The qissa is the long narrative poem of Punjab, sung or recited, usually a love story ending badly. The four that everyone knows are Heer Ranjha, Mirza Sahiban, Sohni Mahiwal and Sassi Punnun. Puran Bhagat and Dulla Bhatti stand beside them.
The form came in with Persian, and the earliest Punjabi qissas are by Muslim poets writing in a Punjabi that Sikhs and Hindus read as easily. Damodar Das wrote a Heer in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, Waris Shah wrote the definitive one in 1766, Hashim Shah wrote Sassi, Fazal Shah wrote Sohni, Peelu wrote Mirza, Qadaryar wrote Puran Bhagat.
In every one of them a woman defies her family and dies for it, and the poet is on her side. That is the whole of the moral architecture of Punjabi popular literature and it has not changed.
The qissas were sung by professionals at fairs and in courtyards, in a form that could run for hours, and they were the main vehicle of literacy and memory in a largely unlettered society.
They are still sung. A verse of Heer surfaces in an ordinary Punjabi conversation the way a proverb does.
The standard metre is the baint, a long line in rhyming couplets that a singer can hold indefinitely, and the poets who used it were writing for the ear of somebody who could not read a word of it.
They are all tragedies and all four turn on a family or a clan refusing a match. What they are actually about is the authority of the biradari over an individual.
The form is Muslim in origin and Persian in ancestry, and it was written by Muslim poets and sung by everybody. It is the shared literature of the Punjab in the most exact sense.
Scholarship on the Punjabi qissa tradition.