange with the mullah are toned down. In the original, Ranjha chides the mullah, "A maid, a wife, a widow, a sheep, a she-ass, none is safe from you," which provides a caustic contrast with the original description of the mullah as erudite and noble. Usborne renders the sentence as, "You lead the village women astray; you are a bull among cows," which sounds more like a praise of the mullah's virility than a scathing denunciation of a sexually predatory rural clergy. Usborne's censorship significantly impeded the workings of oppositional elements within the poem. To capture the deeper structures of a poetic work, rather than simply to convey content, a translator needs what Coleridge calls speculative instruments, familiarity with the author, the language, and how social being left its imprint on syntax. Usborne's translation leads us to ask whether Coleridge's speculative instruments might be affected adversely when the translator is not conscious of potential dangers inherent in imbalance of linguistic power, as in the case of moving from a work from an indigenous language into a colonial one.
The translation by Sant Singh Sekhon, a scholar, writer, and native Punjabi speaker, remains the best translation even though the language strikes the modern reader as a little stilted. The critical edition by Denis Matringe includes a French translation of strophes 1 through 110. This translation preserves the poetic form, follows the original text almost word for word, and includes an introduction and extensive etymological and cultural annotations. A full translation on this order in English would greatly expand the possibilities for investigating the poetics of Hir. While the lack of a full critical edition and translation can't be used as an excuse to reserve comment on the poem, there's no denying that it hampers efforts to draft any comprehensive statements about the philosophical, linguistic, and poetic workings of Hir Varis Shah.
Summary: In summary, it is possible to say that Varis Shah juxtaposes a number of other oppositional forces in Hir, some explainable through sufi paradox, some not so easily resolved. But through all these oppositions, at least the quest for synthesis remains clear. The lovers struggle to remain true to love and to make sense of a world that is riddled with hypocrisy and falsehood. Hir and Ranjha are timeless and Varis Shah's masterful telling of their tale remains compelling even today.
While this article reflects only my initial efforts towards an understanding of the poetics of this qissa, I hope that, in spite of its limited scope, it has conveyed a little of the fragrance of the love of Varis Shah's Hir. |