very age has its own reasons and dynamics for selecting figures that represent its cultural ethos. One wonders what kind of relationship the social media generation today has with the iconic figure of Bulleh Shah.

Bulleh Shah played a prominent role in building a narrative that rejected a society held hostage to the orthodoxy in the later Mughal period and sought to propose alternatives to it. Nadir Shah’s triumphant march to Delhi and the plunder of the city effectively ended the central rule of the Mughals and the politico-religious narrative that they had advanced to support their system of governance. The Punjab, in particular, was no longer firmly under the command of Delhi. Instead, it was influenced by and responded to the pressures from Marathas, Sikhs, Afghans and the European forces. The region became a battleground for decades. As a result it was reduced to gore, death and destruction. Bulleh Shah was a witness to and experienced some of these tragedies.

Punjabis spoke and wrote Punjabi. The Sikhs crafted their own language with a script called gurmukhi for liturgical purposes. However, relations between Muslim and Sikhs stayed strong because of the respect shown to Muslim Sufis like Baba Fareed by Guru Nanak and his successors. This link pitched the two together till the freedom struggle in the Twentieth Century started recasting national identities.

Most of the Sikhs identified as Punjabis. Their language was Punjabi written in the gurmukhi script. Most of the Sikhs and the lands they once governed were in the Punjab. This was not the case with the Muslims. They were spread all over the Indian subcontinent and beyond it. Aspiring to be in the Indian mainstream, many opted for Urdu as their langue of societal upgrade. This trend split the Punjabi Muslims of whom many had to craft an identity that had no overlap with the Sikhs. The latter, in their drive for a unified sensibility owned prominent Punjabi poets. Their efforts in the Nineteenth Century revitalised the Punjabi literary heritage. Mohan Sigh Diwana was a prominent figure in this quest.

Among Punjab Muslims, Bulleh Shah was seen as a symbol of defiance, unorthodoxy and lack of conformism. He stood for truth and had launched a crusade against hypocrisy and double standards. In epochs that valued non-conformism Bulleh Shah became a figure head that spoke of non-accumulation and dispossession and a life based on equality and fearless, unscathed propagation of truth. This figure of Bulleh Shah continued to be garnished by generation that followed in both India and Pakistan.

The social media have provided amazing reach and potency to lay people to say and see everything. Currently, the exchange does not favour validation along the way that is often portrayed as a curb on freedom of expression. Gradually, everything will be contextualised and put in proper perspective.

But he was a different figure for vocalists and playwrights wanting to appropriate his idiom for their own purposes. Many of them used phrases, images and symbols popularised by Bulleh Shah. However, the usage was rarely true to tradition. In some cases at least there probably was a deliberate twist that the man in the street was not aware of.

So how does the social media generation relate to Bulleh Shah? Many among the youth are exposed to the past or its vestiges through platforms like Coke Studio.

One particular trait of this generation, perhaps promoted by the media choices, is their preference for shortness of the message or the brevity of the interaction. It is supposed to be instant and it is often taken as the last word. There is little effort to test the veracity of the claims. One wonders whether anyone has made the effort to go beyond the message or the presentation or find out what is the reference point and what is its basis. There is no time even to take a deep breath and reconsider because that goes against the great speed norm.

Because of insistence on brevity and instant access, the generation may know no better than thinking in terms of absolutes. A lot of what was said following or between many stages of nuances may be taken literally and imposed as such. Such absoluteness can easily be taken as a fact and bandied as the whole truth.

Because of their genius for coining clever phrases and striking images poets can easily be exploited by slogan mongers. One worries that the latest generations of the youth are more enamoured of this ability. One also wonders what happens when the emphasis shifts to the visual as against the verbal. The current age is more hooked to the visual because of the various technological facilitations; the verbal has receded into the background as a may-be reference.

The social media have provided amazing reach and potency to lay people to say and see everything. Currently, the exchange does not favour validation along the way that is often portrayed as a curb on freedom of expression. Gradually, everything will be contextualised and put in proper perspective. The unwise Bulleh Shah, too, will fall to what used to be called ‘adventure advocacy’ of truth without responsibility.

Bulleh Shah’s urs was celebrated last week

The author is a culture critic based in Lahore