Controversy Over Native Place
It was initially thought that Shah Mohammad was from Batala, a steel town in the Gurdaspur district.It took more than a century to establish that Shah Mohammad actually belonged to the border village of Wadala Veeram in the Amritsar district and not Batala.
It was Maula Baksh Kushta, a famous Punjabi critic, who also hailed from Wadala Veeram, who first pointed out that Shah Mohammad belonged to his own village.
A team of researchers in 1973, led by the then Director of the Punjabi Languages Department, visited this village and with the help of revenue records, discovered an old marble slab fixed on the well of Shah Mohammad's house thus proving that the poet did indeed belong to this village.
Wadala Veeram was a Muslim-dominated village which witnessed communal frenzy as the country inched towards the Partition, claiming many Sikh and Muslim lives.
Read more about this topic: Shah Mohammad, Origins
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