Poetry, Power & Humanity—IX Najm Hosain Syed & Mushtaq Soofi: When Language Remembers What Power Erases

Khwaja Ghulam Farid brought the previous part of this series to a distinction essential for any discussion of culture: one may belong without enclosing. Language and land give human beings memory and rootedness, but identity becomes dangerous when belonging is converted into ownership. Farid’s Rohi could therefore remain intensely local while its poetry travelled far beyond the desert.

Before returning, in the concluding part, to the poet whose presence has hovered over this entire inquiry, we must consider two contemporary Punjabi intellectuals who helped us understand why these old voices remain politically and humanly alive: Najm Hosain Syed and Mushtaq Soofi.

Neither treated Punjabi poetry as an ornamental inheritance to be admired safely from a distance. For them, language carries memory; literature records conflicts suppressed by official histories; folklore preserves the consciousness of people whom courts and chronicles rarely considered worthy of remembrance. Their work asks a question inseparable from the theme of this series: who possesses the right to describe reality? That question takes us directly to power.

Najm Hosain Syed’s Recurrent Patterns in Punjabi Poetry, first published in 1968, changed the terms on which classical Punjabi poetry could be read. Its essays ranged from Shah Hussain and Baba Farid to Waris Shah, Bulleh Shah and other classical voices. Zubair Ahmad describes the book as foundational for modern Punjabi literary criticism.

Najm’s method was crucial. A poet did not inhabit an abstract mystical universe detached from history. Images emerged from material surroundings: fields, workshops, rivers, markets, household labour, hunger, class relations and the routines of ordinary people.

The poet could criticise that environment but could not remain indifferent to it. Najm consequently recovered social history from poetry without reducing poetry to sociology. This approach has informed much of our own journey through this series.

The spinning wheel in Shah Hussain was not merely a mystical symbol; it belonged to an artisan world. Heer’s tragedy could not be separated from property, family authority and marriage. Farid’s flour and salt revealed material inequality.

Bahu’s attack on accumulated learning exposed the possibility that religion itself could become possession. Khwaja Ghulam Farid’s Rohi was simultaneously landscape, memory and consciousness.

Najm taught readers to see those connections. His own creative work went further. He took inherited Punjabi forms and forced them to encounter contemporary reality. Zubair Ahmad shows how his poetry brought common people, disappearing professions, urbanisation, class contradiction and political repression into Punjabi verse.

Najm’s plays likewise revisited Punjab’s rebellions: Takhat Lahore engaged the memory of Dulla Bhatti, while Ikk Rat Ravi di reconstructed Ahmad Khan Kharal’s resistance during 1857. Jungle da Rakha satirised the process by which the powerful persuade weaker people to follow them, and Harh de Phull reflected upon the failure of Pakistan’s Left.

The important point is that Najm did not simply manufacture heroes. A particularly revealing reading of Takhat Lahore notes that Dulla Bhatti himself is removed from the dramatic centre.

Attention moves instead towards marginal figures—women, mendicants and the socially oppressed. The rebellion is  not allowed to become another cult of the Great Man. History returns to those whose collective action makes resistance possible.

This is history from below in poetic form. Conventional history remembers coronations, wars, treaties and rulers. Najm repeatedly turns towards what he calls the ordinary days—the innumerable days on which anonymous people labour, suffer, love, resist and disappear without acquiring monuments. His poetry after the collapse of the Soviet Union did not simply mourn a defeated ideological project; it returned to ordinary lives in search of meaning.

Anne Murphy has perceptively described this dimension of Najm’s work as remembering against sentimentality. His engagement with Punjab’s past does not invite nostalgic retreat. He brings past and present into conversation precisely so that memory remains politically alive rather than becoming a museum piece.  This distinction is fundamental.

Nostalgia says that everything valuable belonged to yesterday. Historical consciousness asks why yesterday’s conflicts remain unfinished today.

The connection with Mushtaq Soofi is intellectual as well as personal. As a student at Government College Lahore in the 1970s, Soofi entered Punjabi literary circles almost accidentally.

The Punjabi Adabi Sangat brought him into contact with Najm, who persuaded him to write in Punjabi. Mushtaq Soofi later recalled that the encouragement he received for his first rather ordinary Punjabi poem was deliberately generous: an older generation was trying to bring a younger writer into the linguistic and cultural struggle. That invitation became a lifelong commitment.

Mushtaq Soofi emerged as poet, critic, cultural activist and, through his long-running Punjab Notes, one of the most persistent public interpreters of Punjab’s language and civilisation. His central proposition is uncompromising: language and power are inseparable. A dominant group does not merely impose political institutions; it can elevate its language while degrading the speech of those it governs.

Punjabi presents a peculiar historical paradox. Punjab has frequently exercised enormous political and institutional weight, while Punjabi itself has remained distant from the centres of formal power. Persian dominated successive courts; colonial administration privileged Urdu and English; postcolonial upward mobility continued to reward languages other than the mother tongue of most Punjabis.

Sara Kazmi, presently Assistant Professor of English in Pennsylvania University, had been teaching at Gurmani Centre for Languages and Literature, Lahore University of Management Sciences and was involved in parallel Punjabi theatre, in her well-researched comprehensive article [Mind your language—The movement for the preservation of Punjabi] discussed the history of the Punjabi language movement, demonstrates how British administrators chose Urdu rather than Punjabi for provincial administration.

Mushtaq Soofi rightly insists that writing in Punjabi is itself politically consequential. His own journey from English literature and Urdu poetry towards Punjabi illustrates a form of decolonisation occurring within the educated Punjabi mind.

His poetry can compress an entire political economy into a few apparently simple lines.

Inheritance as Constitution

These lines come from Mushtaq Soofi’s wonderfully sardonic poem Qaumi Dastoor Di Akheeri Shiq—“The Final Clause of the National Constitution”. The poem continues the pattern through inherited distribution and dependence, before ending with the warning that anyone refusing this hereditary arrangement will be branded disloyal.  Its simplicity is deceptive.

A whole social order has been reduced to inheritance. Your father’s place determines yours. The cultivator’s child cultivates; privilege reproduces privilege; dependence reproduces dependence. The unwritten constitution is more powerful than the written one because society teaches each generation where it belongs. Resistance then acquires a familiar name: treason.

Here our recurring distinction between having and being acquires a political dimension. A ruling class does not merely have property. It seeks to have history, language, legitimacy and the authority to determine what counts as respectable knowledge. Those below it are expected not merely to possess less but to imagine less. Language becomes important because imagination begins with naming.

Mushtaq Soofi has repeatedly argued that language can serve both domination and emancipation. It can “other” weaker communities, but it also allows people to articulate experiences that the vocabulary of the dominant order cannot adequately express.

Mushtaq Soof’s defence of Punjabi should not be mistaken for linguistic chauvinism. The warning developed in our previous article still applies: a suppressed language deserves justice, but its liberation cannot justify suppressing another. Najm and Soofi are most valuable when read together precisely for this.

Najm recovers the historical consciousness embedded in Punjabi literature. Mushtaq Soofi exposes the structures that continue to marginalise the language carrying that consciousness.

Najm takes us from the canonical poet back to artisan, peasant, woman, rebel and ordinary day. Soofi brings that insight into contemporary struggles over language, education, class and cultural power. Both reject the assumption that culture descends from the court to the people.

Punjabi history suggests the opposite. Courts repeatedly changed languages. Dynasties disappeared. Empires collapsed. The language outside the palace continued to carry songs, tales, grief, humour, rebellion and memory. Mushtaq Soofi has aptly stressed that Punjabi, despite remaining outside state power, survived as a fully living language employed by poets, saints, intellectuals and ordinary people.

This explains why oral tradition has mattered so much throughout our series. What was not entered into official archives could still survive in a song. What rulers considered insignificant could remain in collective memory. The written archive tells us who possessed the throne; poetry can tell us who paid for it.

Najm Hosain Syed and Mushtaq Soofi prevent us from sentimentalising the poets considered in eight parts of this  series started on July 7, 2026, belonging to Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Punjab and Sindh: Mir Gul Khan Naseer, Atta Shad, Syed Hashmi, Karim Dashti, Mubarak Qazi, Allah Bux Bozdar, Rehman Baba, Khushal Khan Khattak, Baba Farid, Bulleh Shah, Waris Shah, Sultan Bahu, Khwaja Ghulam Farid, Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai, Sachal Sarmast—just to mention a few.

These and many other poets of our region are not decorative symbols of an allegedly tolerant past. Their poetry contains unresolved arguments about hierarchy, possession, gender, orthodoxy, language, labour and freedom. To read them seriously is to bring those arguments into the present.

Part IX has consequently stepped away from the classical poets to understand how they should be read. Najm teaches us to search beneath mystical vocabulary for material life and historical conflict. Mushtaq Soofi reminds us that even the language in which those conflicts are remembered occupies a field of power.

Together they leave us with a proposition that prepares the conclusion of this series: Power writes history from the throne. Humanity remembers it from below.

The final part will return to Lahore and to the faqir whose poetry, life and legend bring together nearly every thread we have followed love and rebellion, labour and language, renunciation and freedom, institutional authority and the refusal to submit. We have deliberately saved the throne for him.

[To be concluded]

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Dr. Ikramul Haq, Advocate Supreme Court, writer, literary critic, Adjunct Faculty at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), member Advisory Board and Visiting Senior Fellow of Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE), holds an LLD in tax laws. He was full-time journalist from 1979 to 1984 with Viewpoint and Dawn. He also served Civil Services of Pakistan from 1984 to 1996.