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Social Scientist

Warris Shah: Punjabi Poet of Love and LiberationAuthor(s): Kishan SinghReviewed work(s):Source: Social Scientist, Vol. 1, No. 12 (Jul., 1973), pp. 31-46Published by: Social ScientistStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3516344 .

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KISHAN SINGH

WarrisShahPunjabiPoet of LoveandLiberation

IN this short paper it is not possible to deal with WarrisShah comprehensively; therefore no attempt is being madehere in that direction. We only intend to draw the readers'attention to the few points that are invariably lost sight ofby most critics.Warris Shah reflects the Sikh revolution of his times. It isnot possible to understand him, unless we understand theclass nature of the guerrilla warfare which the peasant-plebeians of the Punjab were waging against the establishedorder.The roots of this revolutionary armed struggle lie far back inthe crises that overtook the Brahmanical Hindu society in theearly Middle Ages. This is borne out by the fact that thefounders of the Sikh movement themselves hark back to themuch earlier period. Sufi Farid and Bhakta Kabir and otherHindu bhaktas of the earlier times form an integral part ofthe Holy Granth. This means that the Gurus held thesepeople to be expounding the same truth as they themselveswere doing. Warris Shah himself is very conscious of hisideological and spiritual lineage. Before he starts the nar-ration of the love story, he makes a reverential reference toGod, the Prophet and the Four Friends, and then comes

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SOCIAL SCIENTISTdirectly to Farid. He calls him pir kamal,the man who has attained theultimate spiritual perfection attainable by man; the man who incarnatesin himself the truth of God. It is obvious that according to Warris Shah,Farid is the real Sufi, and further, real Islam is what Farid teaches. TheSufism of Warris Shah is exactly the same as that of his pir kamal-Farid. This truth of Farid is not only for personal salvation, but is alsothe panacea for all human ills in society. According to Warris Shah, thefreedom of the Punjab from all its ills, its happiness and salvation, lies inthe acceptance and practice of the truth propounded by Farid. Thelovers that Warris Shah creates have his full approbation. He createshis positive characters in the exact image of Darvesh, the positive cha-racter propounded by Farid. He is very explicit about it. The loverscreated by him are real lovers only because, like Farid himself, they haveovercome in themselves the deadly sins like selfishness, greed, lust and thelike nafas and hirs-the same that Gurbanin its own idiom also declaresas such. Farid is the connecting link between Gurbani n one side andWarris Shah on the other. In other words, in spite of all the differencesin tradition, the idiom and the form in which the positive charactershave been portrayed, the human and social essence of Farid's Darvesh,Gurbani'sGurmukh and Warris Shah's Aashiks, are the same. In Gur-bani's idiom Heer and Ranjha are Gurmukhs or Aashak is the secularform of Gurmukh. This brings us to the conclusion that Farid, andthe Gurus, the bhaktas included in the Adi Granth and Warris Shah

depict the social reality from the same standpoint and have the samevalue pattern. The only thing left to be seen is what exactly this stand-point is and what the implications of the value pattern are with referenceto the nature of society and man. What is the nature of man for whomthese poets draw the reader's sympathy and approbation ?

Apart from the history of men, neither morality nor religion norconsciousness has an independent history and development of its own.In order to understand this consciousness, we have to look to the realexistence of men. Marx and Engels wrote thus in The GermanIdeology:Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and theircorresponding forms of consciousness thus no longer retain the sem-blance of independence. They have no history, no development; butmen altering their material production and their material intercourse,alter-along with this-their real existence and their thinking and theproducts of their thinking.1As long as a class society functions normally and is more or lessstable, its ruling ideas are the ideas of its ruling class. The ruling classesdominate not only in material production but also in cultural and in-tellectual production. The consciousness of a society about itself andabout the world in general is the consciousness of its ruling class. Marxand Engels have made this point very clear in The Germandeology:Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man's ideas, viewsand conceptions, in a word, man's consciousness, changes with every

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change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social rela-tions, and in his social life ? What else does the history of ideasprove, than that intellectual production changes its character in pro-portion as material production is changed ? The ruling ideas of eachage have ever been the ideas of its ruling class. When people speakof ideas that revolutionise society, they do but express the fact thatwithin the old society the elements of the new one have been created,and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with thedissolution of the old conditions of existence.2The existence of revolutionary ideas in a society presupposes theexistence of a revolutionary class against the established order. Whena

class rises to challenge the established order in a revolutionary way, itlooks at life from the standpoint of its own interests and considers themto be moral. It throws up its own ideology and its own world view. Itsoutlook and morality challenge the established outlook and morality anddeclare them immoral. Its ideology justifies its own rise. Engels writes,We maintain that all moral theories have been hitherto the product,in the last analysis, of the economic stage which society had reachedat that particular epoch. And as society has hitherto moved in classantagonisms, morality was always a class morality; it has eitherjustified the domination and the interests of the ruling class, or, eversince the oppressed class has become powerful enough, it has repre-sented its indignation against the domination and the future interestsof the oppressed.3When Brahmanical system of the Hindu society fell into a deepcrisis in the early Middle Ages, it began to lose the allegiance of its ownpeople at all levels of existence. Being in the process of dissolution andhaving lost the allegiance of its own people, it was too weak to resist the

foreign onslaught. The Muslim feudal rulers coming from outside de-feated the local feudal rulers of the Brahmanical Hindu society andestablished their own sway in most parts of northern India. The ideo-logue and spokesman of the newly established Muslim feudal rule inIndia was the kazi. He was not only an influential dignitary of officialIslam, but also a powerful functionary of the Muslim feudal state thenestablished in India. In those days the dogmas of the established religionwere at the same sime political axioms, and the quotations from thescriptures had the validity of law in every court. When Islam had con-quered Iran and formed an empire, its Quranic content, its revolution-ary content, was quietly buried. Islam henceforth had become theofficial religion. So the kazi was the spokesman of the established Mus-lim state and justified its interests and actions, and declared them moraland acceptable in the eyes of God. The establishment of the Muslimfeudal rule in place of the Hindu feudal rule, was not a smooth change-over from one feudal state to another, or from one dynastic rule to an-other. It was not a question of the change of one government foranother. Since the whole social order was in the process of dissolution,

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SOCIAL SCIENTISTthere was great ferment in the whole of the society. The labouring classesbegan to question the whole established order. Since, at that time, thepredominant mode of consciousness in society was religious, the question-ing-and the revolt of the labouring classes-expressed itself first in theform of the rise of heretical movements against the established one. Thishappened in the Hindu as well as in the Muslim fold. The clashingclass interests expressed themselves in the idiom of God, and the classstruggle took the shape of confrontation between two religions or tworival interpretations of the same religion.Whether it was the Brahmanical Hindu society or the feudalMuslim one, it was a class society and so in the established order manwas ruled by money and dominated by property. His being dominatedby maya4 meant that the goal of man's life had become the acquisition ofproperty. This had perverted his nature. Avarice had become hisdominant motive.In the Hindu fold bhaktas like Kabir, and later in the same tradi-tion the Sikh Gurus took up the cause of the plebeian and threw up areligion expressing his freedom. The plebeian being the rock bottom ofclass society, his freedom meant the freedom of all. Since the new reli-gion represented the freedom of man, it gave a scientific critique of thecontemporary society. It declared that man was unhappy and that societyhad become a vale of tears. Man was unhappy because he was a slave.He was in the bondage of maya-money, property, goods. As he was in thegrip of mayahe had ceased to be human. He had become a devil, anothername of evil. He had become completely egoistic. He had fallen avictim to the lure of money, greed, lust, anger and pride-the five deadlysins. All the social relations that he entered into, all the institutions thathe built, all that he felt, thought or did was nothing but the result ofegoism and it led to the perpetuation of the hold of mayaover man. Thenew religion declared that the salvation of man lay in his freedom-free-dom from the domination of money and his consequent absolution fromegoism, greed, lust and the like. Freedom of man alone could result inthe brotherhood of man and thus alone could man become man again,and thus would love pervade his life. This, when put into practice bythe labouringclasses, was the death knell to the established order ofsociety. The idea that man was dominated by maya was not newin the Hindu tradition. But the revolutionary significance of thediscovery of this truth was long since lost. Brahmanism was the productof the domination of Lakshmi over man and it helped the perpetuationof that domination. The significance of this truth could only be graspedby the revolutionary plebeians. They alone could understand thatfreedom always expresses itself in love and that it is a razor's edge toeverything that stands in the way of love.What a bhakta like Kabir was in the Hindu fold, a Sufi like Faridwas in the Islamic fold. It is now commonly recognised that when theBrahmanical system of Hindu society was in doldrums, Islam spread its

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roots deep in the population of this country. Millions of local peopleentered the Islamic fold. It is now freely conceded that in the earlier periodof the Muslim rule, large-scale conversions were conversions to the SufiIslam. It was the Sufis like Farid whose influence was responsible forthese large-scale conversions. The kazis-the official Islam-hardly hadany hand in them. It is also conceded that the converts were by andlarge the labouring classes and the dregs of the Brahmanical society. Itwas the artisans and labourers in the towns, and the tillers, the kamins,and the day labourers from the rural scene. The upper class and thebusiness class Hindu, by and large, stayed away from Islam. These factsare freely conceded. But their real significance is hardly ever grasped.It is not realised that in becoming converts to Farid's Sufi Islam, thesepeasants and plebeians were extending their hands towards their ownfreedom. Farid's Islam was Islam in its revolutionary purity. It wasantithetical to everything that the official Islam of the times did and stoodfor in society. All religions ultimately come to the practical conduct ofman in society, in other words, the value pattern. The value patterngiven by the new heretical religion of the bhakta, the Sufi and the SikhGurus, cuts across everything that the established religions stood for, andall in the name of God.Its concept of what was right and what was wrong and in the modeof distribution of the means of life, what was lawful (halal) and what wassinful (haram) was in direct contradiction to the practice in society.Farid, Kabir and other Hindu bhaktas are an integral part of the AdiGranth, because like the Sikh Gurus, they all stand for revolution againstthe domination of maya (money, property) over man. In other words,they all stand for the freedom of man. It is this tradition of Islam thatWarris Shah inherits, and it is Farid's Sufism to which he owes hisallegiance.In order to understand Warris Shah and other religious poets expou-nding this heretical religion, we have to clearly understand the differen-ce between a slave and a free man. When mayadominates man, the goalof man's life in society becomes the acquisition of wealth. When lure ofmoney and property becomes his motive force, he is bound to becomeselfish and greedy. He tries to use each man who comes his way to hisown advantage. He regards other men as competitors, and hence hostileto himself in the pursuit of wealth. Since the goal is amassing privatewealth, the nature of his work becomes egoistic.I have produced for myself and not for you, as you have produced for

yourself and not for me. The result of my production has, in and ofitself, just as little direct relation to you as the result of your produc-tion has to me, i. e, our production is (not) production of people, forpeople, as people, i. e, not social production. As human beings thus,none of us has a relationship of gratification to the product of theother. Our mutual production has no existence for us as people. Ourexchange can therefore also not be the mediating movement wherein

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SOCIAL SCIENTISTit is acknowledged that my product is for you, at the same time as itis a materialisation of your being, your needs. For not the humanessence is the bond of our production for each other.5Man ceases to be human. He becomes wolfish. The point to be

grasped is that it is the domination of man by money which makes himselfish and greedy. In other words, a man who is selfish and greedy andthe like is a slave. On the one hand, selfishness and greed are the outcomeof the slavery of man and on the other hand, the more one is guided byselfishness and greed the stronger become the chains of his slavery. Whenman has broken the bondage of money he ceases to be egoistic. Hiswork becomes social.With the work becoming social, man and his society become trulyhuman. Other men appear before man as complements of his being, ascollaborators in common in human purpose as "himself once more".Each man recognises himself as a universal, social being. When man getsfree from the domination of money and becomes social, there is no soilleft in his mind for selfishness and greed. Instead love pervades every

aspect of his life. So a man is free only when he is motivated by love forall. Love alone is the expression of freedom.When man becomes a slave, along with the other aspects of hisnature, his sexual passion also gets perverted and degraded. It becomesworse than animal lust. Women to him then become mere chattel-objects for the satisfaction of his lust. Gurbanimakes a very clear distin-ction between the sexual passion of a slave and the genuine sexual love ofa free man. It calls the former carnal lust, kaam,and declares it a deadlysin. To the latter alone it gives the name 'love'. The carnal lust of theslave is declared a deadly sin not only because it is the expression of theslavery of man, not only because the more man indulges in it the worsea slave he becomes, but also because it is a strong bulwark for the systemof mayawhere man is bound to remain a slave. Unless man's nature ispurified and man is absolved of this carnal passion, he cannot be freehimself and cannot be a fighter for human freedom and salvation.Sexual love in the human sense of the word is the attribute of a free manonly. In the state of freedom alone, it mediates between man and womanfor their mutual self-fulfilment. In the language of Warris Shah thisalone is ishk (love). To become an aashik (lover) according to WarrisShah is to attain the status of pir--the delivered man.6

The story that Warris Shah takes up is known to every one in thePunjab. A handsome boy of a landowner's family, named Dhedo Ranjhacomes face to face with an outstandingly beautiful girl of an aristocraticfamily named Heer. They fall in love with each other. Heer managesto get Ranjha appointed a cowherd to look after her father's buffaloes.This position Ranjha very willingly accepts. The lovers keep on meeting onthe riverside when the buffaloes go for grazing. A time comes when Heerrequests her parents to give her in marriage to Ranjha. Under theinfluence of the values of the society, the marriage is refused on the

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ground that an aristocrat's daughter cannot be married to a cowherd-amenial gola. Heer is married to Saida. From her father-in-law's houseHeer runs away with Ranjha with the help of her sister-in-law Sahti.The runaway lovers are caught, and in an attempt to get legally married,Heer is poisoned by her parents; and Ranjha dies because for him life isnot possible without her.This story shows a conflict between two modes of existence-anantagonism between two systems of society, a head-on-clash between twocivilisations: one which is in existence and the other which is strugglingto be born. To be more exact, this story brings out the clash betweenthe social system of maya where money rules and man is its slave on theone hand and free society on the other, in which man will be restored tohis true position and will become master of the means of existence and thusattain his true humanity. How the story is told and with which side ofthe conflict the reader is made to sympathise, depends upon the valuepattern of the poet. Consciously or otherwise, when he once accepts thestandpoint of either of the two systems, the rest follows logically. Sup-pose he is steeped in the value pattern of the established order, he willnaturally make the reader feel that Heer is a fallen woman, and by havingillicit relations with the servant of the household, she is bringing thesocial position and prestige of her father to dust. And finally by runningaway with him out of the wedlock, she conclusively proves that she iswithout all moral sense. In that case Sahti would be doubly immoral.She would be faithless to her father and brother and the familyhonour, and a go-between in favour of an illicit relationship. Kaido inthat case would be virtue incarnate and the custodian of the moral valuesof the established society, winning the greatest reverence of the reader.The story, as it is now, takes completely the opposite stance, vindicatingthe lovers, in other words upholding the values of the freedom of man.The story is not the creation of Warris Shah and for that matternot the creation of any poet. The basic human facts were real happeningsbut the whole stance towards those facts was the creation of the popularimagination. In the Punjab, the peasant-plebeians of that epoch were ques-tioning the established order from the plebeian point of view, that is, fromthe point of view of man's freedom from the fetters of maya.The spearheadof this plebeian consciousness was so strong that it had expressed itselfin the form of a religion rival to the established one. It was emerging inthe form of a strong movement which was fast institutionalising itself.In the times of Warris Shah, the peasant plebeians were in armed revoltagainst the state. People's imagination not only determined thegeneral stance but shaped the story in its entirety, crystallising the conflic-ting parties with their class values, and chiselling out the moral contoursof each character and defining his exact position. The story as is shaped,not only upheld the lovers, but also sanctified ishk(love), giving it theconcrete content of human freedom, thus making the lovers tragic heroes,representatives of the new order. Ishk(love) stands four square against

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SOCIAL SCIENTISTthe yardstick of money, property and status created by property. Hav-ing overcome its perversion and degradation at the hands of private proper-ty the sexual sentiment shines out in its pristine glory and human purity.It has become the bond uniting a free man and a free woman. As it canarise only among the people who have shattered the bonds of maya, itbecomes a revolutionary sentiment against the established social set up.Kaido becomes the active villain against the union of the lovers. In thisrole he is so fixed in the popular imagination, that he is a contemporaryof every generation and stands as poison to everything that is human.This story shaped by the popular imagination almost became anational legend of the Punjab in that epoch. It became an ideologicalweapon in the hands of people to put across their world view, their pat-tern of values, their view of man-woman relationship; in short, it becamea vehicle for the expression of their revolution. As if compelled by apower beyond him, for many generations, poet after poet kept on express-ing his experience of the social reality through this story. It shows thestrength of the revolutionary movement of the times that there is not asingle poet who goes against the popular imagination to excite sympathyof the reader towards the parents of Heer or to evoke an iota of respect formarriage of Heer with Saida. In the rendering of every poet, this marri-age evokes nothing but contempt. This is indicative of the attitude ofthe revolting peasant-plebeians towards the institutions held sacred by theexisting set-up. Unresponsive and blind to the intentions of all the poetswho have rendered this story, only Karam Singh, a historian, has thetemerity to categorise Heer and Ranjha as fallen and depraved youngpeople. In that period in the Punjab, not only this story but other ishk(love) stories, and not all of them of native origin, caught the imaginationof the people. Parallel with their heretical religion, these stories becamethe vehicles or medium for the expression of their revolutionary cultureand also the popular means for their cultural training. The strength ofthe revolutionary movement of the times is further confirmed by the factthat the rendering of the ishkstories gave birth to a new art form-thekissa (epic) in the Punjabi literature. It is noteworthy that it was thefirst attempt on the part of the people of the Punjab to give expression totheir revolutionary experience of life in secular form, in spite of the factthat the mode of consciousness of the society then was predominantlyreligious.Warris Shah was an enlightened man. By birth he belonged tothe ruling classes. He was a 'Saiyad'. His ideological conversion to theplebeian cause was complete. He was a true Sufi in the tradition ofFarid. His imagination imbibed Heer's ishk completely. He knewabsolutely clearly the human content of the aashik (lover), and forthat matter that of the Sufi. Since he knew this he was well aware ofthe degraded, perverted and deadly nature of his antagonist. Thus hedepicted the peasant-plebeian revolution of his times in a manner thathas made him immortal; and the language, the vigour, the sweep and the

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popular idiom of the work is unsurpassed in Punjabi literature.Warris Shah starts the story from a scene in Takhat Hazara. Theneed of the plot is simple. Ranjha must leave his village and take theroad toJhang Syal to meet his destiny. The departure of Ranjha fromhis village has a bearing upon the crux of the economic, domestic, socialand cultural life of the village in such a manner that the essence of thesocial system comes out alive before our eyes. In this system property domi-nates man completely and in obedience to its demands man is pervertedand degraded. Ranjha's father dies. The main property in the villageis land. After the death of the father the land has to be divided amongthe brothers. Overnight the blood brothers become thirsty of one an-other's blood. Each one wants to be a lone wolf. In this social systemthe reason for this wolfishness is cogent and obvious. Land is the stayof life. Whosoever gets the best land gets concrete advantage, not onlyfor his own lifetime, but for generations to come. Whosoever shows alittle generosity, brotherliness or humanity, suffers a deep disadvantage,the results of which will persist from generation to generation. Such aman may earn a temporary gratitude from his brothers but that will beat the cost of permanent curses from his descendants. In the situation itis obvious that nobody can afford to be generous and human, and nobodyremains human particularly when his wife is close by to whisper venominto his ears against his brothers. There is every temptation to use cun-ning, deceit and bribery to get the best and the maximum out of thedivision. It is a sort of free for all. Right in front of our eyes we seethat in obedience to the demands of property, brotherliness evaporates,humanity is discarded and selfishness and greed take full possession ofman. Obviously this is the law of this social life. Ranjha's brothers useevery weapon to their best advantage. The land that falls to his shareis barren, uncultivated and uncultivable. Disgusted, he decides to leavethe village of his birth. Having secured the land, the brothers are quickto realize the value of an extra arm bearer in every armed confrontationin the village. Besides, his departure would earn them a bad name. Theytry to prevail upon him not to go. When he has been robbed of his dueshare, the sisters-in-law have their own reason to make him stay. Beingthe youngest and the most handsome, he was to them a plaything andan object of romance, without incurring too much odium in the village.They too want him to stay, though when it suits them they taunt himsaying that he is the cause of their disrepute. Incidentally, the sceneshows the stuff of which the kazi and the headman of the village, who aresupposed to be doling out justice, are made of. Bribe is a potent weaponand money makes the mare go.On his way to Jhang, Ranjha spends a night in a mosque. Thisgives an opportunity to Warris Shah to highlight the degradation andcorruption of the official religious institution and its incumbent. On theriverside he wins over Luddon and his wives with his beauty and song,and thus lies down in the pleasure-boat of Heer to rest a while. In the

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SOCIAL SCIENTISTstory Heer comes before us in two opposed roles. First as a member ofthe ruling class and then as a victim of the same ruling class. Intoxicatedby her youth and beauty and maddened by the rule of her father, shecares for nobody. She is the undisputed leader of her group. She brooksno opposition. Woe betide her serving man who fails to carry out herwhims. 'Luddon' is beaten mercilessly because he permitted a strangerto lie in her pleasure-boat and she comes with the same intention towardsRanjha. This typifies the relationship of the ruling class with the labour-ing people. Getting up, Ranjha looks at Heer and greets her with love-laden words "O Friend". Heer smiles and becomes kind. They fall inlove with each other at the very first sight. The ishk (love) that has madethem one has also completely transformed them as human beings. It haspurified their hearts of all the dirt that the established order and theirclass position in it had put into them. The moment ishk has pervadedtheir heart, no place has been left there for selfishness, greed, lust and thelike, and for that matter, for any values of that social set-up. In theMarxian language both of them have been "declassed". They have goneover to the revolutionary standpoint against the society of their birth.Heer gets Ranjha appointed as the cowherd for her father's cattle. Thiswas a profession of the lowest menial in that society. Ranjha accepts theposition willingly. He neither goes back from it nor ever regrets thedecision. He has become a plebeian in thought and deed. The trans-formed Heer has taken this decision and it never crosses her mind thatfor Ranjha to work as a menial is derogatory either to herself or to him.A ruling class man can become a highway robber, a smuggler or a de-bauch of the worst order, and he does not lose his caste. He is stillacceptable to his class. But let him once take up a menial profession andwork in it, he can never claim the kinship of his class again. He isdoomed for ever. Like every ruling class, the aristocrats ofJhang takethe same view. They regard Ranjha as a serving man (gola) and theywould not give their daughter in marriage to him. This, to them, is de-grading.The real point in the battle of love, the crucial thing in the creationof Warris Shah, is the transformation in the lovers brought about by theirlove. Ranjha, the son of a headman, Mauju, has whole-heartedly ac-cepted the position of a cowherd. From now on, the status-conscious-ness has vanished from his mind, leaving no trace behind. Heer haschanged beyond recognition. Heer who at one time was intoxicatedby the rule and status of her father has come to the standpoint of a revolt-ing plebeian. The value patern of the system of society, in which shewas born, has been washed off from her mind. She knows that, accord-ing to the code of honour of that system, her enjoying the embraces andkisses with Ranjha before marriage is scandalous. To the aristocracy herlove relationship with a servant is downright degrading. It is humiliatingto the extent that it would be impossible for the father and the brothersto hold their heads high in public after this shame. It was such a dis-

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honour that its ill effects would go down for generations. By this act ofhers the spotless record of the family honour, as prevalent in that system,stands besmirched. But to Heer all this code of honour and its conse-quences are of no significance. She holds the whole code of such honourin utter contempt. She is not stealing a few kisses with somebody till themarriage takes place with the appointed man. Her commitment to herlove with Ranjha is total. She is steeled in the value of ishkand regardsit as the highest morality and the only morality. It is with the innerconviction that her love for Ranjha is sacred and the only love accept-able to God that she boldly approaches her father for her marriage withher beloved.Heer's transformed self stands chiselled out in her confrontationwith the kazi at the time of her forced marriage with Saida. The moralcontours of her personality shine forth very clearly in her ideologicalclash with him. The ideological battle between the kazi and Heer is aclash between two mutually contradictory patterns of values. The kazistands for the feudal set-up of the times and Heer epitomises the revolu-tionary plebeian. Warris Shah explicitly claims that his poetry is theexpression of the essence of Koran.7 It brings out its essential meaning.It means that Heer embodies the Sufi stand. In the religious termino-logy it is a clash between the official Islam, kazi-ismand Sufism.The point at issue is, whether Saida or Ranjha is the lawful husbandof Heer. Since it is a battle between two mutually contradictory conceptsof what is right and moral, both sides are absolutely clear about theverdict. There is no question of any kind of compromise between thetwo parties. If property and the status given by it are the yardsticks,the obvious choice is Saida. It is according to the current coin that theparents of Heer and the headmen have made that choice. In that societyit was unthinkable for the girl to have any say in the matter.8 The kaziwould put his seal on the choice made by the parents. The kazi makesappeals to the property and status, which he thinks may still prevail onHeer. He advises her not tojump into the mud. By mud he means unionwith Ranjha, the cowherd. He appeals to her not to unite silks with coarsecloth, not to bind the costly shawls with the rough blanket. The symbolsused and the advice given leave no boubt about the yardstick of the kazi.The apparently sane path shown by the kazi is the same which thepropertied classes always show to their erring children in such situations,and it is well expressed in the Punjabi saying that "the brick of the topstorey must not be brought down for the construction of the dirty ditch."To attain his objective, the kazi uses every weapon that the armoury ofhis religion provides him with. Of course Heer and her Sufism have acounter weapon for every one used by him. Kazi uses the authority of Godand says that it is ordained by God that the daughters must obey their

parents. He brings in the Code and demands submission to it. Hethreatens that those who disobey the Code shall burn in hell-fire.Of course he interprets the Code himself. He appeals to her common-

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mous and self-determined. She tells the kazi that she will obey no oneelse but herself. She herself is her ishk. Her ishkalone governs her. Thisis the human moral transformation that has taken place in her. Thistransformation has given her personality and character. This has madeher a free woman. She has attained her personality and character justbecause of her ishk. Only when her sexual passion has ceased to be lust,only when her heart has been absolved of selfishness, greed and the like,only when this sexual passion has been humanised and when it has becomea human passion has she acquired her will and become free. Thiswill is human because its content is love. It is the expression of love. Soher being human and being free is one and the same thing or, in otherwords, the sexual passion between a free woman and a free man alone isishk. The rest is all lust. So long as property dominates men andwomen their sexual passion is also under its domination and it is not free.Sexual passion dominated by property is lust. Lust is the bosom friendof selfishness, greed, falsehood and sins of all sorts. Only when thesexual passion is free from the domination of property can it be realhuman love. The ishk in Heer's breast has torn asunder the bonds ofproperty from all around her. In that society caste was class deter-mined on the basis of birth. The institution was the creation of the ruleof mayaover man in the specific conditions of the Indian society. Highercastes meant an unearned status of the individual born in them. Just asHeer has no lure of domain left, similarly the high caste has lost all mean-ing for her. When she is finally being taken away by the kherasas athief takes away the stolen goods, she advises Ranjha to do away withcaste and become ayogi (a wandering sage) and meet her, for she knowsthat she herself will not be able to come back to him. This absolution ofHeer from the sense of possession of domains, the caste, the status and thelike is real transformation in her as a human being. With ishkan entire-ly new kind of Heer has emerged. In order to understand Warris Shah,this human moral transformation of Heer and its significance has to beunderstood.The significance of this human moral transformation is far-reaching.To be more exact, this transformation has a revolutionary significance.Warris Shah and his lovers are quite aware of its full content and itsimplications. When Heer has been forcibly yoked with Saida, she tellsRanjha that all is over between them for the time being. Ranjha in away taunts her by saying that one should not disturb the sleeping cobrasif one does not know how to manage even a honey bee. Ranjha is wellaware that the transformation brought about by love in a human beingis for the established order "a serpent's egg, which, hatched would, as hiskind, grow mischievous". The only course for the established socialsystem is to "kill it in the shell". When the sisters-in-law of Ranjhacome to know that he has failed to get Heer and that she has beenmarried to Saida, they advise him that all is over as far as his gettingHeer is concerned. He should therefore return home. In his answer to

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SOCIAL SCIENTISTthem, Ranjha shows the irrevocable nature of his ishk. He tells themthat sooner or later, ultimately he has to go to those who know him andhis condition, thereby meaning that all is not over in his efforts to getHeer. He will either get her or die in the attempt. He shows his com-plete understanding of ishk and the price that one has to pay for it inthat system of society. He declares that only those run away from it whoare the sons of the unworthy. Heer affirms the same thing in the theolo-gical language. She tells the kazi that those who have been warmed withthe warmth of ishk,need fear no hell-fire.From the poetic and metaphorical language, if one were to comedown to simple prose one would say that only completely humanisedsexual passion is ishk. The meaning of its being humanised is that it hasceased to be an object of sale. Humanised love can only be exchangedfor humanised love, as trust for trust. It alone is the means of mutualself-fulfilment of man and woman. It can only be the passion of ahuman being who is completely humanised and whose relation with thewhole world is a human one. Marx is very explicit about the centralsignificance of love between man and woman as the immediate relation-ship of a human being to a human being. This love of a human beingis a measure of his relationship with entire life. Marx writes,In the relationship with woman, as the prey and the handmaid of com-munal lust, is expressed the infinite degradation in which man existsfor himself; for the secret of this relationship finds its unequivocal, in-contestable, open and revealed expression in the relation of man towoman and the way in which the direct, and natural species relation-ship is conceived. The immediate, natural and necessary relationshipof human being to human being is also the relation of man to woman.In this natural species relationship, man's relation to nature is directlyhis relation to man, and his relatlon to man is directly his relation tonature, to his own natural function. Thus, in this relation is sensuouslyrevealed, reduced to an observable fact, the extent to which humannature has become nature for man and to which nature has becomehuman nature for him. From this relationship man's whole level ofdevelopment can be assessed. It follows from the character of this

relationship how far man has become, and understood himself as, aspecies-being, a human being. The relation of man to woman is themost natural relation of human being to human being. It indicates,therefore, how far man's natural behaviour has become human, andhow far his human essence has become a natural essence for him, howfar his human nature has become nature for him. It also shows howfar man's needs have become human needs, and consequently how farthe other person, as a person, has become one of his needs, and towhat extent he is in his individual existence at the same time a socialbeing.'0In class society where property dominates man, and money ruleshim, man and woman, both are dehumanised. Like their total persons,

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their sexual passion is also dehumanised and has become lust. Everysystem of mayacreates this dehumanisation in man. It can keep itself inexistence on the basis of his dehumanisation only. Humanisation of manmeans his freedom, and his freedom is the end of every system of maya.There is always a deadly confrontation between any system of mayaonone side and anything that makes man human on the other. Ishkis some-thing which no system of mayacan brook.When property dominates man, like everything else, work is alsodehumanised. It becomes slave labour. In the system of mayawomanis the lowest kind of slave. In the case of male only his labour power ison sale or he is on sale for his labour power only. But in the caseof

woman, along with this, her sex also is on sale. She is exploited for hersex also. Freedom of women means freedom of all, which means a freesociety-which means brotherhood of man.Ishkhas humanised Heer and Ranjha and made them free. It hasmade them richer, nobler and greater people than they were before. Ithas made them heroes. The system cannot assimilate them. Althoughthe system is powerful, it has no power to wean them away from ishkwhich has become their very existence. It cannot cow them down. Itcan only kill them and that it ultimately does. But in their death theyare greater than the system which kills them and more glorious.Sahti is the Heer in kheras. Ishkhas delivered her from the fetters ofmaya. She understands the significance of ishkin her own practice. Shehas no illusions about the morality of the system in which she is born. Sheholds its values in utter contempt. To her Heer belongs to Ranjha. Herblood-brother Saida is only a usurper. She helps Ranjha to meet Heerand all three of them plan together to run away. She has the resourceful-ness and energy of the revolutionary. Whatever the situation she is neverfound wanting. She is as much experienced in the practice of ishkas sheis firm about its moral validity. She is unbeatable in putting across thetruth of ishk. She is lesser than Heer only because the rendering of thetheme demands it so.

Kaido embodies in himself the essence of the established order. Heis evil incarnate. Every fibre of his being, every impulse in him, is anti-human. He is recognised as a trouble-maker even by the headmen, whoform an active part of the system. In the normal course of things thesystem can afford a few human frills. At least it can make a show ofthem. Choochak does not like Kaido. He has no heart to encouragehim. But when the crisis comes, it cannot permit the luxury of keepingthe moral frills. The system appears in its stark reality. The detestedKaido becomes its undisputed leader and lawgiver. On the other side,whatever dross of illusion was left in the lovers, the crises purge them ofit. They arise in their pristine purity and glory as they meet theirdeaths.Warris Shah is great because like Farid he is a true Sufi. Being atrue Sufi he understands that selfishness, greed and the like are deadly

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SOCIAL SCIENTISTsins. On the one hand they dehumanise life and on the other they arethemselves the product of the dehumanised life. In spite of the idealismof his faith he imbibed the peasant plebeian revolution of his times, inits full depth, in its human purity and in its true grandeur. He acceptedin its entirety what the people's imagination gave him in full measure.He saw the social reality of his time from the point of view of the revolt-ing plebeian, that is, from the point of view of human freedom. He ex-perienced the humanising effect of the revolution in his very bones. Inspite of his religious faith, he depicted the revolution in a secular form,in the form of humanised love of two young people in full confrontationwith the established order. He understood the revolution so well that hegrasped its antithesis-the evil essence of that social system in its starkreality and rendered it in the human shapes of the kazi and Kaido. Hehas such a firm grasp of the life of his times, that each character thatappears in his creation is every inch alive. The characters come alivebecause each has its roots firm in social reality.

K Marx and F Engels, The German Ideology, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1968,p 38.2 K Marx and F Engels, quoted in E Kamenka, Marxismand Ethics, p 39.8 F Engels, Anti-Duhring,Moscow 1962, p 131.4 Maya is often confused with illusion. It is the daughter of the sea goddess (thegoddess of wealth) in Hindu mythology. It is acquisitiveness and greed whichmake a man blind to all refined things in life.5 K Marx and F Engels, quoted in Erich Fromm (ed), Socialist Humanism,AllenLane, London, 1967, p 246.6 WarrisShah: Heer Warris, Bhasha Vibhag, Punjab, p 1.

7 Ibid., p 69.a Ibid., p 68.o Ibid.0 Quoted in Erich Fromm, Marx's Concept f Man, Frederick Unger Publishing Co,New York, 1969, p 81.

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