Religious Universalism in Bulleh Shah's Selected Poetry

Abstract

The Indian subcontinent had been ruled by the Mughal Empire for almost three hundred years. The regime was marked for its ethnic, cultural, and religious multiplicity. The Mughals utilized the narratives of belonging as a part of their state-building objectives for which diverse cultural, social, and to a great level, religious identities merged. This article concentrates on the significance of poetry in history as a social and political instrument via the selected poems of Bulleh Shah, a poet of the Punjabi language (1680-1757). It aims to exhibit the linkage between the religious, political, and cultural aspects of the Mughal Regime in the sub-continent to pinpoint a liaison between the political and social dynamics of power while establishing statehood. In this regard,the poetic heirloom of Bulleh Shah is persistent in understanding not only the cultural prominence of the Mughal Regime but also the cultural bridge between the religious and political hierarchy of the region.