Vaar
Quick answer: Vaar in Punjabi poetry: the heroic ballad sung in pauri stanzas, from Asa di Var to battle ballads, with craft notes for writing your own praise poem.
A vaar is a Punjabi heroic ballad, a poem of praise, battle and moral struggle composed in climbing stanzas called pauris and traditionally sung by dhadi minstrels to the beat of a small drum. Pauri means the rung of a ladder, and the name is honest: each stanza is a step upward, building intensity the way a drummer builds a roll.
The form lives a double life. In Sikh scripture it became a vehicle for spiritual combat: the Guru Granth Sahib contains twenty-two vaars, and Guru Nanak's Asa di Var is still sung in the early morning. Outside the scripture, poets used the same machinery for flesh-and-blood war, as in Najabat's ballad of Nadir Shah's invasion, so the vaar can praise a saint on Monday and count casualties on Tuesday.
How It Works
The engine of a vaar is the pauri, a stanza of strongly stressed lines built for drum accompaniment and public delivery. In scriptural vaars, short couplets called saloks are placed before each pauri, letting reflection alternate with the ballad's forward march. The verse favours catalogue and escalation: heroes named one after another, blows counted, dawn arriving on a field that has changed hands. A few original lines in the ballad's register:
Everything is concrete, rhythmic and loud. The vaar has no interest in whispering.
Where You Will See It
Asa di Var, attributed to Guru Nanak with additions from later Gurus, turns the heroic frame inward, making the battle one against ego and falsehood. Chandi di Var, associated with Guru Gobind Singh, narrates the goddess Chandi's war against demons with tremendous percussive force. Bhai Gurdas's vaars serve as an early exposition of Sikh thought. In the folk line, dhadi singers still perform vaars about warriors and martyrs at fairs and gurdwara gatherings, keeping the form a live performance art rather than a museum piece.
How to Use It in Your Own Poems
Choose a struggle worth praising, and remember the vaar's insight that the struggle can be interior. Build stanzas that climb: each one should raise the stakes, the volume or the cost. Use hard stresses and end-stopped lines you could strike a drum to. Alternating a quiet reflective couplet with each loud stanza, the salok-and-pauri pattern, gives a modern poem a heartbeat-and-breath structure that readers feel before they can name it.
What poets can take from this
- Write for the drum: strong stresses, end-stopped lines, no syntax that needs rereading.
- Make each pauri escalate; if a stanza could swap places with its neighbour, revise.
- Try the salok-pauri alternation: one soft couplet of reflection, then one loud stanza of action.
- Praise by naming: specific people, places and weapons beat general glory every time.
- Perform the draft standing up; a vaar that works only on the page does not work.
Try it yourself
Write a vaar for an unarmed hero: a nurse, a firefighter, a parent in a hard year. Use four climbing stanzas of four stressed lines each, and open each stanza with a quiet two-line reflection before the drums come back in.
Questions
What is the difference between a vaar and a qissa?
A vaar is a ballad of praise and combat, built to be declaimed with percussion, while a qissa is a longer narrative romance built around a love plot. One celebrates a hero; the other follows a story to its tragic end.
Are vaars only religious poems?
No. The scriptural vaars of the Guru Granth Sahib are the most famous, but the form began as a secular war ballad and continued in that role, as in the ballads about Nadir Shah's invasion.
What is a pauri?
A pauri is the stanza unit of a vaar. The word means a ladder rung, reflecting how the stanzas ascend in intensity, and in scriptural vaars each pauri is usually preceded by short reflective couplets called saloks.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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