Bulleh Shah

Bulleh Shah (c. 1680–1757), born Sayyid Abdullah Shah Qadri, was a Punjabi Sufi poet of Kasur, and one of the greatest voices Punjab has ever produced. He was born around 1680 — Uch is the place most often named, though some accounts give Pandoke, near Kasur, where his family settled when he was six. His father, Shah Muhammad Darwaish, was a village mosque preacher who taught him his first lessons while the boy worked as a herder; his higher learning came at Kasur, under Hafiz Ghulam Murtaza, and then at Lahore, where he became the disciple of the Qadiri Sufi Shah Inayat — a gardener of the Arain caste. That choice cost him everything respectable: a Sayyid bowing to a man of low caste shocked his family, and the town's clerics declared him a non-believer. He answered them in the people's own tongue. His kafis — short, song-like poems built on a refrain — ask the simplest and hardest questions: who am I, if I am neither believer nor unbeliever, neither Moses nor Pharaoh? More than 150 kafis and 94 other compositions survive, carried for over a century by singers before they were first printed. When he died at Kasur in 1757, the clerics who had condemned him refused to lead his funeral prayer; it was led instead by Syed Zahid Hamdani, and a shrine grew over his grave. Three centuries on, his verses are still sung — by qawwals, by rock bands, in village gatherings and concert halls — wherever Punjabis gather. He is remembered as the Poet of the People.