Shah Muhammad

Shah Muhammad (also spelled Shah Mohammad) was a Punjabi Muslim poet of Wadala Veeram, a village in Amritsar district. He is remembered for his Jangnama, written around 1846, a long poem on the First Anglo-Sikh War and the fall of the Sikh kingdom, which Wikipedia lists as Jangnama Singhan te Firangian. The Tribune calls it an eyewitness account of the war that followed Maharaja Ranjit Singh's death, and historians treat it as a primary source.

Key facts

• The Punjabi critic Maula Baksh Kushta, who came from the same village, gave his dates as 1780 to 1862. It took historians more than a century to establish that his village was Wadala Veeram in Amritsar district and not Batala in Gurdaspur district (The Tribune).
• Close relatives are said to have served in Ranjit Singh's army, which helped him build a full account of the battles between the Sikhs and the British.
• He admired Ranjit Singh's rule and wrote that the Maharaja turned Punjab from a land of sorrow into a garden. He lamented that the kingdom collapsed soon after the Maharaja's death through intrigue among the Sikh sardars, the treachery of the Dogras led by Dhian Singh, and British manoeuvring.
• He described Punjabi Muslims as part of the Sarkar-e-Khalsa and the Maharaja's rule as one in which Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims lived together.
• Dr Harbhajan Singh Bhatia told The Tribune that the poem's facts can be checked against the Roznamacha, a daily diary from Ranjit Singh's reign.

Remembered for: a Muslim poet's lament for Sikh sovereignty, valued, as The Tribune says, as a primary source on the court's intrigues and the Dogras' treachery.

Memory and neglect: in 1973 a team led by the Director of the Punjabi Languages Department used revenue records to find an old marble slab on the well of his house, and commemorations were held in 1973 and 1978. The Tribune reported in December 2005 that he had been largely forgotten again, that a gurdwara and a private house now stand where he lived, and that a school hall in the village bears his name. A memorial trust and an annual festival at Wadala Veeram aim to keep his memory alive.