“Between Scripts, Beyond Borders: What It Means to Be a Punjabi Hindu-Sikh Sufi Poet in Urdu”
By Manav Sachdeva urf Maasoom Shah
What is my being as a Punjabi Hindu-Sikh writer of Sufi Poetry in Urdu while living between Ludhiana, New Delhi, and New York? What does it mean to me, mean for me, and mean to other people as they look at me with equal parts wonder and disdain as I embrace Farsi and Urdu as my own as did my ancestors prior to partition when Urdu was a language of our regions, as Javed Akhtar once said about language being of regions rather than religions?
To be a Punjabi Hindu-Sikh writing Sufi poetry in Urdu is to carry the weight of centuries in my breath and the burden of a border in my bones. It means returning to a home I never left—and was never allowed to fully claim.
It means that when I write in Nastaliq script or even Roman or Hindi script but in Urdu, or quote Hafiz or write in Naskh in Farsi, I am not converting, betraying, or straying. I am completing a circle. One my ancestors began long before Partition redrew maps and mistrust into the fabric of everyday language.
As Javed Akhtar once reminded us, “Languages belong to regions, not religions.” I write in Urdu not because I am Muslim though I don’t deny that label for myself either, but specifically, because I am Punjabi. Because I am from a land where Heer ran through the fields, where Bulleh Shah danced with defiance, where Shah Hussain stitched poetry into the shawls of the soul.
It means I am watched—sometimes with wonder, sometimes with suspicion. Some marvel at the fusion: the New York poet invoking Mir and Ghalib in Brooklyn cafés, speaking of ishq-e-haqiqi in the same breath as trauma therapy and diasporic longing. Others look on with narrowed eyes, asking—silently or aloud—“Whose side are you on?”
To that, I say: I am on the side of poetry. Of shared breath across centuries. Of the tongue that trembles with truth regardless of script. Of the language that fed my grandfather’s soul in Amritsar and now finds voice again in mine in Washington Square or Connaught Place.
It means I translate myself daily—between identities, continents, alphabets. Sometimes I write Mohabbat in Devnagari. Sometimes I whisper shukr where others expect dhanyavaad. I live between the ik onkar and the bismillah, between naan and bagel, between Sufi silences and the American chaos of self-invention.
And what does it mean for me? It means freedom. It means rebellion. It means healing.
It means to remember that before Urdu became politicized, it was loved. Before it was feared, it was sung. It was the shared heritage of Lahore and Ludhiana–the cities of my father’s and my birth, Delhi and Dera Ghazi Khan–cities of ancestry, further and present.
I do not ask permission to write in Urdu. I write to reclaim what was always mine.
And what might it mean to others?
Maybe discomfort. Maybe curiosity. Maybe a slow awakening to the lie that language must belong to creed. Maybe the beginning of a reckoning: that art refuses to stay in its box, that love poems don’t ask for passports, and that faith is sometimes just the belief that what was broken can be made whole.
So I will continue.
To write qawwalis and qasidas and sehras and ghazals and nazms in cafés. To quote Baba Farid beside Rumi. To live as a bridge—not between East and West, but between the false walls we’ve built within ourselves. And if some still look on with disdain, let them. I am writing in the voice of my ancestors.
And they are no longer silent.
