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