Mirror images across tales of love
Harbans Singh

Heer Ranjha and Other Legends of Punjab.
by Harjeet Singh Gill. Harman, New Delhi. Rs 600. Pages 157.

HARJEET Singh Gill, Emeritus Professor of Semiotics, while presenting the five most popular legends of Punjab, has subjected the narratives of Heer and Puran Bhagat to their specific existential and semiotic parameters. The other three — Sassi-Punnu, Sohni-Mahinwal and Mirza-Sahiban have been rendered into free verse.

Semiotics, for the uninitiated, is a science concerned with signs and deals with all the processes of information interchange in which signs feature. Human beings, it is believed, talk, write, wave and disguise themselves and put up signposts and erect barriers to communicate messages to others.

Thus, a reader could be excused for wondering why only two of the five legends get this treatment and why the author has chosen the other three for his poetic skills and why he himself has not cared to explain this selectivity.

Semiotics or no semiotics, the fact remains that the reach of all these legends continues to transcend time and space. The strength of Heer lies in the fact that Waris Shah indulges in the generalisations on the nature of men, women and the affairs of this and the other world. Beginning with the most ordinary and the mundane affairs of the world, he invariably moves to the cosmological context where the highest principles of faith and friendship are underscored. Dealing with the theme of love and renunciation, he brings out the pristine purity in thought, word and deed on one hand and mind and body on the other.

While the faithful are entitled to their beliefs and sceptics to their cynicism, the truth is that after going through all the five legends, a reader has a fair idea of the Punjab that is now history. The reader would also not fail to notice certain common traits in the characters and that often their responses become predictable.

The female characters, except for Sassi, are the prisoners of social norms. As Punjabi girls, Heer, Sohini and Sahiban are confined to the family and home and, therefore, there is no question of going beyond or putting up a fight against the tenets. Even Heer, who invokes the cosmological principles, all too easily succumbs to the ways of the world. When threatened, castigated and abused, she becomes submissive. Conceit, in such circumstances, happens to be the most potent weapon, and Heer, too, uses it to connive with Saihti, her sister-in-law.

In contrast, only Sassi has the courage to break out of the beaten path and embark upon a journey into the unknown in search of the object of her love. One might suggest that while heroines of the legends are held in thraldom by society and the immediate family, Sassi, to a large degree, is fairly well empowered as the well being of her foster family has been earned by the riches that she brought with her.

Reading of all these legends together also brings out the abnormal childhood of some of the heroes and their inability to come to grips with life when faced with the reality. Thus, we have a Ranjha, who has had so pampered an early life that escaping from the grind of everyday existence is considered better by him than trying to cope with the problem of breaking the earth to earn a livelihood. When confronted with the harsh reality of life after his father’s death, he runs away just as the Lady of Shallot did, when the mirror of his make-believe world shatters. The next time his dream is shattered, he prefers to renounce the world, though the whole exercise puts a question mark on the credibility of the mendicants of the times.

Similarly, Puran had an extraordinarily abnormal childhood, which perhaps explains his inability to forge normal relationships, though the lust for Luna only aggravates his problem. In his case, too, renunciation adds more questions than answers, if one is not particularly endowed with the gift of faith. After all that he has endured, one can understand his becoming a Yogi, but what baffles is the urge in him to draw Sundran out of her cloister and then spurn her love. What kind of a Yogi was he to be so subservient to his ego as to establish a stamp of his authority over that hapless princess?

Perhaps these questions would not have arisen if all these legends were not read in a single-book form. Read as a unit, these questions are disturbing, but in stirring the soul, they reestablish their reach and depth.

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