India, May 2 -- "What you consider to be baits are ayats/ They direct the mind to the beloved" - so sang Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai (1689-1752), the medieval Sufi poet-saint of Sindh. His baits, or verses, composed spontaneously and sung out loud, are saturated with the exquisite agony of a lifelong yearning for the Beloved. According to him, they were like ayats, verses of the Quran, composed with divine inspiration that came through him, not from him.

Shah Latif was one of the first to compose in Sindhi, not Persian, the language that dominated poetry in that era. His beautiful verses evoke the people and folktales and landscape of Sindh, and the finer, nuanced landscape of human experience, embellished further with ingenious alliteratio...