October 22, 2026

Even Your Name Will Pass

Bulleya, I know not who I am.

Bulleh Shah was an 18th-century Punjabi Sufi poet who studied under a teacher from a lower caste, a choice that got him disowned by his own family and shunned by the orthodox clergy of his time. Stripped of the identity his birth had handed him, he wrote this refrain listing everything he was supposedly not: not Hindu, not Muslim, not pious, not sinner, not even fully alive or dead. Each line erases another label until nothing fixed remains, only the questioning itself. Centuries later, in a world that hands us job titles and roles the moment we wake up, his words are a reminder that none of those labels were ever permanent to begin with.