Waris Shah was born at Jandiala Sher Khan in Sheikhupura district and wrote his Heer in 1766 at Malka Hans near Pakpattan, in a room beside a mosque that still stands.
The poem runs to about 630 stanzas. It is a love story and it is also a survey of eighteenth-century Punjab: its castes, its trades, its foods, its medicine, its law, its insults, its clergy. He puts the whole society into it and is savage about most of it, particularly the qazis and the mullahs.
The story is Heer of the Sials of Jhang and Ranjha of the Ranjhas of Takht Hazara, her forced marriage to the Kheras, his becoming a jogi at Tilla, the elopement, the poisoning by her own family.
The metre is fixed and the recitation is a distinct performance tradition with its own tunes. A good Heer singer can hold a village for six hours.
In 1947 Amrita Pritam wrote Aj Aakhaan Waris Shah Nu, addressing him by name and asking him to speak from his grave, because a hundred thousand daughters were now weeping and one had been enough for him. It is the most quoted poem about Partition in either Punjab.
His tomb is at Jandiala Sher Khan. It is in Pakistan and it is maintained.
The story is older than he is. Damodar Das wrote a version in the sixteenth century, Muqbal in the eighteenth, and there are Heers by Ahmad Gujjar, Hamid and others. His is the one that closed the competition, and to say Heer in Punjabi now is to mean his and nobody else's.
The form is the kissa, Punjabi narrative verse in the baint metre, and the shelf it belongs on holds Hashim Shah's Sassi Punnun, Fazal Shah's Sohni Mahiwal and Hafiz Barkhurdar's Mirza Sahiban. They are Muslim poets writing Punjabi in the Persian script, and together they are very nearly the whole literary canon of the language before the twentieth century.
That a Muslim poet dead for a hundred and fifty years was who Punjab addressed when it needed somebody to speak in 1947 is the thing worth holding on to. The language did not divide when the province did, and the poem that says so is read on both sides of the line.