Poetry, Power & Humanity—X Shah Hussain: ‘Thrones are not won merely by asking’

The previous part ended with a proposition: power writes history from the throne; humanity remembers it from below. Najm Hosain Syed and Mushtaq Soofi helped us understand why Punjabi poetry survived outside formal centres of power—through memory, song, oral tradition and the language of ordinary people. We deliberately saved the throne for Shah Hussain.

We began our Punjabi poetry journey with Shah Hussain, crossing his “narrow passage” from attachment towards freedom. We return to him now because one of his briefest lines gathers almost every theme explored since then—possession and renunciation, labour and freedom, institutional authority and resistance, love and the refusal to submit.

Najm Hosain Syed’s celebrated essay on Shah Hussain opens with an arresting contrast. In modern Lahore, Hussain lies buried, but once each year the myth of Lal Hussain returns through the Festival of Lights. 

Najm hears an “undertone of mockery” in the released feet and voices around Shalamar: ordinary bodies momentarily mocking ancient walls. Hussain himself, he writes, danced a “dance of mockery” through Lahore’s streets. Najm’s essay, The throne builds walls. The faqir dances outside them. That image provides the proper conclusion to this inquiry.

Hussain’s Lahore was an imperial city, but his imagination did not belong to the court. Formally educated and remembered as having memorised the Qur’an, he could have sought the prestige of scholarship and clerical respectability. Instead, the biographical tradition remembers red clothes, music, dancing, public non-conformity and an unwillingness to let received authority determine the limits of experience.

This was not ignorance rebelling against knowledge. It was an experience challenging authority’s claim to monopolise truth. Najm interprets Hussain’s transformation as a refusal merely to accept knowledge received from others and an insistence on knowing for himself. His chosen form reinforced that independence. 

Punjabi kafi drew upon folk song, domestic labour, birth, desire, separation and death. These compositions, Najm stresses, were not primarily texts “intended for the eye”; music belonged to their meaning.

Language became social memory. Persian could speak from administration and court; Hussain’s Punjabi spoke from streets, workshops, courtyards and the experiences of those who possessed neither chronicles nor palaces. The ordinary voice required no permission from the throne.

Refusing the Kheras

The Shahmukhi text is preserved as Kafi 105; the Roman rendering and literary English translation are ours. Najm’s reading is crucial. The conventional marriage song normally leaves mother and daughter within an accepted social order. Hussain alters the structure: the daughter acquires the power of choice and rejection. The Kheras represent wealth, security and social approval; Ranjha represents the condemned alternative through which she claims fulfilment.

Waris Shah later exposed the institutions that converted Heer into property. Hussain, speaking through Heer’s voice, gives her the power to reject the transaction itself. In Erich Fromm’s terms, the conflict again becomes one between having and being. The Kheras offer what society recognises—status, security and acceptable alliance. Ranjha offers relationship rather than acquisition. The choice appears irrational to a possessive society. Freedom often does.

Hussain’s association with Madho Lal poses a similar challenge to bounded identity. Historical and devotional accounts differ in detail, and modern categories should not be imposed carelessly on a sixteenth-century relationship. The enduring cultural fact is the composite name Madho Lal Hussain. A Muslim faqir and a Hindu companion became inseparable in Lahore’s collective memory. Later politics hardened precisely the communal boundaries that the popular name refuses to observe.

Labour also enters Hussain’s poetry not as picturesque scenery but as lived experience. Mushtaq Soofi has drawn attention to his spinning-wheel imagery as an early recognition of alienated work. In one kafi the female voice rejoices when the spinning wheel breaks because life has been released from torment. Soofi’s discussion of work, self-fulfilment and enslavement helps recover the material world beneath the mystical vocabulary.

We should not turn Hussain into Marx before Marx. The point is simpler: work can express human creativity, but under domination it can become exhaustion and estrangement. Punjabi metaphysical language repeatedly grows out of such material life.

Hussain’s rebellion also carries the Malamati suspicion of public sanctity: the ego can convert virtue into reputation and religion into status. The warning is contemporary. Wealth, achievement, piety and politics are increasingly staged for display; digital visibility itself becomes a possession.

Hussain diminished the respectable self in order to enlarge the human one.

The Journey Must Be Made

These lines are preserved as Kafi 85. Najm reads the crossing as a transition from the familiar towards the unknown. Desire ceases to be a wish and becomes action. That may be the deepest political meaning of this series: freedom cannot remain an aspiration. A person must cross; a society must cross. The unjust order often survives because familiarity itself provides a kind of security.

The series has followed many such crossings: Farid from private pain to universal compassion; Bulleh Shah beyond imposed identity; Waris through property and patriarchy; Bahu from ritual to accountability; Khwaja Ghulam Farid from rootedness without exclusion. Najm and Soofi showed how language remembers these crossings. Shah Hussain embodies the crossing itself.

This is why Mela Chiraghan remains more than a shrine festival. Najm saw in its music and moving bodies an echo of Hussain’s mockery of walls. Mushtaq Soofi connects the festival with spring, illumination, rhythm, regeneration and a poet who made music and dance part of lived practice. Empires disappear. The dance survives.

Commemoration has its danger: establishments can convert rebels into harmless saints. The shrine survives while the questions fade; the kafi becomes entertainment. Recovering Hussain requires reconnecting poetry with material life and resistance. And now we arrive at the lines for which we deliberately reserved the conclusion.

The Throne

The text is preserved as Kafi 89. The throne need not be reduced to kingship. It can represent sovereignty in a larger sense: dignity, moral independence, freedom from fear and liberation from compulsions that make human beings servants of wealth, status and authority.

Hussain’s paradox is decisive. The seeker of worldly power wants others beneath him. The faqir seeking freedom wants no one beneath him—and therefore cannot willingly remain beneath another. Genuine freedom, in this sense, cannot simply be requested from power.

This does not mean that rights should not be demanded. Constitutions must restrain rulers; democratic institutions, organised politics and enforceable rights remain indispensable. Hussain offers no substitute for law or public struggle. He gives us something that institutions alone cannot create: the human disposition without which institutions themselves become new instruments of domination.

A population trained only to petition the powerful reproduces hierarchy. A citizen conscious of dignity begins to ask why the throne possesses such power in the first place. Across these ten essays, Punjabi poetry has returned us repeatedly to the same truth: humanity is diminished whenever having overwhelms being—when property overwhelms love, ritual overwhelms conscience, identity overwhelms personhood, language becomes domination and authority becomes an end in itself.

Participation without possession.
Love without ownership.
Faith without arrogance.
Identity without exclusion.
Knowledge without domination.
Power without dehumanisation.

That is the civilisation these poets imagined from below. Kings possessed Lahore. Shah Hussain possessed no throne. Four centuries later, we remember the faqir. The thrones have changed hands many times. His song has not.

کہےَ حسین فقیر سائیں دا
تخت ن ملدے منگے

Says Hussain, the faqir of his Master:
Thrones are not won merely by asking.

[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.