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The compositions attributed to the great Punjabi Sufi saint Šayḫ Farīd are of a unique character in the Gurū Granth, and are quite distinctive even within the general category of the bhagat bāṇī (utterances of the saint-poets) to which they are commonly assigned. Following a brief biography of Farīd the Sufi saint, this article outlines the salient features of the language and content of these compositions. The latest evidence is then used to explore the vexing questions of their authorship and how they came to be incorporated in the Gurū Granth, before engaging in a final discussion…

is the most important member of the Dardic sub-group of Indo-Aryan languages, with 2,000,000 speakers in Jammū and Kashmīr in India and about 250,000 in the adjacent region in Pakistan in 1961. While prolonged cultural influence from Northern India has brought Kashmīrī closer than the other Dardic languages to the rest of Indo-Aryan, it exhibits many of the characteristic phonological features of Dardic resulting from the separate development of the group in the Middle Indian period. Kashmīrī ha…

, meaning “west” in Pand̲j̲ābī, was first given wide currency as a linguistic term by Grierson in the Linguistic survey of India. Following this authority, the name is often applied to the Indo-Aryan dialects of the western Pand̲j̲āb (Pākistān), as opposed to the Pand̲j̲abī [ q.v.] of the central and eastern districts. The more natural feminine “Lahndī” is now general in South Asian scholarly usage, but neither form has ever achieved popular local currency. 1. Status and dialects. Grierson distinguished the dialects of the westen Pand̲j̲āb as belonging to a “Lahndā la…

, or “bitter repudiation (sc. of the beloved)”, a term of Perso-Urdu literary criticism which has two senses. First, it denotes a theme intrinsic to Persian love poetry which came to be prominently exploited for its own sake in the 10th/16th-century Persian g̲h̲azal by such sabk-i hindī poets as Waḥs̲h̲ī (d. 991/1553), although the exclusive association with the latter suggested by S̲h̲iblī ( S̲h̲iʿr al-ʿad̲j̲am , 3, 16) is to be questioned (P. Losensky, Welcoming Fighānī , Costa Mesa 1998, 82). Later, the term wā-sōk̲h̲t was used in the Urdu poetry of the…

, Urdu poet whose pivotal significance from the viewpoint of literary history is tellingly unsupported by much reliable biographical data. Even his name is uncertain, although the best evidence suggests “Walī Muḥammad”. The popular sobriquet “Walī Dakanī” indicates the general belief that he was born in the Dakan at Awrangābād, probably in 1079/1668. At the age of twenty he moved to Aḥmadābād, where he studied at the madrasa attached to the shrine of the Ḳādirī saint Wad̲j̲īh al-Dīn. A number of Walī’s poems attest his close association with Gud̲j̲arāt, including a short mat̲h̲nawī …

, the premier language of Islamic religious and cultural expression in modern South Asia. In its contemporary significance in the wider Islamic world, it may be ranked immediately after Arabic and English. Urdū is the national language of Pākistān and it has official status under the eighth schedule of the Constitution in India, the home of the majority of its native speakers. Its great geographical range is now extended to the South Asian diaspora, notably in Arabia and the Gulf states, in the …

is only loosely to be defined as the ¶ Indo-Aryan language of the Pand̲j̲āb [ q.v.]. Most linguists follow the narrower definition proposed by Grierson in the Linguistic survey of India, according to which “Pand̲j̲ābī proper” is restricted to the speech of the central and eastern districts only, in distinction from the western dialects separately classified under Lahndā [ q.v.]. 1. Historic status and dialects. Pand̲j̲ābī is thus placed between Lahndā to the west and the Khaŕī bōlī of the Dihlī region, which forms the base of Urdū and of modern standard Hind…

, a historic region of the western part of the Indian subcontinent, and now the name of a province in the Indian Union. It is bounded by the Pakistan provinces of Sind and Pand̲j̲āb on the west and northwest, and by the Indian states of Pand̲j̲āb, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh on the northeast, Madhya Pradesh on the east, southeast and south, and Gud̲j̲arāt on the south. With an area of 342,267 km2/132,149 sq. miles, it is the second largest state in the Indian Union (after Madhya Pradesh), but because of its climate and habitat, has a less dense population than any ot…

, the older Indian Sindhu , the name for the region around the lower course of the Indus river (from which the region takes its name, see mihrān ), i.e. that part of the Indus valley south of approximately lat. 28° 30’ N., and the delta area, now coming within the modern state of Pākistān. There are alluvial soils in the delta and in the lands along the river, liable to inundation when the river ¶ rises in spring from the melting snows of the northern Indian mountains and rendered fertile by a network of irrigation canals and channels for flood control. To the west of …