A large amount of what is known about Bulleh Shah (1680-1757) comes through legends, and is subjective, together with some biographical detail deduced from his writings. He is believed to have been born and brought up in the part of the Punjab now in Pakistan. This Punjabi Sufi-poet believed that the path of spiritual realization was open to all, beyond the formal religions:
There is no Hindu, there is no Muslim, Let us abandon our pride and sit together like young girls at their spinning wheels I am neither Sunni nor Shi’ah. I’ve chosen the path of the lineage of peace.
Bullhe Shah, like other Sufis of his time, maintained contacts with yogis, as this verse shows:
Ranjha [the Lord] hath come as a Yogi It is wonderful, Ranjha hath come as a yogi. The eyes of this Yogi, in wide sockets Plunge over the victims like falcons All the sorrows end when He comes in sight My eyes have realised the dearest Lord. What is the sign of this Yogi? He has rings in his ears and the coloured string around his neck. … I shall serve him with all my heart.
Bulleh Shah attempted in his poetry and writings to provide commentary understandable by the ordinary people on the complex problems of the world around him, especially the turbulence that the Punjab was passing through during his lifetime. Many of his poems have been set to music in the 20th century and sung by renowed Sufi singers such as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Abida Parveen. In the 1990s several of Bulleh Shah’s poems were performed by the Pakistani rock band, Junoon. In 2004 Rabbi Shergill turned the poem ‘Bullah Ki Jaana’ into a rock/fusion song that became popular in India and Pakistan. Several of Bullah Shah’s verses have also been adapted and used in Bollywood film songs.
Bibliography
Shuja Alhaq, A forgotten vision (Selangor: Thinker’s
Library, 1995)
Surindar Singh Kohli, Bulhe Shah (New Delhi: Sahitya
Akademi, 1987)
C.F.Usborne, Bullah Shah: Sufi, mystic and poet of the
Panjab (1905; reprint: Lahore: Saadi Panjabi Academy,
1976)
Robin Rinehart, ‘The portable Bullhe Shah: biography,
categorization, and authorship in the study of Punjabi
Sufi poetry’ Numen 46(1), 1999:53-87
J.R.Puri and Tilaka Raja Shangari, Bulleh Shah (Punjab:
Radha Soami Satsang Beas, 1986)
Denis Matringe, ‘Krsnaite and Nath elements in the
poetry of the eighteenth-century Panjabi Sufi Bullhe
Shah’, in Devotional literature in South Asia: current
research, 1985-1988, edited by R.S.McGregor
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)
From John Noyce, Enlightened Sufis (lulu press, 2nd ed, 2020)
