Punjabi literature opens with a Muslim saint whose verses are preserved in Sikh scripture. Fariduddin Masud, the Chishti teacher remembered as Baba Farid, settled in the thirteenth century at Ajodhan on the Sutlej, the town now called Pakpattan. The verses attributed to him are the earliest substantial poetry surviving in the Punjabi language, and three and a half centuries later Guru Arjan gathered them into the Adi Granth, where they are still sung. That one fact tells you most of what you need to know about this literature. It does not sort neatly by faith, and it never has.
Three traditions run through it, and they run into each other constantly. There is the Sufi lyric, from Shah Hussain in the sixteenth century through Sultan Bahu to Bulleh Shah in the eighteenth, whose subject is love, the false self, and the Divine sought through both. There is the Sikh scriptural corpus, which carries Hindu and Muslim voices alongside the Gurus’ own. And there are the qisse, the long verse romances of Heer Ranjha, Sohni Mahiwal, Mirza Sahiban and Sassi Punnun, told beside the anonymous folk couplets that were the people’s poetry as the saints’ was theirs. Waris Shah gave the first of those romances its greatest telling in 1766, and his Heer is still the measure the others are held against.
The same body of work is read in two scripts. In the east it is set in Gurmukhi, in the west in Shahmukhi, and a kafi of Bulleh Shah is the same kafi in both. Partition drew a border through the readership, not through the literature. We give both scripts wherever we can, because a reader on one side of that line should not have to take our word for what a reader on the other side sees. The two scripts sets out how the pair works.
What we can reproduce in full stops short of the present day. Amrita Pritam and Shiv Kumar Batalvi are still in copyright, so the modern poets can be written about and linked to here but not reprinted. That is a smaller loss than it sounds. The canon that is free to publish is already eight centuries deep.
What this shelf is for
Punjabi literature is read in three other places on this archive, and each of them is a way of reading rather than a home for the works. Read a Line takes a single couplet and opens it completely. The Parallel Reader sets a full text beside a translation with every word tappable. The reading library shelves both by how much help you will want beside you.
This shelf is the fourth thing. It holds the works as works: what was written, by whom, in which language and in which script, and why it still matters. Most of what belongs here would sit awkwardly in the other three, and the first of them proves the point. It is a poem that almost no Punjabi reader can read.