Baba Farid Ganj Shakar, the first classical poet of contemporary Punjabi and a saint, who succeeded as the head of Chishti Sufi Order in India after the death of Bakhtiar Kaki,was, we all know, a figure larger than life as a founder of a literary tradition and also as an ascetic in the spiritual realm.

He shunned the trappings of glory and prestige of the most influential order he was associated with. He left the nobility-infested Delhi in disgust after inheriting the mantle of the order. He made a conscious choice of staying away from the power centre by moving to the ancient town of Ajodhan now known as Pakattan, hundred and twenty miles from Lahore in the South West. He lived an extremely austere life among his disciples and the ordinary mortals. He founded a monastery that came to be known not for its bricks and mortar but for its open to all people friendly policy. It admitted all those who in search of knowledge and spiritual enlightenment were ready to accept its rigorous discipline and austerity which symbolised its unshakeable bond with the wretched of the earth.

Baba Farid had nothing but contempt for the worldly riches as they were in his view invariably a result of exploitation of common folks. ‘Wood is my roti and hunger is the platter for me/those who eat the buttered ones would have to suffer the pain[Roti meri kaath di, lawan meri bukh/ jinhan khaddi chopri, ghanay sahin ge dukh]. Why those who get everything on a silver platter will suffer?

A Christian monk in medieval Europe, economist Ernest Mandal tells us, had the answer. Addressing a gathering of rich feudal lords the monk says: ‘gentlemen, you are not thieves but what you eat is the fruit of theft’. Likewise Baba Farid warned the opulent land owners in one of his Shlokas [couplets] thus: ‘Farid, these stalks of mustard in the pan though sweet are poison / some toiled till they dropped dead raising the crop, others moved in plundering it [Farida, eh viss gandlan, dharian khand liwaar/ ik rahinday reh gae, ik radhi gae ujaar]’.

The poet-saint very clearly distinguished between the plunderers and the plundered. He practically lived among the plundered and always denounced the plunderers setting an example whose sheer moral force inspired all the poets of coming generations in Punjab to stand for the oppressed and resist the oppressors. No wonder that person of such a moral stature came to be venerated and worshiped by the people. No wonder that his verses inspired Guru Nanak, one of the greatest minds this land of rivers ever produced, so much that he collected the Shlokas that eventually became part of the holy scripture Adi Granth/ Guru Granth sahib of Sikh religion when it was codified by the fifth Guru Arjun sahab in the 16th century in Lahore.

Wood as Roti unmistakably signified helplessness in hunger that Baba Farid witnessed all around and experienced it as a mark of solidarity with the oppressed and exploited. Starvation emerged as one of the important themes in his poetry because of his immense empathy; he could share the pain of those who produced food in his neighborhoods and starved because the produce was appropriated by parasitic class of landlords who owned arable lands in the name of sovereign. It’s reliably reported that in one of his public dialogues he declared the roti/ food as sixth tenets of Islamic faith. Hunger could lead the people astray and force them shun moral probity. In other words provisions were responsibility of society and state in his view. But at the same time he never ever equated poverty with disgrace or indignity as is done in our capitalist consumers’ society. He knew very well that causes of poverty were not natural but man-made; it was a product of an iniquitous system prevalent in an uncaring class society.

But with the passage of time things at what is left of his monastery/ shrine have turned into their opposites. The decadent descendants of the saintly poet who employed female voice for his creative expression in his verses debar women from entering the inner sanctum and restricting their movement for two reasons; women are unclean and segregation by sex is a desirable act in the spiritual realm. All this is done in the name of a saint who said; ‘I didn’t sleep with my beloved today. Thus my limbs are wilted and withered/ I wonder how do women spend their nights that are eternally separated from their partners’? The way women are treated by the parasitic custodians at the shrine reeks of misogyny and thinly concealed pious hypocrisy, to say the least.

Another shenanigan that we witness at the mausoleum is how those aspiring for the ultimate in the material world go to Baba Farid’s shrine and fall prostrate in apparent worship on its threshold in search of what he hated most; power. Bliss of poverty which was the apogee of his spiritual union with the celestial and mundane has been replaced by glory of riches as far as his so-called heirs and their opulent clients are concerned. This isn’t a sudden phenomenon. It’s a greed driven process that has been going on for centuries.

Since Baba Farid had an organic link with people, they, not the power hungry crowd, have the right to do within the precincts of his shrine any religious ritual or superstitious act they deem fit in their desperation to assuage their pain and fears in an unjust society that never hears ‘the sigh of the oppressed and the voice of the voiceless’. But the saint did hear: ‘I thought I alone suffered while the entire world suffered/watching from the vantage point I found every house ablaze’. He struggled to extinguish the fire that incinerated people in his age. Sadly it still rages on. The ordinary mortal, battered and hunted, is still in a state he was in during our saint’s stay on this earth: ‘Lone bird and fifty hunters with traps /this wave swept body pins it hope on you , my true Lord’.