Does anyone care for Romance any more? Laila and Majnu, Sohni and Mahiwal, Romeo and Juliet? Film buffs at least may continue to argue over the merits of the dozen or so movie versions of Heer & Ranjha made since cinema took over and translated the older worlds of poetry and song.
Some viewers who, like me, intrigued by the differences in the narrative evident in the several movie versions available online, may have gone back to check out the classic, if not earliest, telling in the Punjabi poem, love-song really, composed by Waris Shah in the 18th century – my own reading admittedly mediated by a (slightly bowdlerized) English translation by one of those British I.C.S. officers who took a genuine interest in the cultures his imperial masters were deforming and transforming.
Even allowing for the creative freedom required to “translate” a story from one medium, let alone language, to quite another, there are increasingly radical differences between the story-line as told in the Waris Shah Heer and that in the several available filmic variants from the Chetan Anand classic of 1970 to the present that followed upon the 1956 film Heer.
Set aside, necessarily, the richness of the poem’s imagery, its allusiveness and at times emblematic quality – the ultimate fight the lovers have with a hungry lion, for example, quite apart from the – as ever – enchantingly erotic flute and the correspondingly “feminine” compliance of the buffalo herd – and there are still a couple of major aspects the film-makers have not – though could have – made something of.
There is the religious aspect. This is a Sufi poem. Yes, it is a love story but there is a sufic – like bhaktin – ambiguity or convergence of earthly with divine love. Not only do Five Pirs intermittently appear supernaturally to intervene on the lovers’ behalf – in the face of social conventions and the whole world if need be – but ultimately God himself burns down a city to vindicate the authenticity of their love.
There is even the suggestion that their love remains platonic – Plato himself is evoked in the poem as one of the wise. Ranjha not only takes on the guise of a Jogi, fooling the Guru who initiates him into believing he is renouncing the world, but to some extent becomes one with the power to perform miracles. There is a constant refrain – echoed throughout by various characters both good and bad – that life is but a dream and beauty fades in the blink of an eye.
That this reading of the poem has something to it is supported by a second arresting aspect of the poem. Heer and Ranjha are far from being idealized. They are not only moon-struck, star-crossed lovers – as in the various movies – but of the earth earthy, as punjabi as a kurta-pajama. They swear, curse, insult and deceive as freely as those who persecute them. Even allowing for the vigorous Punjabi tradition of the sexes mocking each other in boliyan and tappe, there is an additional edge to much of this: after all, the poem does end in a ruthless honour killing.
While Heer and Ranjha are much put upon by religious officers such as mullahs and kazis, who are shown to be subject to bribery and corruption, and by families and communities who are concerned about – often hypocritical – respectability and social norms, they are not themselves free from a good deal of deviousness and downright deceit, even in dealing with each other.
The difference is that the “bad behaviour” of the lovers is directed at flouting and subverting the mundane social conventions in favour of romantic love while that of the three communities with whom they are involved is set on maintaining the proprieties based on worldly wealth and status, including the arrangement of marriages.
Ranjha has never done a day’s work in his life – however much such freedom may be admirable in those choosing the penuriousness of an artistic or a religious life. He flounces out of the family home, taking umbrage that his brothers have told him he is a lay-about and calling one of his sisters-in-law ugly for saying he is effete and effeminate.
Trading gross insults wherever he goes, he flings accusations of lasciviousness against a mullah who complains about his playing the flute at the first mosque he comes across and is equally outraged by a boatman who refuses to take him across the river for free. He is himself subject to verbal and physical abuse when found sleeping on her luxurious couch in the boat by Heer, who is as likely as the boatman to have thrown him into the river if she had not fallen in love with him instantly.
In keeping with a gender distinction that adheres to the Indian divinities, Heer is the active force, the shakti, in the relationship, Ranjha passive. Heer sweet-talks her parents into taking on Ranjha as a menial herdsman before going out into the wooded scrubland to, so the poet tells us, sweet-talk Ranjha into playing this game. If Heer, both disobedient and deceitful, reveals herself in this as something of an artful minx – that is, unless you take her throughout as a feminist icon – Ranjha is – as both a shrewd shepherd and even the pious Pirs later tell him – a bit of a wally to let this charade go on for so long rather than act decisively and elope with Heer.
The poem gives us plenty of time to explore the characters of the lovers as they prevaricate in the face of lame Uncle Kaidu’s – not unwarranted, if conventionally villainous – attempts to convince Heer’s parents the lovers are having them on and bringing the proud Sials into contempt, objects of derision, in the eyes of their village community. The lovers themselves test the temper of their love as they tease and taunt and even doubt one another. The village go-between actually educates Ranjha in the diverse sorts of love.
There is a good deal of shilly-shallying and blame-gaming all round in Jhang Sial before the Elders, the Kazi and Kaidu finally prevail on her parents to marry Heer off lest her ungovernable behaviour affect other young women in the village. Denounced as a prostitute by her mother and threatened with every sort of gruesome honour killing by her brother and erstwhile supportive father, Heer remains defiant and is ultimately married off against her will into the well-off Khera clan. She is put to what is the ultimate test of refusing her husband, Saida, his marital rights, successfully doing so thanks to the intervention of the Five Pirs, a vision of whom terrifies the poor fellow.
The poem strikes a fine balance in showing how the Kheras even more than the Sials are fooled, bewildered and even somewhat traduced by Heer’s socially errant behaviour. You have to be entirely committed to the freedom of the path of sufi love not to feel they are a bit hard done by.
As for Ranjha, in the poem he actually follows the baraat bearing Heer away to the Kheras and steals in to see her, not this time as at Jhang Sial dressed as a woman. After mutual recriminations, it is at her suggestion he play-acts once more and takes on the guise of a Jogi as a way of gaining access to her in her new home. There follows the strange ambiguity of Ranjha’s induction as a holy man and uncertainty, once he eventually re-establishes, rather fortuitously, contact with the Kheras, about the worldliness or otherworldliness of his love.
Besides starting a pointless fight with a Jat and his wife in the Khera village of Rangpur, Ranjha engages in a series of prolonged and abusive arguments with Saida’s sister, Sethi, she as ready to abuse him for being a lascivious holy man as to expose him for being, her other suspicion, Heer’s interloping lover. She actually throws him out of the house and sets some young women on to breaking up his things.
We must assume that the “bad behaviour” of the lovers, Heer especially, towards each other is on account of the age-old testing of whether their love is unconditional and limitless. At one point recriminations between Heer and Ranjha get so intense Heer decides to doll herself up with make-up and let Ranjha and Saida fight over her. Confessing all to Sethi, she is accused of being selfish when she tries to buy Sethi off by promising that Ranjha will use his miraculous powers to transport her equally illicit lover, Murad the camel-driver, so that she can elope with him as he with Heer.
This plan agreed, the three conspire to deceive Sethi’s family by staging a potentially fatal snake-bite to Heer, curable only by the wonder-working Jogi aka Ranjha. Ranjha has the worldly satisfaction of first refusing poor Saida’s plea to come and save Heer and then beating him black and blue for wearing shoes in his presence. Heer finally being removed to an isolated hut for the pretended cure, the Pirs, after making one more timely appearance to oblige Sethi in transporting the dazed Murad from distant parts, vanish as quickly as the pairs of lovers do.
Next day the Kheras, discovering their loss, set off in hot pursuit. Sethi and Murad, having managed to reach the safety of Baluchi friends, beat off their pursuers but Heer and Ranjha, exhausted from their fight with a man-eating lion, are overtaken as they lie asleep. Ranjha is thrashed to within an inch of his life while Heer is dragged away, screaming to Ranjha to demand justice from the Raja into whose territory they have made their way.
Ranjha does appeal to the Raja, who calls for the Kheras to be overtaken, apprehended and hauled before his Court. Before the Raja’s Kazi Ranjha claims to be a Jogi whose wife has been stolen from him by the thieving Kheras. The Kheras counter that Ranjha is a cunning rogue, deceitfully acting the roles of herdsman and Jogi, in the latter guise engineering the elopement of Saida’s sister and stealing away Saida’s lawfully-married wife on the pretence of healing a snake-bite.
Threatened by the Raja with being hung, drawn and quartered if they are lying, the Kheras, when taxed by the Kazi, are able to adduce witnesses of all religious faiths to the marriage of Heer to Saida while Ranjha can claim only God as witness. Not surprisingly, the Kazi finds in favour of the Kheras, thereupon Ranjha, saying he has no money to bribe the officers of the court, curses the Kazi, saying that if he was so in league with the Kheras, he should give them his own daughter.
Finally Ranjha advises Heer to make her life with the Kheras and forget him, leaving him to live the life of a religious mendicant. She in turn makes one last appeal to the Raja and that failing, first she and then Ranjha call on God to burn down his city.
This God obligingly does, upon which the Raja hastily consults his astrologers. They find that, though the officers of the court had committed no fault, God clearly heard and acknowledged the sighs of true lovers. The Raja hauls the Kheras back and pronounces his revised judgement that Heer belongs to Ranjha, pontificating, somewhat tangentially, that God curses those who tell lies, that he will kill all those who oppress the poor and cut off the noses of those who take bribes.
At this point the story has a happy ending. Or has it? Once again the film versions depart quite radically from the poem’s ending. In the poem, the reunited lovers ride off contentedly towards Ranjha’s home before Heer, as ever, has a further idea. She would like to be welcomed as a ceremonial bride, not as an eloping lover. Fatefully, she has for once acquiesced in an essential social convention, a family wedding.
The couple turn aside to Jhang Sial and the Sials are beginning to make the wedding arrangements for them when who should turn up but an embassy of the Kheras demanding the return of their bride. The envoy is sent away with a flea in his ear and Heer and Ranjha, his Jogic gear being dispensed with, are dressed up in finery and sat upon the wedding gadi. Ranjha is then sent home to announce the good news to his family and is met with great rejoicing, especially from the sisters-in-law.
Alas, dear reader, great is the cunning and treachery of mankind in this mutable world, where the young and innocent are led like goats to the slaughter.
Uncle Kaidu – his lameness in those unregenerate times being taken as a signifier for villainy – argues that the reputation of the proud Sials will be in tatters if, having given their daughter in marriage to one man, they then set about giving her to another. The matter now being so complicated, they were likely to have a right royal battle on their hands that no-one can see the end of. This view prevails and everyone in the community agrees that a more immediate expedient is necessary: poison.
Hence Kaidu approaches Heer with the fake news that Ranjha has been killed, at which she faints. On the pretext of bringing her round, she is given sherbet laced with poison and, crying out for Ranjha to be brought to her, she dies. When news of her death is sent to Ranjha, he collapses and dies of a broken heart.
Thus do two lovers die separately as they had lived much of their short love-life physically separated, their love unconsummated, unbroken and undiminished by age and circumstance. Those whom the gods love die young. A happy ending then, not a tragedy? Perfect Love?
There is a potent myth that, at his trial in London for the murder of the Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab at the time of Jalianwallabagh, socialist shaheed Udham Singh chose Heer as the holy book on which to swear his oath. From the ashvamedha of earliest Vedic times to the present the concept of a sacrifice being necessary for the world to be re-made has been evident in Indian culture.
The particular strength of Waris Shah’s story is that it inextricably combines, as does the sufi concept of love, the human and the divine. His story is a wild and bewildering combo of wonder-working saints and abusive, argumentative and antagonistic people, not least of all the feisty lovers themselves. What a film it would make. Bring it on.
