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The special feature of the current issue was meant to be on Punjabi literature that, in its written form, is almost 800 years old. Circulating in the oral form as oaths, abuses, reprimands, repartees and anecdotes, its origin was far older. In the written form, it had its beginning with Sheikh Farid. His ancestors had migrated from Iran, then called vilayat. He composed couplets called shaloks. They numbered more than a hundred comprising around eight hundred words. They derived from lendi boli, till now, a distinctive dialect of the western Punjab. Sheikh Farid’s couplets, overflowing with the milk of human kindness, raised this dialect to a literary level for the first time in the history of Punjab.

The diction, Sheikh Farid formed by fusing human content with humane motifs, did rely upon the Koran. It conveyed the significance of humility, piety and meditation. The sense of sin it sought to exonerate was of the polity. No wonder, it held out a lesson to those who enjoyed power and pelf. At the same time, it soothed the pang and pain of the poor and the low-born whom religious doctrines had nothing more to offer. Their past significance was there. To draw from them present meaning and future value did not lurk on the horizon then. No wonder, for three centuries almost, there was a complete void. Sheikh Farid’s couplets were routinely regarded as curiosities. His successors did write in imitation but they were bereft of literary excellence.

To revive Punjabi as a literary language, effort had to be made at a level of world-historical importance. There was the urgent need to enrich its diction that Guru Nanak did by borrowing words from all possible sources i. e. classical languages; not only Sanskrit and Pali of the Indian origin but also Arabic and Persian of what was then regarded as vilayat. In this context, the dialects of the areas to the west of Punjab were also not ignored. Thereby, Braj, Rajputani and even Sindhi were tapped for this purpose. Guru Nanak also saw to it that derivation from multiple sources was not of the haphazard sort. Two techniques were at hand i. e. tatsam and tadbhav which, in a masterly way, he employed to form words of his own. He did so by altering the spellings, tones, intonations and even meanings of words for use in his diction. From my study of the Western literature of the medieval times, I can think only of Dante who employed such subtle and suitable means to develop the Italian language. It is not out of context to remark that even now if some discourse on some subtle and profound topic is to flourish in pristine Punjabi, it is not possible without taking help from the diction he forged five centuries back with lot of subtlety and sobriety.

So far, Guru Nanak has been accepted as the founder of Sikhism. He propounded its doctrine through his Bani that formed the basis of Guru Granth, the magnum opus composed sixty-five years after his demise. The Sikh scholars have accepted his writing as prophetic. The Indian scholars have included him amongst remarkable savants, like Namdev and Kabir, who composed bhakti kavyas during the medieval times. Professor MacLoud, whose work on Guru Nanak and his doctrine is path-breaking, has regarded him as profoundest of all the poets of bakhti kavya, excelling even Kabir in this regard. Those were dark times and to reckon with them was not an easy task. The earthly experience, so poignantly evoked in the Vedas had got burdensome. The speculative flights, adumbrated in the Upanishads, had got submerged into the labyrinth of superstitions. The bonds of castes and creeds had strangled initiatives and innovations of all sorts. The local rulers, helped by their cohorts, deprived their subjects of all means which could have rendered their life worthwhile. They themselves played second fiddle to the invaders who had established their rule over them. Since Punjab acted as the threshold for outrages of this sort, Guru Nanak’s awareness of all things gone wrong, rather outrageous, knew no bounds at all.

On all aspects and facets of life, Guru Nanak looked profoundly askance. At the same times, he suggested alternatives, more meaningful and substantive. The earliest incident was that he refused to wear the sacred thread. In its place, he pleaded the case of honesty and humility. Likewise, was his attitude towards education, being imparted from childhood onward. As he grew up, he was faced with the thought of what vocation to pursue in life. He opted for one in which, not on profit but on welfare rested the choice. With the passage of time, the range of his choices got universal in space and eternal time. Rather than remain a recluse, he got married, had two sons and accepted the job of a store-keeper to enable his family to live with self-respect.

Over self-respect, it was self-esteem that he valued more than anything in life. This required of him to show to the people the right way of living. As Bhai Gurdas, his greatest chronicler testified, he launched his project to reform the people, the world over. As Guru Nanak hinted in a hymn of his own, he had the great urge to see the people and the world with his own eyes. For two decades, he travelled not only all over the Indian sub-continent but also went as far as Sri Lanka, Mecca and Baghdad. His interaction with the people was incessant that invariably used to end on a cordial note. It was because neither, like a politician, he exhorted the people to change nor like a preacher he frightened them with gory prospects of hell and suffering. He adopted very subtle and suggestive methods in which dramatic strategies and poetic-cum-musical measures played their roles with consummate skill.

This Feature comprises five sections.

The first section comprises renderings into English of selections from the Guru Nanak’s oeuvre, named Bani in Punjabi.

The second section carries poems composed by the subsequent, particularly the 20^th century poets of Punjabi to which Guru Nanak’s contribution is the greatest. The editor of the Feature has translated them into English from Punjabi in which they were composed by poets, four of them no more alive and the rest living in the India, Pakistan, England and Canada.

The third one carries seven articles on the different aspects and facets of his life, personality, journeys, vision, creative principle, literary canon, patriarchy and his acceptability that has residual, dominant and, emergent proportions. Their authors, some no longer alive and the others highly reputed in their fields have pondered deeply over the issues they have grappled with in their respective articles. One of the articles by the Editor of this Feature deals with Guru Nanak’s presentation in playwriting and painting, the hindrances so far accepted by painters and way in which their acceptance can be dealt with in innovative ways.

While the fourth section ‘Perspectives’ carries three write-ups, the fifth one presents a review of Khooni Vaisakhi – A Poem from the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre 1919, originally written in Punjabi by Nanak Singh, a firsthand witness to the incident. The poem remained unpublished until his grandson Navdeep Suri has recently translated it into English.