Mian Muhammad Bakhsh

Early life Bakhsh was born in in Khari Sharif (present-day Azad Jammu and Kashmir, Pakistan) during the Sikh rule, into a Punjabi Gujjar Poswal family of the Banian clan with roots in Gujrat (present-day Punjab, Pakistan). There is considerable disagreement about his year of birth. Mahbūb 'Alī Faqīr Qādirī, in a biography printed as an appendix to the text of Sayful Mulūk gives the date as 1246 AH (1830 AD), a date also followed by the Shāhkār Islāmī Encyclopedia; 1830 and 1843 are suggested in other works. Mīān Muhammad Bakhsh himself states in his magnum opus, Sayful Mulūk, that he completed the work in the month of Ramadan, 1279 AH (1863 AD), and that he was then thirty-three years of age. Hence, he must have been born in 1829 or 1830.

Once he had advanced a little along the Sufi way, he became more and more interested in composing poetry, and one of the first things he penned was a qasidah (quatrain) in praise of his spiritual guide. Initially he preferred to write and , but then he advanced to composing stories in verse. His poetry is written in a mixed language composed of the Majhi, Pahari-Pothwari dialects of Punjabi alongside the Hindko language, and utilizes a rich vocabulary of Persian and Arabic loan-words. Mian Muhammad Bakhsh, in his lifetime, contributed his great mystic thought in the language of the masses – Punjabi language which was also his mother tongue.