ith every passing year, it appears that the rituals surrounding the urs of some of the most contentious people are being shaped increasingly in conformity with mainstream perceptions of religion. Bulleh Shah’s urs, observed last week in Kasur, was, in comparison with the character of the man and the life he lived, a remarkably tame and timid affair.

The times in which he lived marked the beginning of the end of Muslim rule in the subcontinent. He could see the fissures that had been glossed over by the possession of political power beginning to grow wider and deeper.

The main target of his attack was the hypocrisy and double standards of those in positions of religious authority.

In a way, the various shades of the Sufi movement, if it can be called a movement, constituted a rebellion against the nexus of political power and religious orthodoxy, at a time when the humanistic narrative was being pushed to the backburner.

Bulleh Shah’s life and poetry represented a rebellion against this narrative. He challenged the perceptions and hierarchies of religious authority that had been put in place around him.

Like other Sufis of the Punjab, Bulleh Shah had a significant political dimension to his life and thought, which over the years has been muffled in the language of mystical practice and esoteric behaviour. His reaction was so extreme that the orthodoxy refused to let him be buried in the designated place. His last rites, so to say, were boycotted by them. In the end, Bulleh Shah died and was buried in the manner in which he had lived all his life, outside the pale of acceptability.

From the empty shell of rituals now observed, the vitality that triggered the revolt needs to be reignited and lived anew. 

The alliance of political expediency, religious manipulation and self-interest was something Bulleh Shah found profoundly revolting and anti-humanistic. He did not seek refuge in the boundaries laid down by religion, caste and social structures. Instead, he challenged them all and, in the manner of the malamatis, denounced everything. And he had much to denounce, his being a Sayyid, the persona of piety, sophistry in the name of knowledge and inherited social status.

These anti-social stances and challenges to hierarchy are often couched in the language of mysticism and otherworldly practice, so that the ordinary person need not grasp their implications. But it was evident from his poetry and lifestyle that Bulleh Shah found the world around him contrary to the spirit of humanism, which, for him, was the true expression of religious sensibility.

Today, the urs of Bulleh Shah, like those of many other Sufis who veered towards the extreme, has been reduced to the observance of rituals and the cultural spectacle of singing and dancing. In the process, it has lost its connection to the impulse that gave the tradition its force.

Bulleh Shah’s mazar, too, now stands in the midst of the fast-expanding city of Kasur. It is difficult to imagine that the man was not allowed to be buried within the settlement.

What remains today is the empty shell of ritual. What needs to be recovered is the vitality that once made such a revolt necessary, and to reignite it, not merely commemorate it.

The writer is a Lahore-based culture critic.