‘I’ve got a chest infection, Marvi. I’m in my dressing gown. I’ve cancelled an outing. These years that come and go don’t seem to matter much any more.’

‘Well, maybe see you … tomorrow then?’

I had been asked to give a talk on performative modes in South Asian poetry at the University of Leeds, at a conference that would fall on the Persian New Year; I thought I would write about the Indus tradition for once, rather than the ubiquitous ghazal or masnavi. I was trying to revise and put in order the notes I had made. For background noise, I switched the TV on to a cable channel that was playing videos of mellow jazz performances, Carmen McRae and Thelonious Monk and others, vocal and instrumental. Listening to them, I noticed again how American blues singers sang from the same raw places as our folk musicians.

Persian remained a language of courtiers, I read in my notebook, while the vast majority of the populace spoke their vernaculars. The cosmopolitan tradition of Persian was fragmented by the rise of poetry in local languages. In India, Urdu replaced Persian as the favoured language of poets, although little Sufi poetry of note was written in Urdu until the appearance of Iqbal in the twentieth century. In many parts of South Asia, more and more poets turned to vernacular dialects to sing their songs and tell their tales … the lessons of the Persian masnavi had, however, been well learned and adapted to indigenous needs; folk heroes and heroines, Sassi and Punnu and Heer and Ranjha, Momal and Rano and Umar and Marvi brought their poems closer, in characterisation and landscape, to readers and listeners. In the lands of the Indus, great poets were to emerge, creating new traditions: Waris Shah and Bulle Shah in the Punjab, Shah Abdul Latif and Sachal Sarmast in the Sindh. Bulle and Latif were both born in the 1680s, and helped to propagate an indigenised Sufism that appealed to common people of all religions. Language, particularly in the case of Bulle, can be rough; form, for both, serves as a performative element. Latif was a skilled musician who set his own verses to music. The work of both poets is meant to be declaimed or sung. These song-poems are called kafi in the Punjab, and wai in the Sindh, terms that refer more to their performative function than to their prosody, which allows the poet more technical freedom than the innate courtliness of Persian or Urdu. Metaphors and similes, too, are bucolic. Cotton-seed, harvest, village fair are used as emblems of life, in its struggles and regenerations. The humble spinning wheel and the butter churn become symbols of the business of living. Take, for example, Abdul Latif, the most sung and celebrated of Sindhi poets, who, in his Sur Sarang (‘Rain Song’), wrote about the rainfall on the Thar desert …

Today, too, there are hopes of rain,

the clouds are dark and low,