Muslim Saints of South Asia: The eleventh to ... - blog blog blog

THE ASCETIC OF PAKPATTAN
landscape, lakes with wild geese (apparently, a widely used motif
even in Sindhi poetry), a broken pitcher by the well, or so typical for
Ajodhan, a figure of a pātańī (ferryman):
pharīdā dukkhāņ setī dihu gaĩā, sūlāņ setī rāti
kha´rā pukārai pātańī, be´rā kappara vāti
In pain the day is spent, in grief the night is passed.
‘On the shoals,’ the sailor cries, ‘the boat is now stuck
fast’.
(Shackle 1993: 272)
Farid’s poetry in Persian, of course, is not a mirror image of his
poetic output in Multani, using the devices of another language, or,
for that matter, even the other way round. Apparently, even the poet
himself clearly felt this difference, using in his Persian verses the
takhallus¸ ‘Mas‘ūd’ and in Multani verses referring to himself as
‘Farīd’ (‘Pharīd’). This dissimilarity might have been determined
by the changing tasks of South Asian Sufism at various stages of
its development. In Mas‘ud’s words speaks Shaikh Fariduddin, the
Muslim mystic of the period of the consolidation of Islam in
the subcontinent. He addresses all the faithful and thinks in images
of a cosmopolitan lingua franca, widely used in all places and understood
by the Muslim community as a whole. In Pharid’s language
preaches Baba Farid, popular Punjabi saint, whose message is
addressed to a limited social environment, which was already
conscious of its ethnic and cultural distinctiveness. In all appearances,
it was exactly this pronounced linguistic-cultural specificity, characteristic
of the later period of development of Islam in South Asia,
which was conducive to the inclusion of Farīd-bāńī in Ādi Granth,
the scripture of an ethnically defined religious community.
On the fifth day of Muharram of the year 1265 Shaikh Farid passed
away with the pious exclamation ‘Yā H˛ayy Yā Qayyūm’ (O Living,
O Eternal!) on his lips. The cause of his death was khalah – this was
the collective name of various fatal maladies of the bowels, causing
acute pain or colic. Neither the family nor the fraternity had enough
money to procure a shroud for him. A matter of deep pride for Amir
Khurd, the author of Siyar al-awliyā, was the fact that his grandmother
Bibi Rani made a donation of her only remaining shawl, which was
used to cover the mortal remains of the saint. Shaikh Farid was buried
near his own khānqāh in a modest tomb made of bricks, and it was
only considerably later, in the middle of the fourteenth century, that
Sultan Muhammad Tughluq erected a marble tomb at its place.
101