L - Gurmat Veechar

perceptive man, grasping as it were, the subtlest nuances of
things as they happened. In short, he is a remarkable kind of
a poet and a historian. In an utterly terse and tell-tale manner,
he tells us all what happened after the death of Sarkar as Ranjit
Singh was lovingly called by his subjects. The events happened
with such rapidity that none other than an extremely gifted poet
could have grasped them all. A curse of sorts seems to have
operated in the Punjab, leading each one of the grandees to their
doom, leaving the Lahore Darbar almost wholly orphaned in a
matter of half a dozen years. There is a sense of divine wrath
and dramatic irony in the enveloping tragedy. That the level of
the poet's sensibility could have risen in the same proportion
is something that cannot be overlooked. Without some such
process occurring, such a good, historically valid and evocative
poem could not have been written.
It is almost a filmic, yet truthful and sensitive account that
unfolds reel after reel in the form of a documentary which can
be remembered and sung with great effect before different
audiences by the itinerant singers of Punjab called dhadies. Our
poet is a man of great empathy and is able to bring on record
what no ordinary poet would have grasped, much less recorded.
Above all, he is so much of a Punjabi patriot that he is not
influenced by how the new rulers would react to his description.
. Another important fact which also needs to be mentioned
right at the outset is that while Shah Mohammed is a high-born
Muslim, Ranjit Singh hailed from the peasant stock and became
the ruler ofPunjab after welding numerous principalities together
into a kingdom, only about half a century earlier. And this
happened after eight long centuries of Islamic rule in India. But
then Shah Mohammed is wholly secular, with not a trace of
communal thinking in his mind. He blames only those who need
to be blamed and praises where praise is due, without any
distinction of caste and creed. In short, he is a picture of what
an Indian Muslim should be in order to weld India into a strong,
homogeneous society.
He is particularly relevant to the trifurcated Punjabi society
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