It is difficult to find an historical figure from the Sub-Continent whose popularity stretches equally across Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims ? each trying to claim him as their own. To the point that much of the written material about this great Muslim thinker is from Hindu and Sikh authors. This, perhaps, is the ultimate benchmark of the humanity of Bulleh Shah - a relatively unknown Punjabi Sufi, son of a village preacher, who wrote in the simple language and dialect of the illiterate common folk, who perhaps himself lived a life of relative peasantry having never ventured outside his neighboring localities of Punjab, who devoted his life to his lower-caste murshid, who never married, and who was even denied a funeral by the religious orthodoxy of his time.