Shah Mohammad was a Muslim Punjabi poet of Vadala Viram in Amritsar district who wrote the Jangnama, an account in verse of the First Anglo-Sikh War, within months of the events.
It is a contemporary eyewitness account of the fall of the Sikh state by a Punjabi who was neither a Sikh nor a British officer, and there is nothing else like it. Every other narrative of 1845 to 1846 is written by the winners or by the court.
His judgement on the war is that the army fought and the durbar sold it. His most quoted couplet says that the Singhs fought a war without a king and that the whole of Hindustan is remembering it.
He grieves for the state as a Punjabi thing, not as a Sikh thing, which is the reason the poem still lands here. A Muslim poet mourning the fall of a Sikh kingdom is a fact about Punjab that the twentieth century made hard to imagine.
The poem is taught in Punjabi schools in India and is much less known in Pakistan.
The poem runs to over a hundred stanzas in the baint metre and circulated orally before it was printed, which is why the text has variants and why no critical edition of it exists.
It is sympathetic to the Sikh army and hostile to its commanders, and its most quoted line says that the Punjab has been lost by its own people.
He wrote other qissas as well, including a Sassi, and they are almost unread. The Jangnama absorbed his whole reputation.