In the 1880s, Edward Maclagan, a British officer in the Indian Civil Services in Punjab was on a field trip when he came across a group of folk singers devotedly singing various songs on traditional instruments. These Mirasis, also called Dooms, are hereditary singers who record histories of local clans in form of poetry and music. They are living records of influential families’ entire family trees. They traditionally earned from the families whose stories they recorded.
The specific ballad that Edward Maclagan heard was talking of an army of savages that terrorised the population and fought in brutal battles. He recorded a few verses of the ballad, but he found massive gaps in between them, and his lack of complete knowledge of local context would prevent him from collecting the complete piece. One thing was clear: the ballad must be generations old, and the current generations of singers only knew few verses each. Different bards recited different verses, and it was a game of hunting these verses and completing the puzzle. There was also a time limit, for the bards who could recite even those verses were old and with each passing generation of Mirasi families, lesser and lesser of it would remain.
Realising all of this, the task was taken up by Rai Bahadur Hari Kishan Kaul, a lawyer from a Kashmiri-Punjabi family who would later become the governor of Jammu and Kashmir under the Dogra dynasty. It was too clear that the ballad talked about Nadir Shah’s invasion of India that took place more than 170 years before.
Hari Kishan Kaul spent years visiting different bards in different areas and interviewing them. He collected as many verses as he could. This ballad was organised in stanzas called “pauris”, and he was able to collect 854 tuks (lines) from all the bards. There was also confusion with some verses of a different ballad (Chattheyan di Vaar) being included but these were later identified and removed.
Finally in 1916, Hari Kishan Kaul presented the work to Punjab Historical Society and hence saved the ballad from being lost to history. The verses contained self-signature (as is usual in Punjabi poetry) of a narrator called “Najabat”. This resulted in it being called “Najabat di Vaar” (Najabat’s Vaar). (Vaar is a genre of Punjabi poetry/music relating to battles and accounts of bravery.)
In 1917 the Vaar was published by Kaul alongside an English translation. Historians Bawa Baudh Singh and Karam Singh Historian studied the work, transliterated it into the Gurmukhi script and analysed the poetic value of the Vaar.
The two historians also set out to find the identity of Najabat. Through bard knowledge and checking ancestries, they identified Najabat as a man called Najabat Ali Khan who was most likely a Rajput who lived in the 1700s near the cities of Chiniot or Sargodha and hence lived through the Persian invasion.
The Vaar is not a straight recounting of facts and that only makes it more interesting. It portrays Nadir Shah’s invasion of India as an event which was written in fate and was unavoidable. It links it to two cosmic entities, Kalh (likely a personification of the Kaliyuga from Hindu belief) and Narad (based on Sage Narada from Hindu mythology, however there are differences in how Narad is portrayed in the Vaar but the theme is the same).
Kalh is a feminine entity who feeds on blood and war. She serves and praises anyone who could give her that diet of blood. She complains to her husband Narad of having not eaten a full meal in several centuries. This quarrel ends with Kalh traveling to Persia to provoke Nadir Shah to attack India while Narad informs Muhammad Shah Rangila (the Mughal emperor) of the events. They note that the last time Kalh ate to satisfaction was during Timur’s invasions in the 14th century. Then there are detailed scenes of the armies, the battles they fought and the plundering that came with it.
Although the Vaar has inaccuracies regarding history as well as mythology (the character of Narad), it is considered a very valuable work in Punjabi literature and is one of the most well-known Vaars.
Today the Vaar is a part of the syllabus of Punjabi literature in almost all universities that offer the subject in India. In Pakistan, though, I could not find any evidence if the Vaar is covered or studied in Punjabi literature courses - which are already pursed by much fewer students there.