Iftikhar Shafi’s Hari Yu Piya is an evocative ode to the Indus Valley civilization, particularly the urban grandeur, cultural richness, and aesthetic sophistication associated with Harappa. The repeated refrain, “Hari Yu Piya, Hari Yu Piya / A thousand shades are thine,” situates the reader in a multiplicity of experiences and perceptions, suggesting both the visual and sensory diversity of the civilization.
The poem’s imagery—“paths leading to thee,” “chirping of birds,” “seven-hued earth,” and “scent of blossoms”—constructs a sensorially rich landscape, inviting the reader to inhabit the historical space through the poet’s imaginative lens. References to musicality (“lake of thy music”), feminine adornments (“surma and kajal”), and the lexicon of classical Indian musical notes (Kharaj, Rishabh, Gandhar) anchor the poem in a lived aesthetic universe, conveying not only the physical but the cultural and ethical fabric of the civilization.
The second stanza elaborates the social and civic dimensions of Harappa, portraying a city where “maidens in dance reside” and “valiant youth stand with pride,” while chariot riders wander freely at the city gates. These lines emphasize urban sophistication, social organization, and ritualized expressions of life. Agricultural abundance, the fragrance of wheat fields, and the celebration of knowledge, art, and festivals further reinforce a civilization that is civilizationally complex, holistic, and grounded in quotidian joys and ethical refinement. Shafee’s literal imagery, therefore, situates the Indus Valley not merely as an archaeological abstraction but as a vibrant, multisensory human space.
Decolonial Standpoint
From a decolonial standpoint, the poem functions as a literary reclamation of Harappa, challenging the often Eurocentric historiography that frames the Indus Valley civilization through fragmented archaeological data or as a prelude to later “great civilizations.” In line with Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s advocacy for decolonizing methodologies, Shafee’s poetic act embodies an indigenous epistemology, narrating Harappa from within its historical-geographical locus rather than through imposed external frameworks.
Smith emphasizes that decolonial research must privilege the knowledge, practices, and lived experiences of the community itself. Analogously, Shafee’s poems privilege the sensory, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions of the civilization that are rarely captured in conventional historical discourse. By invoking urban landscapes, music, festivals, and bodily practices, the poet foregrounds the civilizational subjectivity of Harappa, restoring agency to the people who inhabited it and challenging colonialized narratives that reduce the Indus Valley to artifacts and ruins.
Border Gnoseology and Analectic Negation
Walter Mignolo’s border gnoseology and concept of analectic negation provide a complementary lens: the poem operates at the border of historical knowledge, resisting dominant epistemic hierarchies while simultaneously dialoguing with global historiography.
Shafee’s positionality—writing from the modern territory of Pakistan, the heartland of Harappa—situates him as an indigenous interlocutor, capable of engaging the past in a conversation that is both local and globally legible. His depiction of “resilient everyday life, aesthetic practices, and civic order”a
form of border epistemology, asserting knowledge from within the civilization’s spatial and temporal locus, rather than accepting externally imposed interpretations.
In this sense, Hari Yu Piya exemplifies analectic negation: it resists partial, colonially-inflected readings of Harappa while producing a counter-history embedded in sensory, ethical, and aesthetic experience.
Decolonial Aesthetics
Beyond historiographical reclamation, the poem exemplifies decolonial aesthetics, where literary form itself enacts epistemic agency. The intertwining of sound, color, bodily imagery, and ethical norms conveys a poetic epistemology: knowledge is inseparable from sensory, performative, and ethical experience.
The repetitive refrain, rich imagery, and structural cadence evoke resilience through dialogue, suggesting that even as historical knowledge has been mediated or silenced, poetry can serve as an indigenous locus of enunciation, asserting ordinary yet profound epistemic subjectivity.
The poet’s use of life writing techniques—drawing on diaries, letters, and memoirist sensibilities within a poetic form—translates historical imagination into ethical and reflective praxis, demonstrating how everyday aesthetic experience functions as epistemic agency.
By foregrounding the everyday, embodied, and dialogical life of Harappa, Shafee challenges both colonial and postcolonial epistemic dominance, showing that civilizational knowledge, aesthetic sophistication, and ethical practice existed independently of later frameworks imposed by outside observers.
The poem’s literary strategies—polyphonic imagery, refrains, and multisensory narration—reveal a thinking poetic subject capable of negotiating between archival history, oral tradition, and ethical imagination. This positions Hari Yu Piya as a decolonial intervention in both literary and historical knowledge, offering a model of how poetry can reclaim, animate, and ethically represent indigenous pasts.
An Ode to the Indus Valley Civilization
Hari Yu Piya
(A Song of the Indus Valley)
Hari Yu Piya, Hari Yu Piya
A thousand shades are thine
On the paths leading to thee, chirping of birds abound,
In thy seven-hued earth, the scent of blossoms is found.
In the lake of thy music, rise beautiful lotuses of grace,
In the eyes of thy maidens, surma and kajal have their place.
In every fibre of being, they dwell within,
Kharaj, Rishabh, Gandhar,
Hari Yu Piya, Hari Yu Piya
A thousand shades are thine
In thy city of beauty, maidens in dance reside,
Tusks’ bangles on their arms, the valiant youth stands with pride.
At the gates of thy city, chariot riders wander free,
With the fragrance of wheat, all the fields are filled with glee.
To civilizations you bestowed, a grand heritage,
Knowledge, art, and festivel,
Hari Yu Piya, Hari Yu Piya
A thousand shades are thine
Poetic Representation
Translated & Reviewed by Dr. Naghmana Siddique
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Government college for women Sahiwal
