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 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, folktales and landscape of Sindh, and the landscape of human experience, embellished further with ingenious alliteration and rhyme. Not for nothing has he been likened to Hafiz and Shakespeare. Connoisseurs of Sindhi literature often refer to him simply as Shah, meaning "King". Across the border, in Sindh, Shah Latif and his poetry have become the emblem of Sindhiyat. Yet, most Sindhi Hindus in India and in the diaspora are not familiar with his verse. Nearly eight decades ago, when Sindhi Hindus migrated to India during Partition, the urgent need was resettlement and rehabilitation. Scattered, anxious to assimilate, and often looked down upon for being needy refugees, they focused on rehabilitating themselves economically while downplaying their ethnicity. With no state or linguistic region to call their own and with little patronage, their language and literature began to decline. As the professor and writer Rita Kothari has astutely observed, it is ironic that the Sindhi community is defined as an ethnolinguistic minority when the region itself is inaccessible to Indians, and Sindhis themselves are becoming more distanced from their language. The Sindhi community has, over the decades, turned from Sindhi to English, and occasionally Hindi, to explore its roots. Translations of Shah Latif's Risalo (meaning "treatise" or "compendium"), therefore, are precious, bridging the gap between Sindhis and their literature, history and culture. Given this backdrop, it is quite a coincidence to see not one but two translations of the Risalo available in India in recent months. One is by Rita Kothari, translating into Hindi, a language much closer to Sindhi, and therefore a closer interpretation. The other translation, into English, is by Christopher Shackle, who specialises in Sufi, Ginan and Islamic poetry as well as Sikh literature. This is a reprint of an earlier 2018 American edition; the Indian edition has dispensed with the original verses in the Perso-Arabic script, given its dwindling readership. It is a challenge to translate Shah Latif. For many translators, their starting point is the definitive annotated compilation of the Risalo by the writer and professor Kalyan Advani, which won him the Sahitya Akademi award in 1968. This pathbreaking publication "translated" the Risalo from medieval Sindhi, thereby unlocking it for future readers and translators. Translators of Shah Latif such as Anju Makhija and Shabnam Virmani stand out for being among the few who can successfully convey in English the essence of his poetry in a lyrical way, accessible to a wide range of readers. In the bargain, though, there is some departure from the original literal text. In Shackle's work there is considerable fidelity to the original text. Although it may not immediately appear lyrical, the serious reader who spends time with each verse will arrive at the lyrical meaning contained within it. Shackle's is an enormous oeuvre, running to more than 1,600 verses: no mean feat. It is also in accessible modern-day English. It is deeply ironic that Shah Latif's verses, which were meant to be sung out loud by the common people, are now being pored over in books by a few, and understood only through the filters of translation. And yet, in the borderlands of the Thar desert - Kutch and Rajasthan in India, and Thar Parkar in Sindh - the pastoral communities that Shah Latif depicted in his poetry, continue to sing his verses. For these communities, Shah is far more than a poet: he is a saint, an anchor. With the verses and their music and their message passed down orally through generations, it is these communities who are the true heirs to Shah Latif....