Phenomenon of death is something we encounter so frequently that it loses its disturbing immediacy. We take it as an invisible extraneous particle that causes a glitch in the ever rolling biological machine of life for a moment. We pause briefly, of course with a sense of sorrow but fail to experience it as if nothing serious has happened unless it is death of someone we can relate to.

Death, mystics would say, gives meaning to life. Being aware of death’s visibly invisible presence all around us makes us conscious of short span we are given on this earth that compels us to make something of our otherwise meaningless life.

Life affirms its presence by nurturing and nourishing itself in innumerable forms and shapes. Death affirms itself by destroying what is nurtured and nourished in forms and shapes. Life and death are twin but enemies that share the same habitat. But it is the latter that being elder and more powerful ultimately pushes the former out into an infinite wilderness of time called eternity. We all know that death at the end of the day takes away whatever meaning life supposedly has.

But the opposite is also true if we look at our collective historical experience. Death in certain situations creates meaning which is grasped as a metaphor of inextinguishable fire of life opening up and illuminating new vistas.

Remember great heroes; historical and mythical? Can you imagine Socrates san hemlock? He is what he is in our imagination because of his being condemned to death by his Athenian fellow citizens, chosen by lot to serve as jurors.

It is hard to understand the monumental impact he had on the coming generations without his death, the death of a man who in the words of Plato was ‘the wisest and most just of all men’. His death in fact made him larger than life.

It on the one hand exposed the hollowness of a social order arrayed against him and on the other showed him having an unusual courage to stand his ground, ready to pay the ultimate price for his intellectual and moral independence.

The situation is not much different if we look at our folk and classical heroes and heroines. Death is what stalked them all their lives not for any natural reason but because of socio-cultural factors closely related with power structures of our society. Death immortalized them all by making them symbols of élan vital.

The story of the greatest heroine of our folk and classical literature Heer is well-known. After her forced marriage she runs away with her lover Ranjha on a journey of uncertain destiny. Both are captured and tried. She is given over to her in-laws.

When the lament of Ranjha turned Jogi (Yogi) sets the town ablaze, she is allowed to get re-united with him. Now Heer’s family persuades them to solemnize their marriage.

Ranjha leaves Heer in the custody of her family and goes back to his town to bring the marriage party to tie the knot as is the tradition. Heer’s family in a desperate bid to restore their so-called sense of honour poisoned Heer. When Ranjha hears the news he sighs and breathes his last.

Now imagine them married and living happily ever after with their seven children! Can you think that the great poets like Damodar Gulati and Waris Shah would have bothered to touch the story? Death is what makes their life highly significant and imparts a universal dimension to the unceasing struggle they waged against their oppressively hierarchical society.

The lovers’ end forces us to go back to the beginning and ‘in the beginning is the end’. And the beginning in this case is the defiance; the defiance of the given as is shown by Ranjha’s giving up of his inherited lands and Heer’s choosing of a lowly traveler as his lover that thinly conceals the end of what is known as a normal life in a normal society i.e. the social and emotional conformity peddled as virtue.

Such a virtue means acceptance of what is unacceptable and non resistance to what is to be resisted as a free conscious individual. Death not in the sense of natural end of one’s span of life, is a corollary of what precedes in terms of action taken to realize a dream of human unity in society driven by divisive forces of class and caste.

So is the case with other legendry characters like Sassi Punnu, Sohni Mahinwal and Mirza Sahiban. Sassi’s dying in the burning desert in search of her abducted lover and Sohni’s drowning in the river Chenab in an unstoppable urge to go to the other end to see her lover is what catapulted them to the stage of myth.

In all the stories mentioned except that of Miza Sahiban, death is a distant presence hardly noticed till we reach the end. And when the end comes it comes as a highlighter of the actions of the protagonists compelling us to see them as metaphors of something bigger than the sum total of what they did while living.

In the saga of young lovers Mirza Sahiban, death is not a lurking shadow in the back-ground; rather it is a haunting element of the fore-ground, a sign of a thinly concealed destiny. “He shall end up being slaughtered for his earthly love with his horse he will live wind’s life”, says Hafiz Barkhurdar while describing Mirza. Both Mirza and Sahiban undeterred by palpable threat of death do undauntedly what they must: the rejection of tribal and feudal morality born of patriarchic values enshrined as a sacrosanct social code. Both go down fighting their foes signifying a new stance in the history of individual and social relationships in our tradition bound society that puts such a premium on submission. Open defiance of dehumanized social order resulting in the young lovers’ death makes it a metaphor of mysterious flux of human passion.

Dying in young age for a human ideal always evokes strong feelings; inspiration and pathos. Long after the electrifying episode of Mirza and Sahiban we encounter in twentieth century another young man called Bhagat Singh who with his unsurpassable poise accepted death as a consequence of his revolutionary action against the British colonialists that stirred the imagination of the sub-continent.

Without the extraordinary courage he displayed at the moment of his hanging, he would be little more than an angry young lad with a crude bomb in his bag.

Hero is reborn in his death signifying the perpetual pull of yet unrealized but realizable human potential at symbolic level and thus becomes a metaphor of mysteries of dreams we dream.