‘Man atkeya beparwah de nal Us deen duni de shah de nal My heart is entangled with the indifferent One Who is the King of this world and the Hereafter’ 〜Shah Hussain
In Lahore, the City of Gardens, stands the famous shrine of Madho Lal Hussain. Inside the mausoleum are two graves lying side by side, together in death as in life — the 16th-century Punjabi Sufi saint Shah Hussain and his Hindu companion, Madho Lal.
As the world observes Pride Month, the timeless legend of the Sufi saint who fell in love with a Brahmin boy shows that queer love is not a modern concept, but has existed and been celebrated across the Indian subcontinent for centuries.
The dargah where the two saints are interred has been a site of reverence and pilgrimage for devotees across religions. Over the centuries, Mela Chiraghan, which celebrates the Sufi Saint, has found patronage from the Mughals, the British, and even the Sikh emperor Maharaja Ranjit Singh, who famously merged the Urs (death anniversary) of the saint and the festival of Basant.
Draped in red robes, clean shaven, wine flask in one hand and an earthen lamp in the other, the legend of Hussain, the rebellious pir fakir, and his band of disciples dancing through the streets of Lahore in drunken ecstasy continues to capture the imagination over 430 years after his death.
It is said Hussain (1538-1599) faithfully followed Orthodox Islam for 26 years, gaining acclaim, until one day he read the lines: “Harken, Ye Folks, the world is a play and a show, a display of pageantry, pride, and boasting between yourselves, and competing with one another for greater wealth and number of children (Sura Al-Hadid 57: 20).” Interpreting the verse literally, Hussain began to treat the world as just that: an ephemeral playground.
There are varied accounts of how the name of the red-robed Sufi mystic came to be fused with that of Madho Lal, who came from a Brahmin family, and by all accounts was at least 40 years his junior.
Legend has it that Madho, a beautiful boy of sixteen, was riding a horse in a market in Lahore when Hussain took one look at him and was besotted, writes Noor Ahmad Chishti, a famed architect and chronicler of Lahore, in Tahqiqat-e-Chishti.
In another version of the tale, Hussain came upon Madho in Shahdra, a busy suburb across the Ravi, and fell in love at first sight.
It is said that Hussain was so in love with Madho that he began to celebrate the Hindu festivals of Basant Panchami and Holi. “Once Madho Lal exclaimed that posterity would forget him and only remember the enigmatic poet-saint. So, Shah Hussain assured him that Madho Lal’s name would be taken before his own for all of eternity. And, so it came to be that the saint (Shah Hussain) and his disciple (Madho Lal) are invoked in the same breath,” recounts Zubair Ahmad, a Lahore-based retired English professor and award-winning author of short stories.
This fusing of names to become a single entity embodies the Sufi principle of fana – cultivating a profound love for God so intense that it results in the merging of the individual self with the Divine so that the lover and the Beloved become one.
And, there lies the rub, scholars do not agree on whether the relationship between the two was a spiritual bond of a Murshid (spiritual guide) and Murid (the novice seeking enlightenment), or “transgressed” beyond it.
Lore and folklore In his poems, which remain popular in eastern and western Punjab, Hussain assumes a feminine voice and identifies as Heer, one-half of the star-crossed lovers Heer-Ranjha. One of his verses goes thus: “Ranjhan Ranjhan phiraan dhoudaindi, Ranjhan mairay naal (I wander calling for Ranjhan, but Ranjhan is with me).” Whether Ranjhan refers to the Divine or Madho is open to interpretation. However, the Sufi saints of Punjab that came after Hussain, including Bulle Shah and Waris Shah, continued the tradition of using the trope of Ranjhan as a metaphor for the beloved in their poetry.
As per some accounts, a lovelorn Hussain waited for 16 years for Madho, and would frequently cross the
