What Is a Vaar in Punjabi Poetry?
Quick answer: A vaar is a Punjabi heroic ballad sung in pauri stanzas, praising warriors and saints. Learn its history, famous examples and how dhadi singers perform it.
A vaar is a Punjabi ballad of heroism and praise, a narrative poem built from stanzas called pauris and traditionally sung aloud to fixed tunes. At its heart it is a poem of action: it recounts battles, feuds, sacrifices and moral victories, and it honours the figure at the centre of them, whether that figure is a warrior, a saint or a guru. The form grew out of Punjab's oral bardic culture, where professional singers carried the stories of local heroes from village to village long before anyone thought to write them down.
That said, the vaar is bigger than the battlefield. Some of the most celebrated vaars ever composed are spiritual, borrowing the language of war to describe the fight against ego, greed and falsehood. Twenty-two vaars sit inside the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh scripture, and several are sung daily in gurdwaras around the world. So the honest answer to the question covers both traditions: the vaar is a war ballad by ancestry, and a vehicle for praise, teaching and lament by centuries of practice.
Where the Vaar Comes From
Long before printed books reached Punjab, bards attached to chiefs and landowning families earned their keep by singing the deeds of their patrons. A victory in a cattle raid, a stand against an invader, a famous act of generosity: each became raw material for a sung ballad that could travel wherever the singer travelled. Because the songs were performed rather than read, they developed features that help a listening audience: strong repeated rhythms, vivid physical detail, and stanzas that each complete one clear step of the story.
We know this older folk layer existed because the Sikh gurus referred to it directly. When vaars were compiled into the Guru Granth Sahib in the early seventeenth century, several were given musical instructions naming the tunes of existing heroic ballads, including a vaar about a prince called Tunda Asraja. The instruction only makes sense if singers of the time already knew those tunes by heart, which tells us the heroic vaar was a living, popular tradition well before it entered scripture.
The Pauri: The Vaar's Building Block
The stanza of a vaar is called a pauri, which literally means a rung of a ladder, and the image is exact. Each pauri lifts the story one step: a challenge issued, an army gathering, a blow struck, a lesson drawn. Line counts vary from vaar to vaar, but within a single poem the pauris tend to keep a consistent shape, so the listener feels the climb.
Rhythmically, pauris are counted in matras, the beat units of Indian prosody, rather than in stressed syllables the way English metre works. Lines carry a strong mid-line pause and often land hard on the final phrase. In many vaars the closing line of a pauri is shorter than the rest, which gives it the snap of a drumbeat and makes the key idea easy to remember. In the scriptural vaars, short couplets called saloks are placed before each pauri, adding reflection between the steps of the ladder.
The Twenty-Two Vaars of Sikh Scripture
The Guru Granth Sahib contains twenty-two vaars, and they show what happens when a battlefield form is turned inward. Asa di Var, composed mainly by Guru Nanak, is sung in the early morning in gurdwaras and is probably the most widely heard vaar in the world today. Its combat is moral: the enemies are pride, hypocrisy and empty ritual, and the hero is the honest, remembering mind.
Nine of these scriptural vaars carry prescribed dhunis, tunes borrowed from older heroic folk ballads. The choice was deliberate. Congregations already felt courage and resolve when they heard those melodies, and the gurus harnessed that feeling for spiritual struggle. It is one of the great recycling acts in literary history: the sound of the war song kept, the war itself transformed.
Chandi di Var and the Heroic Line
The heroic vaar did not disappear when the spiritual vaar arose; the two ran side by side. Chandi di Var, attributed to Guru Gobind Singh, retells the battles of the goddess Chandi against demon armies, drawing on much older Sanskrit sources. Its language is famously percussive, thick with clashing consonants and the names of weapons, so that the sound of the lines imitates the din of battle.
Secular and historical vaars kept the tradition rooted in real events. Najabat's vaar on Nadir Shah's invasion of 1739 turned a national catastrophe into sung history, and folk vaars celebrated popular heroes such as Dulla Bhatti, the rebel of the Sandal Bar remembered every year at Lohri. For ordinary Punjabis across centuries with little access to written chronicles, the vaar was the news archive, the history lesson and the memorial, all set to a tune.
How a Vaar Is Performed
The classic performers of the vaar are dhadi jathas, small ensembles named after the dhadd, a small hourglass-shaped drum held in one hand and struck with the fingers. Alongside the dhadd sits the sarangi, a bowed instrument whose wailing tone suits both lament and battle cry. A typical performance alternates sung pauris with passages of spoken exposition, in which the lead performer explains the history, adds colour and builds anticipation for the next stanza.
You can still hear dhadi performances at gurdwaras, religious fairs and remembrance days across Punjab and the diaspora. The mix of song and speech matters for anyone studying the form: a vaar is not designed to sit quietly on a page. It expects a voice, a drum and a crowd.
What a Modern Poet Can Learn from the Vaar
Even if you never write a word of Punjabi, the vaar teaches transferable craft. It shows how to praise someone without going soft, because admiration in a vaar is always earned through concrete deeds, never through adjectives alone. It shows how a stanza can function as a single step of narrative, which is a discipline worth trying in English: one event per stanza, no spillover. And it proves that strong, regular rhythm is not old-fashioned decoration but a memory technology.
If you attempt a vaar-flavoured poem of your own, a praise ballad for a grandparent, a nurse, a striker on your local team, you are exercising exactly the muscles contest judges look at when they score structure and emotion. A poem with a clear ladder of stanzas and earned feeling stands out in any pile.
What poets can take from this
- Listen to a recording of Asa di Var before writing about the form, because the tune teaches you the stanza shape faster than any description.
- When imitating the vaar in English, use a long line with a strong mid-line pause to echo the matra-counted original.
- Keep the hero of your ballad flawed in at least one visible way; the best vaars honour real people, not statues.
- Use clusters of hard consonants in battle or conflict passages, the way Chandi di Var does, and softer vowels in laments.
- Study how saloks add quiet reflection between pauris, then try inserting a two-line aside between your own narrative stanzas.
- Name real places; the vaar tradition anchors every deed to a village, a river or a fort.
Try it yourself
Write a praise ballad of five stanzas for someone unfamous who once did something brave. Give each stanza one action only, end each on a short punching line, and name the exact place where it happened.
Questions
Is a vaar the same as a ballad?
They are close cousins but not identical. Both are narrative songs about memorable deeds, yet the vaar has specific machinery: pauri stanzas, matra-based rhythm, prescribed tunes and a strong tradition of praise. A European ballad tends toward quatrains and often centres on tragedy or the supernatural, while the vaar leans toward heroism and honour.
What is Asa di Var?
Asa di Var is a spiritual vaar composed mainly by Guru Nanak, with saloks added between its pauris. It is sung in the morning in gurdwaras and treats the moral life as the true battlefield, with ego and hypocrisy as the enemies. It is the most widely performed vaar in the world.
Who performs vaars today?
Dhadi jathas, small ensembles playing the dhadd drum and sarangi, remain the classic performers, appearing at gurdwaras, fairs and commemorations in Punjab and across the diaspora. Recordings and broadcasts have widened the audience far beyond live gatherings.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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