A rather random rant. Or maybe not really that random. I stumbled upon this version of Heer sung by Lata Mangeshkar. I had heard it earlier and didn’t like it much.
Since I searched for this on YouTube, it showed me another version in Hindi. A little more searching and I found out it was from the 1970 Bollywood movie Heer Ranjha.
The lyrics are attributed to Kaifi Azmi, but it’s actually a line-by-line translation of a stanza from the epic Heer by Waris Shah. I don’t know how familiar Kaifi was with Punjabi, so someone else may have translated it for him. The industry has always been terrible at giving proper credit, so everything likely just got put under Kaifi Azmi’s name.
The real sad part is that this stanza isn’t even by Waris Shah. It was the result of publishers trying to sell the “longest” version of Heer for commercial gain. They paid writers of the time to add more stanzas to the same tune, corrupting the original text in the process. I wrote about it in this old post on my blog and this Twitter thread.
For so long, I wanted to read this book about Heer Waris Shah and man it turned out to be such wahiyaat stuff. Will post about it in detail tomorrow.
— Amardeep Sidhu (@amardeep_sidhu) April 14, 2021
Zahid Iqbal, in his work on inauthentic stanzas in Heer, attributes this particular one to Hidayatullah.
I haven’t watched the movie, so I don’t know the exact storyline, but there’s another problem: it portrays Heer in a completely different light. Waris’s Heer is a rebel. In the whole story, she fights the system for her freedom. She even argues with the Qazi who comes to read her nikah. Waris’s Heer wouldn’t be lamenting and crying the way she is in this piece of poetry.
YouTube comments tell me the song was widely appreciated, mostly because of the emotions and Lata’s voice. But the fact remains: it is neither Kaifi nor Waris Shah.
It is Hidayatullah!