سرائیکی ڈیجیٹل لائبریری

Introduction

Most kafis of Khwaja Ghulam Farid speak of the pain of separation. The lover weeps for the absent beloved. She waits, she complains of the long night, and she prays for a meeting. The beloved is far away, but the love itself is never in question.

This kafi 15 is different. On the surface, it follows the same pattern. There is weeping, there is public disgrace, and there is a sick heart. But underneath lies a question that the usual kafi does not ask. Was the love true? Did the beloved leave because he was forced, or did he leave knowingly? The kafi is built upon this radical doubt about love.

The lover carries a secret that she cannot share with anyone. The world knows of her disgrace, but it does not know the cause. The cause is revealed only indirectly, through the story of Sassi and Punnun. It is then turned into a question through the story of Laila and Majnun. The kafi ends not with a meeting but with a journey that has no road.

The first four stanzas look conventional. They speak of dust, disgrace, grief and failed cures, as many kafis do. Their full meaning appears only when the Sassi stanza reveals the secret. So I read them partly in the light of what comes later. I also take the speaker to be a woman. This is the usual voice of the kafi, and the Sassi stanza confirms it here.

In this essay I read the kafi stanza by stanza. For each stanza I give the Siraiki text, a plain English translation and my reading. I do not read the kafi within Farid’s usual mystical system, though some of its lines touch that system.

Opening: The Secret

کیا حال سُݨاواں دل دا

کوئی محرم راز نہ مِلدا

What state of the heart can I tell? I find no one who shares the secret.

The refrain tells us that there is a secret in the heart. Something has happened. It is an event that has broken the lover’s life, but she does not name it. She only says that there is no mahram raaz. A mahram is not just a friend or a listener. A mahram is someone who is already inside the secret and can hold it. The lover has no such person.

So the problem is not simple loneliness. The lover has something to say, but there is no one fit to hear it. This refrain returns after every stanza. Each time it returns, it reminds us that whatever we read in the stanza is only the outside of the matter. The secret itself stays untold.

Stanza 1: The Scandal

مُنہ دھوڑ مِٹی سر پائیم

سارا ننگ نموز ونڄائیم

کوئی پُچھݨ نہ ویڑھے آئیم

ہتھوں اُلٹا عالم کِھلدا

There is dust on my face. I have put earth on my head. I have lost all my honour and good name. No one came to my courtyard to ask after me. Instead, the world laughs at me.

The first stanza moves from the inner secret to the outer world. There is a public scandal. The lover has become a kind of outcast. Her nang and namoos, her honour and her good name, are gone. No one comes to her house to ask how she is. The world only laughs.

But the scandal is not the secret. The scandal is the way the event is seen and told by the people. The people know that something has happened, but they do not know what. They fill the gap with their own story.

The grammar of the stanza adds something here. Paayim means “I put” and vinjaayim means “I lost”. The lover herself has put earth on her head. This is the old gesture of mourning. So the scandal begins with her own open grief. The town sees the mourning but not the thing she mourns. It sees the outside and makes its own meaning. In this way the stanza draws a clear line between what the world knows and what only the heart knows.

Stanza 2: The Weight of Separation

آیا بار برہوں سر باری

لڳی ہو ہو شہر خواری

روندیں عمر گُذاریم ساری

نہ پائیم ݙَس منزل دا

The heavy load of separation fell on my head. There was uproar and disgrace in the town. I spent my whole life weeping. I never found a trace of the destination.

This stanza shows the weight of both things together. One is the scandal outside. The other is the secret inside that cannot be spoken. The lover carries birhon, the pain of separation, like a heavy load on her head. In the town there is hu hu, a noise of gossip, and there is khwaari, disgrace.

It is worth noting that the separation itself is named openly here. So separation is not the secret. The town may well know that the beloved has gone. What the town does not know is how he went. That is the part the lover keeps to herself.

The last line is important. The whole life passes in weeping, and she never finds a das, a trace or a sign, of the destination. She does not know where this road leads. She has lost the direction of her own life.

Stanza 3: Your Heartless One

دِل یار کیتے کُرلاوے

تڑپھاوے تے غم کھاوے

ݙُکھ پاوے سول نِبھاوے

ایہو طور تیݙے بے دل دا

The heart wails for the friend. It writhes and eats grief. It suffers pain and bears the pangs. This is the way of your heartless one.

Here we see the result. The heart cries, kurlaave. It writhes, it eats grief, it bears the sool, the sharp pangs. The lover has reached a state of bedili. The heart has gone out of her.

The stanza opens with dil and closes with bedil. The loss of the heart is written into the words themselves.

There is also a turn in the voice. For the first time the lover speaks to the beloved directly. She calls herself teede bedil, your heartless one. Even in this broken state she still calls herself his. She has not given up the claim of belonging to him. This loyalty will matter when we reach the Sassi stanza.

Stanza 4: The Wrong Cure

کئی سہنس طبیب کماوِن

کئی پُڑیاں گھول پِلاوِن

میݙے دل دا بھیت نہ پاوِن

پووِے فَرق نہیں ہِک تِل دا

Many thousands of physicians work on me. They dissolve many powders and make me drink them. They do not find the secret of my heart. Their medicine makes no difference at all, not even as much as a til.

The burden of the secret and of separation has made the lover ill. Now the physicians come. There are thousands of them, sahans. They dissolve their puriyan, the small paper packets of powder that every village hakim and ved gives, and they make her drink.

Nothing works. The medicine makes no difference at all. The word til carries this sense. A til is a very small mark on the skin. It is also a very small seed. So the line says that not even the smallest change comes. The reason is given plainly. They do not find the bheet of her heart. Bheet is the secret. It takes us straight back to the raaz of the refrain.

The physicians fail because they treat the body and not the cause. And the cause is exactly what cannot be told. A cure would need a mahram, someone who knows the secret. The physician cannot be that person. So every cure is the wrong cure.

Stanza 5: The Knowing Departure

پُنوں ہوت نہ کَھڑ مُکلایا

چھڈ کلہڑی کیچ سدھایا

سوھݨے ڄاݨ پچھاݨ رُلایا

کوڑا عُذر نبھایم گِھل دا

Punnun Hot did not even stop to say farewell. He left me alone and went away to Kech. My beloved knowingly made me wander. I kept up a false excuse of drowsiness.

This is the stanza where the secret is hinted at. It is not told directly. It is told through the story of Sassi and Punnun.

In the common telling of the legend, Punnun’s brothers give him a drug and carry him away while Sassi is asleep. Punnun is not to blame and Sassi is not to blame. It is a misfortune. Farid changes this. Here Punnun did not even stop to say goodbye. He left jaan pachhaan, knowingly. And Sassi’s sleep becomes a koora uzr, a false excuse.

This is the secret. What pains the lover is not only the public scandal. It is the knowledge that the beloved abandoned her knowingly. She can face the scandal. She cannot face this truth. The false excuse of sleep is the public story. It is the story the world believes. The truth of the knowing departure stays in her heart.

The verb she uses is nibhaayim. Nibhaana is the word we use for keeping faith with a relation or a promise. So she does not only hide the truth. She keeps faith with the lie, and through the lie she keeps faith with the love. If she names the truth, the magic of love is gone. Love demands that it stay a secret.

The line may allow one more reading, though I hold it only as a possibility. If the drowsiness was a false excuse, perhaps she was awake. Perhaps she saw him go and did not stop him. This would turn the old legend fully upside down.

We should also see how the stanza answers the refrain. The refrain said there was no one to tell. Here the secret is told after all, but only through the mask of a folk story. The folk story is the form in which the lover is able to speak of it.

Stanza 6: One Lifting of the Veil

سُݨ لیلی! دھانہہ پُکار اے

تیݙا مجنوں زار نزار اے

سوھݨاں یار توݨے ہک وار اے

کݙیں چا پردہ محمل دا

Listen, Laila! This is a cry for justice. Your Majnun is wasted and worn. Beautiful friend, even if it is only once, lift the curtain of your litter.

The next stanza strengthens the doubt through another story. In the Sassi stanza the beloved had left. Here I read Majnun as a lover in doubt. The text says only that he is zaar nizaar, wasted and worn. I read this wasting as the effect of not being sure of Laila’s love. The next lines give my reasons.

He does not ask for union. He does not ask her to come back. He asks for one thing only. Lift the curtain of the mahmil, even once, hik vaar. I give this phrase weight. A lover who only wants to see his beloved asks to see her again and again. A lover who asks for one lifting of the veil wants to know something. One unveiling would settle the matter. On this reading he is seeking the truth of Laila’s love.

One caution is needed. Hik vaari is also a common phrase in a lover’s plea. Its weight here comes from its place, right after the Sassi stanza, and not from the phrase alone.

The word dhaanh points the same way. It is not a sigh. It is the cry of someone who calls out for justice. So the stanza reads like a plea for the truth to be shown.

When we place the two stanzas side by side, a pattern appears. Sassi has the knowledge and hides it. Majnun lacks the knowledge and begs for it. To know the truth of the beloved is unbearable. Not to know it is also unbearable. The veil of the litter is at once a curtain before the eyes and a secret held back. And the Sassi stanza has already shown what one lifting of the veil might reveal.

Stanza 7: The Roadless City

دل پریم نگر ݙوں تانگھے

جتھاں پینڈے سخت اَڑانگے

نہ راہ فرید! نہ لانگھے

ہے پندھ ٻہوں مُشکل دا

The heart longs for the city of love, where the paths are hard and steep. Farid! There is no road and no crossing. It is a very difficult journey.

This is the most complex stanza of the kafi. It brings us to an impasse.

The named lovers are gone. There is no Punnun and no Laila now. In their place stands prem nagar, the city of love. Love is no longer tied to one beloved. It has become a place, a general condition of love. This move from a particular beloved to love in general is interesting. It is close to giving up the object of love. After the betrayal of Punnun and the veil of Laila, the heart does not turn to another beloved. It turns to love itself.

But the way to this city is hard. The paths are araanghe, steep and full of barriers. Then Farid goes further. There is no road at all, na raah, and no crossing, na laanghe. The city of love cannot be reached by any known way.

Yet Farid does not say that the journey is impossible. He says hai pandh, there is a journey. It is only very difficult. So the kafi does not close in despair. It closes with a plain acknowledgement of how hard this travel is. One may read here a hint of going beyond attachment to one beloved, towards a love that is general. But Farid knows this is the hardest journey, if not an impossible one.

This reading comes close to the mystical idea of rising above a single beloved, which I set aside at the start. But the route here is different. The move does not come from a doctrine. It comes from betrayal and doubt. The heart turns to love in general because the particular beloved has failed it. I read the word as prem, love, and not param, supreme, as the edition glosses it. The note on the text below explains this choice.

Closing

Read as a whole, this kafi moves in a clear line. It begins with a secret that has no listener. It passes through a public scandal that hides the secret, a heavy grief, and a cure that cannot touch the cause. Then, through Sassi, it hints at the secret itself. The beloved left knowingly, and the lover keeps a false story alive to save her love. Through Majnun it turns this knowledge into a question about the truth of love. At the end the heart turns from the particular beloved towards the city of love, and finds that there is no road to it.

This is why the kafi stands apart. It is not only a song of separation or a prayer for meeting. It is a song of doubt. It asks whether love can survive the knowledge of what the beloved has done. The kafi does not answer this question. The lover keeps the secret and stays loyal to the beloved. The heart still longs for the city of love, though there is no road to it. Farid does not say that she will arrive. He only says that the journey is very hard.