On Waris Shah's Hīr
ਹਾਜੀ ਲੋਕ ਮੱਕੇ ਨੂੰ ਜਾਂਦੇ ਮੇਰਾ ਰਾਂਝਾ ਮਾਹੀ ਮੱਕਾ।—Pilgrims go to Mecca; my Mecca is my beloved Ranjha. (Bulleh Shah)
“When the lover has become the very substance of love, there is no longer any opposition between subject and object, between the lover and the beloved.” (Henry Corbin, 1971)
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Farina Mir (2010) notes that Ganesh Dass’s Char Bagh-i Punjab, a political history of Punjab written in 1849, took care to mention an account of Heer-Ranjha, arguably the most popular of Punjab’s many qissas, narrating the epic tragedy of two star-crossed lovers. Over centuries, the tale’s extraordinary intensity has colored the verses of Damodar Gulati, Shah Hussain, Bulleh Shah, Waris Shah, Guru Gobind Singh, Amrita Pritam, etc.— providing fertile grounds for inspiration and contemplation to mystics, poets, philosophers, romantics alike, accumulating rich spiritual and literary connotations with each iteration.
In the rich, shared cosmology that Punjab’s varied religious traditions draw from and contribute to, the qissa of Heer-Ranjha occupies a prominent place, shaping and informing the cultural and literary imagination(s) of Punjab. There is perhaps no better indication of its vital stature in the Punjabi consciousness than the fact that Udham Singh, the famed revolutionary, insisted during his trial that he would only take an oath on a copy of the epic romance.
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The physiognomy of true aristocracy
The description of the Ranjhas of Takhat Hazara in the opening verses of Waris Shah’s Heer expresses an ideal of youthful masculine beauty: ਛੈਲ ਗੱਭਰੂ, ਮਸਤ ਅਲਬੇਲੜੇ ਨੀ, ਸੁੰਦਰ ਹਿੱਕ ਥੀਂ ਹਿੱਕ ਸਵਾਇਆ ਏ ।—Beautiful young men, buoyant and rakish, with handsome faces and strong chests. Ranjha, in particular, embodies the Romantic ideal of beautiful, idle, aristocratic youth: the hedonistic, wasteful existence of the aesthete, destined for a life of indulgence, of innocent frivolities and playful philandering.
Even as a yogi, Ranjha’s exceptional beauty continues to enchant and transfix girls. When he visits the town of Rangpur as a yogi, the girls run home and inform their mothers of his looks: wild-eyed and intoxicated, eyes deep and bloodshot, as if whetted; eyebrows arching as if he were drunk, matted hair framing his face like dark clouds surround the moon, carried by an aura of sorrow.
They wonder at the whims of fate, which has consigned this handsome youth to mendicancy, ਸੋਇਨੇ ਵੰਨੜੀ ਦੇਹੀ ਨੂੰ ਖੇਹ ਕਰਕੇ—having turned his golden body to ash. “ਸੋਹਣਾ ਫੁਲ ਗੁਲਾਬ ਮਾਸ਼ੂਕ ਨੱਢਾ, ਰਾਜ ਪੁੱਤਰ ਤੇ ਸੁਘੜ ਸੁਜਾਨ ਹੈ ਨੀ,” they say: “Lovely as a rose-flower, this young man, [he has] the cultured visage of a prince.” Sahiti, Heer’s sister-in-law, too remarks on his distinguished looks, saying he seems to belong to some esteemed noble lineage, he whose beauty exceeds even Heer’s.
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Thus the text reveals a correspondence between beauty and vitality with nobility (and vice versa), the idea of true aristocracy rooted in health, grace and pleasing form. Ranjha’s person always-already carries a potent spiritual charge, a sublime physiognomy (physical as well as spiritual) that shines through his facade of mendicancy. Guru Arjan Sahib says, ਸੰਤ ਜਨਾ ਕਾ ਮੁਖੁ ਊਜਲੁ ਕੀਨਾ ॥—The faces of the saints [and their] fellows are always radiant.
A curious little detail, often lost in discussions, is how the buffaloes that Ranjha tended to refuse to graze after he leaves Jhang— bound to his flute-playing presence, they gradually die off, wandering away, killed by tigers. Early versions of the Heer tale also provide an account of Ranjha encountering and taming a lion with his divine flute-playing. His music even pleases and moves the five Pirs enough to consecrate his union with Heer.
This spiritual potency, always-already present, is only enhanced by Ranjha’s initiation as a yogi, developing miraculous healing powers: Sahiti, initially skeptical and hostile towards Ranjha, is overcome by awe upon witnessing him perform a miracle; she declares him a true saint— “ਪੀਰ ਸੱਚ ਦਾ ਅਸਾਂ ਤਹਿਕੀਕ ਕੀਤਾ”— and swears devotion to him.
This magical, magnetic, almost otherworldly admiration that Ranjha inspires from everyone establishes that he possesses divine attributes. This complements the fierce devotion he stirs up in Heer, who is like a devotee drawn to her object of worship, beckoned by “chimerical promises of romantic union… promising bliss but remaining ever-elusive” (Deol 1996)— the lover’s desired object, the devotee’s cherished god, Heer’s Mecca.
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Two forms of the same love
Waris Shah compares Heer falling in love with Ranjha with Taimus’s daughter (Zulaikha) falling in love with Yusuf upon beholding his beauty: ਰੂਪ ਜੱਟ ਦਾ ਵੇਖ ਕੇ ਜਾਗ ਲਧੀ, ਹੀਰ ਘੋਲ ਘੱਤੀ ਕੁਰਬਾਨ ਹੋਈ ।—Seeing the Jatt youth’s beauty, she was roused awake; Heer was consecrated as a sacrifice [to him].
This comparison employs a legend firmly entrenched in the Biblical and Islamic literary cosmos, immediately conveying the immensity of Heer’s infatuation with Ranjha. This analogy also occurs conspicuously in Ahmad Gujjar’s text, which compares Heer’s marriage to Saida with Zulaikha’s marraige to Aziz. Much like Yusuf, Ranjha is robbed of his lover, whom the text posits as his haqq, his right.
Indeed, the Heer texts in general weave notions of devotionality and possession into the romance: much like the cows and the gopis were enchanted by Krishna, so is Heer in thrall of the cowherd Ranjha; as the devotee belongs to and is subsumed by his god, so is Heer the mal (property) and haqq (right) of Ranjha. Jeevan Deol points to Ranjha’s elevation to the center of Heer’s devotional cosmos, placed alongside (mirroring, and so exchangeable with) the Prophet: “I will sit and read God’s word and busy myself with Ranjha.”
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In his work on Iranian sufism, Corbin (1971) eloquently writes about the sanctity of human love (as continuous with, rather than opposed to, divine love):
… human and divine love are by no means opposed to one another as a dilemma demanding that the mystic make a choice. They are two forms of the same love; passages in one and the same book which one must learn to read (with “eyes of light”). To pass from one to another does not consist in the transfer of love from one object to another, for God is not an object; God is the absolute Subject. To pass from one form of love to another implies the metamorphosis of the subject, of the ’āshiq.
Writing about love as the dominant subject and medium of Persian courtly poetry’s philosophical and metaphysical explorations, Julie Scott Meisami (1987) says:
. . . love itself, conceived of as that cosmic force that maintains harmony among the varied levels of creation, transcends interpersonal relationships to encompass the entire range of human experience. Love is the power that integrates macrocosm and microcosm; correspondingly, in romance the individual’s personal experience of love, his quest for fulfillment reflects at once his own moral qualities and his place in the larger order of things.
Nasir al-din al-Tusi said, “the true nature of Love is the quest for union with that thing with which the seeker conceives it perfection to be united.” The movement towards the Sun-door is driven by love. ਸਾਚੁ ਕਹੌ ਸੁਨ ਲੇਹੁ ਸਭੈ ਜਿਨ ਪ੍ਰੇਮ ਕੀਓ ਤਿਨ ਹੀ ਪ੍ਰਭੁ ਪਾਇਓ ॥—I speak the truth, listen here O everyone: only he who is absorbed in love finds Prabhu. Within the poetic cosmos of Waris Shah’s text, the urgency and purity that drives Heer and Ranjha’s love effects a spiritual metamorphosis: it is the mystical mirror in which they perceive God’ radiance, the vehicle that carries and unites them with God, not as individuals, but as ‘the living flame of love.’ (Corbin) Unity in God, then, is not in contradiction to, but simply the apotheosis of the love Heer and Ranjha harbor amongst themselves.
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Aulakh’s analysis (1979) of Mirza-Sahiban approaches the protagonists as ‘heavenly beings’ and ‘ideal characters endowed with the qualities which make them super-humans,’ and concludes that the narratives refuse to interrogate existing societal codes, instead pursuing a literary structure consisting of conceptual oppositions and correspondences, in service of what Deol calls “an apotheosised union in which life and death lose all distinction.”
This privileging of death creates a parallel between the marriage procession and the war-march and a narrative trajectory in which the heroism of the stoic lovers elevates them to the status of mystics.
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Vir Singh Bal's qissa ‘Ranjhe Hir ka prem’ (1837) draws upon the Puranic metanarrative presented in the Dasam Granth. In the ninety-eighth tale of the Charitropakhyan, Heer and Ranjha are refashioned as incarnations of divinities— in other words, as ‘heavenly beings’ and ‘ideal characters.’ The charitar places the tale within the Dasam Grantha’s syncretic cosmos, elegantly fusing popular, Islamic and Puranic elements.
The beautiful apsara Menaka is born as Heer, doomed to roam the world until she is liberated by the god-king Indra, who will assume the form of Ranjha. Girls are entranced by Ranjha’s beauty, chanting his name like a devotee chants the name of his Lord. The dazzling spell his looks cast on women recalls Krishna’s congress with the gopis. Krishna and Ranjha’s position as cowherds reiterates their shared grounds in devotional terms.
Heer, too, falls in love with this charmed youth, ਰਾਂਝਨ ਹੀ ਕੇ ਰੂਪ ਵਹ ਭਈ ॥ ਜ੍ਯੋ ਮਿਲਿ ਬੂੰਦਿ ਬਾਰਿ ਮੋ ਗਈ ॥—She was immersed in Ranjha’s form thoroughly, like a drop of water merges with water. The tale concludes with Ranjha taking Heer and departing for the realm of the gods, where they are transformed into the god-king Indra and the celestial maiden Menaka. Interestingly, Ahmad Gujjar, concluding his version, wrote: “God made Ranjha a pure martyr (shahid) and Hir joined the ranks of the huris.”
Reinhart (2019) notes this charitar is one of the few that doesn’t pontificate on the guiles of women, instead emphasizing the deeply devotional love of Waris Shah's Heer: “ਰਾਂਝਨ ਰਾਂਝਨ ਸਦਾ ਉਚਾਰੈ॥— ‘Ranjha, Ranjha’ she chants constantly.” The lover, one can say, intuits the nature of worship.
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These examples maintain what Deol sees as the mystical hierarchy established between Heer and Ranjha, mirroring that of the devotee and his cherished god, the lover and his object of desire, the pilgrim and the holy city, the celestial maiden and the martyr she is destined to serve.
When the two first meet, Ranjha asks of Heer: ਸਾਡੇ ਨਾਲ ਜੇ ਤੋੜ ਨਿਬਾਹੁਣੀ ਏਂ, ਸੱਚਾ ਦੇਹ ਖਾਂ ਕੌਲ ਕਰਾਰ ਹੀਰੇ ।—If you wish to fulfil [this love] to the end, then give me a vow sworn in truth, O Heer. Heer is essentially initiated into the tariqa of Ranjha’s love, taking a vow of devotion to her guide, her shaykh. He becomes for her what Corbin calls ‘the mirror to God.’ Deol: “if Ranjha is (analogically at least) a pir who shares certain qualities with the prophets, it is only right that Hir adopt a certain attitude of formalised devotion towards him.”
Medieval mystical poetry in the Indian subcontinent, ranging from Amir Khusro to the bhakti poets to the Guru Granth Sahib, frequently compares the ardent devotee/seeker with the bride, who restlessly awaits her beloved’s arrival, yearns to be united with him in carnal and spiritual ecstasy. Shah Hussain writes:
ਮਾਹੀ ਮਾਹੀ ਕੂਕਦੀ, ਮੈਂ ਆਪੇ ਰਾਂਝਣ ਹੋਈ ।ਰਹਾਉ।—Calling upon [the name of] the beloved, the beloved, I myself have become Ranjhan.
ਰਾਂਝਣੁ ਰਾਂਝਣੁ ਮੈਨੂੰ ਸਭ ਕੋਈ ਆਖੋ, ਹੀਰ ਨ ਆਖੋ ਕੋਈ ।—Everyone ought to call me Ranjhan, Ranjhan; no one will call me Heer.
When Heer pledges her love (indeed, her head, her very life) to Ranjha, she says: ਪਾਸਾ ਜਾਨ ਦਾ ਸੀਸ ਦੀ ਲਾਈ ਬਾਜ਼ੀ, ਤੁਸਾਂ ਜਿੱਤਿਆ ਤੇ ਅਸਾਂ ਹਾਰਿਆਂ ਈ ।— On life’s dice I have staked my head; you have won and I have lost. Guru Nanak invites his beloved Sikhs: ਜਉ ਤਉ ਪ੍ਰੇਮ ਖੇਲਣ ਕਾ ਚਾਉ॥ ਸਿਰੁ ਧਰਿ ਤਲੀ ਗਲੀ ਮੇਰੀ ਆਉ॥— If you desire to play this game of love; with your head on your palm, step into my lane.
Gill (2003), commenting on the text’s invocation, says that “Waris had existentially situated the ideological context of his narrative in the very beginning with an invocation to God, the first lover, the ashaq, and the Prophet the first beloved, the mashuq.”
In the vortex of love, the lovers experience celestial correspondences: becoming to each other shaahid, theophanic witness, shaykh or guide; master and slave revealing the Divine. “Ranjha is her love, her religion, her faith”; this is why, in Heer’s heart, Ranjha finds a place next to the Prophet.
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On the nature of piety
Upon discovering her illicit romance, Heer’s parents arrange for her to be married into the Khera’s household in Rangpur, and the local qazi arrives to give Heer counsel.
An argument ensues, where Heer contrasts the qazi’s emphasis on socially sanctioned conduct with the faith that informs her mystical bond with Ranjha; to forsake this bond would be a grievous sin:
ਅਸਾਂ ਓਸ ਦੇ ਨਾਲ ਚਾ ਕੌਲ ਕੀਤਾ, ਲਬੇ-ਗੋਰ ਦੇ ਤੀਕ ਨਿਬਾਹੁਣੀ ਹੈ ।—I have vowed myself to him; I shall keep my word until I reach my grave.
ਅੰਤ ਰਾਂਝੇ ਨੂੰ ਹੀਰ ਪਰਨਾ ਦੇਣੀ, ਕੋਈ ਰੋਜ਼ ਦੀ ਇਹ ਪ੍ਰਾਹੁਣੀ ਹੈ ।—At the end of days, Heer will be married to [unite with, merge with] Ranjha; for a mere few days is she a visitor [in this world].
Her dedication to Ranjha is in accordance with the advice of the five Pirs: “ਨਾਹੀਂ ਇਸ਼ਕ ਨੂੰ ਲੀਕ ਲਗਾਵਣਾ ਈ ।—Let nothing ever blemish [your] love”— also, “ਜ਼ਰਾ ਜਿਉ ਨੂੰ ਨਹੀਂ ਵਲਾਵਣਾ ਈ ।—Never deviate from your deed for even a moment,” the deed being her love for Ranjha.
Thus blessed by the five Pirs, their love is elevated to a profoundly mystical condition. Now that their union has been sanctioned by the divine saints themselves, what weight does the worldly jurisprudence of the qazi hold for Heer? The lovers are akin to ਜਿਨ੍ਹਾਂ ਨਾਮ ਮਹਿਬੂਬ ਦਾ ਵਿਰਦ ਕੀਤਾ—they who contemplate their lover’s name: dhikr, japa.
And yet, she takes care to qualify her transcendental love within the frame of correct religious conduct. The poet Na’at’s treatment of Heer’s argument with the qazi (published 1880) foregrounds the question of what constitutes the nature of piety. Heer circumvents the qazi’s insistence on the intimately twined notions of filial honor and duty as well as socially conditioned religious mores, instead arguing that her faithfulness to Ranjha is truer to the spirit of Islam.
Writing about Ahmed Gujjar’s version of the tale, Deol notes:
Hir claims that her marriage to Ranjha was sanctioned by God at the beginning of creation… the demands of ideology begin to seem immoral and the sharia a compromised tool of that ideology: after all his books and omens show him that Hir and Ranjha have been married by God, the qazi still “makes a ruling with his mouth but regrets it in his heart” (38).
Co-opting the lexicon of Islamic jurisprudence, she declares, “Everyday like a slave I take Ranjha’s name, without him, oh qazi, to eat or drink would be forbidden [haram],” blending her devotion to Ranjha with devotion to God, and framing this conduct in terms of what is halal (sanctioned) and haram (proscribed). Juxtaposed with the qazi’s willingness to cynically use sharia for upholding established social systems of control, Heer’s stance is vindicated in the text.
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Heer’s argument with the qazi is mirrored in Ranjha’s conversation with his teacher Balnath. The key difference here is that Ranjha, willingly initiated as a Natha yogi by Balnath, is bound morally and ethically to his teacher within the guru–shishya tradition, the bond between ustaad and shagird, teacher and student, guide and initiate. As such, there is a sense that Ranjha is answerable to his Guru, and must satisfy his doubts.
Ranjha justifies his love for Heer, despite becoming a yogi: ਸਾਨੂੰ ਜੋਗ ਦੀ ਰੀਝ ਤਦੋਕਣੀ ਸੀ, ਜਦੋਂ ਹੀਰ ਸਿਆਲ ਮਹਿਬੂਬ ਕੀਤੇ ।—My passion for yoga was born the day Heer became my beloved. This paradoxical statement defines love as an ascetic practice, a form of tapas (“Tapas is a passion voluntarily undertaken, and with a known end in view.” Coomaraswamy 1933), worship.
Unlike the qazi, who is complicit in the hypocrisies and intrigues of the social structures he is part of, the ascetic Balnath is able to empathize with Ranjha’s position. Moved by his student’s appeals, Balnath prays, joined by the five Pirs, supplicating God’s aid. The conversation ends on a fruitful note: the teacher blesses his student, assuring him, “ਹੀਰ ਬਖਸ਼ ਦਿੱਤੀ ਸੱਚੇ ਰਬ ਤੈਨੂੰ— The true God has granted you Heer.”
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This tension between the exoteric and the esoteric, ظاهر ‘zaher’ and باطن ‘batin,’ jurisprudence and mysticism, social propriety and eros, forms the dialectic that propels the narratives of medieval Punjabi romances. Ultimately, the mystical purity and intensity of the lovers prevails, immortalized in the ink of hundreds of writers and poets, even as their worldly fates are consumed by tragedy— even as their subsequent beatification allows society to sustain its hegemonic structures by appropriating and so neutralizing (and denying the couple) the subversive, ecstatic potential of their love (the Devi’s vortex).
Mian Muhammad Bakhsh Jihlami, a late nineteenth-century qissa writer, compares the persecution of the lovers Mirza and Sahiban with the execution of the 9th century mystic Mansour Hallaj:
They thought Mirza Kharal’s love (’ishq) faulty because he acted unreasonably
Just as the ulama didn’t comprehend Shah Mansur’s secret.
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In both discourses (Heer and the qazi, Ranjha and Balnath), the protagonists endeavor to place their actions within the bracket of religious morality and conduct (rather than reject or transgress against them). Articulating their love in mystical, sacred terms, they seek to reinterpret rather than upend the boundaries of religious and social jurisdiction, of the nature of religion and religious practice itself.
To this effect, they locate their relationship in a higher, mystical piety rooted in love (Corbin: “The lover has become the very substance of love, he is... both the lover and the beloved”), transcending worldly jurisprudence: ਅੰਤ ਰਾਂਝੇ ਨੂੰ ਹੀਰ ਪਰਨਾ ਦੇਣੀ—in the end, Heer will be married to (unite, merge with) Ranjha.
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The Edenic black forest
The village on the one hand, and ‘the river, the woods, and the forest’ on the other, represent a fundamental division between cosmos and chaos, between ‘inhabited territory and the unknown and indeterminate space that surrounds it’ (Eliade 1957). HS Gill (2003) marks ‘the river, the woods and the forest’ as the sites where Heer and Ranjha meet, at the liminal threshold of (but also simultaneously defined by, and so part of) the social structure; this world “is never transgressed, it is always circumvented.”
‘The river, the woods, and the forest’: this liminal space exists between all oppositions, separates and yet links the two, the seemingly insurmountable gulf inaugurated by duality (the sword that cleaves). The mystical force that bridges this gulf is the sacrality exemplified by Heesterman’s itinerant figure of the consecrated warrior, or the gnostic ascetic archetypes of the vratya, the brahmacharin, the keshin.
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Ranjha, the beautiful aristocratic youth, princely son of a feudal lord, dons a series of ancient Aryan archetypes: the vagabond-musician (the magadha accompanying vratya warbands), the nomadic cowherd, the liminal yogi renunciate— this series of transformations positions him on this liminal outside (river, woods, forest). He alternates vratya-like between grama (the settled world) and aranya (wilderness), “the go-getting itinerant, the yayavara” (Heesterman 1995).
The catalyst that effects Ranjha’s metamorphosis— a series of becomings from decadent aristocratic youthful to liminal shamanic renunciate— is love: divinizing him even as he is stripped of worldly possessions and status (a simultaneous movement of downward self-abnegation and solar ascension), culminating (in death) in apotheosis through mystical unity with Heer, a transcendental marriage fulfilled with(in) God.
Indeed, when Bulleh Shah speaks of the figurative cowherd with the magic flute, he equates Ranjha with Krishna: ਬੰਸੀ ਵਾਲਿਆ ਚਾਕਾ ਰਾਂਝਾ—flute-player, cowherd Ranjha, ਬੰਸੀ ਵਾਲਿਆ ਕਾਹਨ—flute-player Kaahan [Krishna]. As enchanters of animals and humans alike, they also recall the ancient archetypal Pashupati (proto-Shiva, Rudra), the primeval yogi, ancient lord and protector of animals.
These figures become interchangeable in the mystic unity of Bulleh Shah’s vision: the tunes Ranjha plays on his flute are in harmony with all existence (“ਤੇਰਾ ਸੁਰ ਹੈ ਸਭ ਨਾਲ ਸਾਂਝਾ”), mirroring Krishna’s divinity as an avatara. By extension, Heer’s yearning for Ranjha mirrors Radha’s devotional yearning for Krishna.
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It is in the forest that Ranjha has his fateful encounter with the five Pirs, who inform him, “ਬਖ਼ਸ਼ੀ ਹੀਰ ਦਰਗਾਹ ਥੀਂ ਤੁਧ ਤਾਈਂ—Heer has been granted to you by the court [of God].” This meeting is one among many narrative conceits that confirm the divinely ordained nature of Heer and Ranjha’s love.
It can be argued that Ranjha functions as the tale’s mystical crux, the fulcrum that conjoins the dualities inherent to the narrative: society and liminality, the village and wilderness, aristocracy and vagrancy, the manifest and the esoteric, duty and renunciation.
Nevertheless, a distinction: unlike the cowherd or yogi, who, although outside the security of society, still operate in relation to it (holding powers beyond societal structures), Ranjha’s pursuit is ‘purely cosmological’ (Gill 2003); he is consumed by a singular impulse, deep in the cosmic vortex of love: to realize the hohe stimmung of his soul, to attain absolute union with Heer.
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Thus, this Outside becomes the site of their trysts. The cosmic purity of the union between Heer and Ranjha transfigures these sites in qualitative terms: their passion serves a hierophanic function, severing the sites from their mundane, profane contexts, elevating them into a spiritually exalted ontology. These sites effectively become Eden, the center that orients their shared cosmos cf. Eliade 1957:
For religious man, space is not homogeneous; he experiences interruptions, breaks in it; some parts of space are qualitatively different from others. … There is, then, a sacred space, and hence a strong, significant space; there are other spaces that are not sacred and so are without structure or consistency, amorphous… space that is sacred—the only real and real-ly existing space—and all other space, the formless expanse surrounding it.
Ironically, the narrative opens with praises of Ranjha’s native Takhat Hazara: ਕੇਹੀ ਸਿਫ਼ਤ ਹਜ਼ਾਰੇ ਦੀ ਆਖ ਸਕਾਂ, ਗੋਇਆ ਬਹਿਸ਼ਤ ਜ਼ਮੀਨ ਤੇ ਆਇਆ ਏ ।—What praises of Hazara can I express, that which is like heaven itself had descended to the earth. Najm Hosein Syed (2003) posits Hazara as Eden destroyed by the snake of envy that “keeps striking at [Ranjha’s] heart,” ending in his (voluntary) expulsion. This turn of events emerges from the aforementioned dialectic of worldly corruption and inner purity: the corrosive envy and prurience of his brothers and sisters-in-law manages to corrupt and profane the text’s first model of Eden. That is to say, all worldly paradises, caught in the decay of historical time, enmeshed in the tangle of social intrigues and spiritual baseness, are ultimately perishable and corruptible.
And so it is that ‘the river, the woods, and the forest,’ truly separated from (outside) the ways of the world by the ‘purely cosmological’ stimmung of Ranjha’s pursuit, become the text’s true Eden: sites transformed by Ranjha’s divinity (or rather, the divinity of his and Heer’s love, subsuming them in ‘the living flame of love’), even as the liminality associated with these sites makes possible this cosmic hierophany— a circular, reciprocal arrangement.
This Eden is where all things, including the lovers, return (restored) to their primordial state; in other words, initiate and shaykh are in turn initiated into the absolute unity of God. ਨਦੀਆ ਵਾਹ ਵਿਛੁੰਨਿਆ ਮੇਲਾ ਸੰਜੋਗੀ ਰਾਮ ॥ ਜੁਗੁ ਜੁਗੁ ਮੀਠਾ ਵਿਸੁ ਭਰੇ ਕੋ ਜਾਣੈ ਜੋਗੀ ਰਾਮ ॥—Separated by the flux of the [world-]river, with good fortune does one reunite with Raam. What seems sweet yuga after yuga is really brimming with poison, only the yogi knows this, O Raam. Tellingly, when the boatman Luddan finally agrees to ferry Ranjha across the river (thus leading him to his fateful first encounter with Heer), Waris Shah compares it with Adam’s return to Eden: ਤਕਸੀਰ ਮੁਆਫ ਕਰ ਆਦਮੇ ਦੀ, ਮੁੜ ਆਣ ਬਹਿਸ਼ਤ ਵਿੱਚ ਵਾੜਿਆ ਨੇ ।—[As if] Adam, his sins forgiven, had been carried back to heaven. Waris Shah’s kalam, brimming with enchanted poesy, conspiring to bring Ranjha to Eden.
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All this culminates in his and Heer’s climactic union in the Edenic black forest. Waris Shah’s verses adopt a frenzied, ecstatic tempo as Heer hurries towards the forest (ਵਾਂਗ ਮੋਰ ਦੇ ਪਾਇਲਾਂ ਪਾਂਵਦੀ ਹੈ ।—prancing like a peacock; ਹਾਥੀ ਮਸਤ ਛੁੱਟਾ—[like] an inebriated elephant let loose), overfull with the promise of “an apotheosised union in which life and death lose all distinction.” ਮੇਰਾ ਹਰਿ ਪ੍ਰਭੁ ਰਾਵਣਿ ਆਈਆ ਹਉਮੈ ਬਿਖੁ ਝਾਗੇ ਰਾਮ ॥—She arrives to enjoy her Prabhu, having overcome the poisonous oceans of her ego.
At the same time, the poet juxtaposes this erotic fervor with markedly religious analogies to describe Heer’s arrival in this earthly Eden: she enters like the arrival of spring clouds (abr-e-bahar), she enters like the Laylat al-Qadr, the revelatory night on which the Prophet received the Qur’an. Pagan fecundity, holy revelation: earth and heaven, united.
ਰਾਂਝਾ ਆਖਦਾ ਅਬਰ ਬਹਾਰ ਆਇਆ, ਬੇਲਾ ਜੰਗਲਾ ਲਾਲੋ ਹੀ ਲਾਲ ਹੋਵੇ । ਹਾਠ ਜੋੜ ਕੇ ਬੱਦਲਾਂ ਹਾਂਝ ਬੱਧੀ, ਵੇਖਾਂ ਕੇਹੜਾ ਦੇਸ ਨਿਹਾਲ ਹੋਵੇ ।—Ranjha exclaimed, [it is as if] the clouds of spring have arrived; the forest, the meadow aglow, resplendent. The pregnant clouds have come together, eager to pour, to determine which land to enrapture.
ਚਮਕੀ ਲੈਲਾਤੁਲਕਦਰ ਸਿਆਹ ਸ਼ਬ ਥੀਂ, ਜਿਸ ਤੇ ਪਵੇਗੀ ਨਜ਼ਰ ਨਿਹਾਲ ਹੋਵੇ ।—[It is as if it were] the luminous black night of Laylat-al-Qadr, the Night of Revelation: he upon whom its grace descends will be filled with bliss.
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Through this union (described later through Raiba and Sarifa’s salacious chorus, using amply sexually charged analogies and metaphors), the modality of lack and non-being that had hitherto defined both Heer and Ranjha’s existence is transfigured into erotic, sacred plenitude and ecstasy (śṛṅgāra). The abyss that separates the sacred and profane, the worldly and the celestial, the carnal and the spiritual, collapses in ecstatic unity: initiate subsumed into the shaykh, Heer into Ranjha, both Heer and Ranjha into divine fullness. ਧਨ ਹਰਿ ਪ੍ਰਭਿ ਪਿਆਰੈ ਰਾਵੀਆ ਜਾਂ ਹਰਿ ਪ੍ਰਭ ਭਾਈ ਰਾਮ ॥—The blessed, dear Prabhu ravishes his wealth [the bride, the devotee] as she pleases him.
For this reason, the narrative effectively concludes (completes itself, exhausts itself) here.
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A coda: Hīr Rānjhā’s darbār
The tomb that today marks the final resting place of Heer-Ranjha is viewed as a spiritual center, a popular shrine where the pious and the lovestruck alike may seek the benedictions of these supreme martyrs of cosmic love.
Such shrines are common in Punjabi folk religion, akin to saint veneration, which forms an essential component of folk tradition: centered on the figure of the divine intermediary, who may be a pir, a sant, a yogi, a shaykh, or even martyrs, lovers, rebels, wrestlers, or musicians. These figures serve as mirrors or links to the Absolute.
In this sense, Sikh metaphysics is in consonance with (rather than opposed to, or hostile towards) folk religion: the Guru, too, functions as the supremely divine sun-door (or mirror, link) through (within) which the Sikh seeks to gain union with the divine. ਗੁਰਬਿਨੁਕਿਉਤਰੀਐਸੁਖੁਹੋਇ॥— Without the Guru, how can one swim [across the world-ocean] and find bliss?
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A curious feature of the tomb is its ‘miraculous’ roof, an open orange dome revealing clear blue skies. It functions as “an aperture in the roof— the ‘eye of the dome,’ symbolizing break-through from plane to plane, communication with the transcendent” (Eliade, 1957); it is the opening to their marriage in(to) ‘God, the absolute Subject.’
Insofar as ‘the river, the woods, and the forest’ were the (reflections of) Eden where Heer and Ranjha could bask in the fierce fires of sacred, erotic plenitude, this tomb represents the transcendental fulfilment of the promises made to the couple by the five saints and Balnath: it is their lasting Eden, where they rest in aeternum, united in the Light of Lights until the end of time.
ਦੋਵੇਂ ਦਾਰੇ ਫ਼ਨਾ ਥੀਂ ਗਏ ਸਾਬਤ, ਜਾ ਰੁੱਪੇ ਨੇ ਦਾਰੇ ਬਕਾ ਮੀਆਂ ।—The two departed from this mortal coil, indivisible, and so have they arrived in the abode of life eternal.
ਦੋਵੇਂ ਰਾਹ ਮਜਾਜ਼ ਦੇ ਰਹੇ ਸਾਬਤ, ਨਾਲ ਸਿਦਕ ਦੇ ਗਏ ਵਹਾ ਮੀਆਂ ।—The two followed the path of love in unity, and with their faith intact have they been severed from this realm.
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