Rumi Foundation brings out a ‘Sufi journal’ called Hu. This year two of my essays have been published in the journal. I am posting the first one on Bulleh Shah.

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If God was found by bathing and cleansing

He would have been found by frogs and fish

If God was found by wandering in the jungles

Stray animals would have found him

O Bulleh, the Lord can only be found

By loving hearts – true and pure…

(Translation by author)

Fifteenth century India witnessed a spiritual-cultural synthesis that was navigated by hundreds of yogis, Sufis and poets of India. Very much a people’s mobilisation, the Bhakti movement articulated a powerful vision of tolerance, amity and co-existence that is still relevant today. The powerful and soulful voices of Sufi poets of the sixteenth century therefore sing a shared tune: of love, rejection of formal identities based on caste, organized religion and class.

Bulleh Shah (1680-1758) of Kasur in Central Punjab is an extraordinary voice that provided a mystical message beyond caste, institutionalized religion and ideologies of power. Born in 1860 and named Abdullah Shah in a Syed family, he found a Murshid (spiritual master) in Shah Inayat who was an Arain (traditionally a non-landowning group). Bulleh’s family disowned him for trampling his caste and therefore identity in the rural context. However, Bulleh Shah, driven by Sufi ideals of equality of humans, rejected the formalized social identity framework based on hierarchies. The quest for knowledge, and the thirst for spiritual completion – what the masses perceive to be the domain of religion – was a pursuit beyond these divisive and hereditary conceptions of formal religion. When the orthodoxy declared him as an infidel, Bulleh replied: (more…)