L - Gurmat Veechar

communalism and the Partition of the country would not have
taken place. In that case, we would have remained Punjabis in
the same way as Ranjit Singh had left us. But alas! With our
modern education, everything got changed, so much so that
today there are either Hindus or Muslims or the Sikhs in Punjab
but no Punjabis. Perhaps through the modern educational
process we have learnt less and unlearnt more. At least we have
unlearnt the virtue of being truly civilized which means true,
sensitive and tolerant human beings, wedded to a higher Punjabi
sense of solidarity and togetherness.
VII.
A brief discussion of the imagery used by Shah Mohammed
is perhaps called for. The metaphors and similes used by Shah
Mohammed are patently Indian, if not Hindu. These figures of
speech are used by poets to compress aeons of experience in
a few words. These bring before the readers' eyes a whole drama
being enacted or an entire episode being narrated just in one
word. The storehouse of such allusions inevitably are the Indian
classics like the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Normally, a
high-born Muslim, connected with the Qureshi clan of Arabia,
Shah Mohammed, would have used those figures of speech from
the Islamic sources which means the Persian and Arabic classics.
But that is not the way Shah Mohammed goes about his task.
He had no use for bamboozling the reader or his listener
with his Himalayan scholarship or the knowledge of foreign
languages. He, therefore, talks in the idiom of the people so that
the import of his usage becomes instantly clear. It is such things
only which underline the rootedness of the poet to the soil which
has nurtured him. However, it is difficult to imagine that an
Indian Muslim could have become so much Indianised or, more
correctly speaking, indigenised himself to this extent that almost
all his metaphors and similes are taken from local sources. Well,
it does not happen even today when there is so much of lip
sympathy for the local idiom. And anybody who achieves it can
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