A short drive out of Jalandhar, in the flat, canal-fed farmland of Punjab's Doaba region, lies the village of Safipur — more often spelt Shafipur. It is an unremarkable place of a few hundred households, and it is where Hans Raj Hans was born, into a Mazhabi Sikh family of modest means. The Mazhabi Sikhs are a Dalit community, historically kept at the margins of Punjab's landowning social order, and the singer has never made a secret of where he started. The village name still travels with him: in Punjab he is introduced not merely as a singer but as the boy from Shafipur who ended up in Rashtrapati Bhavan.

A Guru, and a New Name

Punjab's folk tradition is passed down through the ustad-shagird relationship, and Hans found his teacher early. As a teenager he became a student of Ustad Puran Shah Koti, the Sufi singer who had settled at Shahkot near Jalandhar and who trained a whole generation of Punjabi vocalists from a very modest establishment. It was Puran Shah Koti who steered him away from ordinary stage singing towards the sufiana repertoire — the verse of Bulleh Shah, Baba Farid and Shah Hussain — and it was the same teacher who gave him the name he now carries. Hans means swan, and the epithet stuck so completely that Hans Raj Hans is now a single unit rather than a name with an addition.

His formal education continued alongside the music. He studied at DAV College in Jalandhar and became a fixture of the inter-college and inter-university folk singing circuit, taking the top prize in Punjabi folk singing at university level for several consecutive years. His earliest recorded material included a patriotic ballad about the martyr Bhagat Singh — a subject that has launched a hundred Punjabi singing careers, and in his case actually worked. He began, as he has often described it, by singing in villages, at fairs and at weddings, and only gradually worked his way into the towns and the recording studios.

Cassettes, Sufi Verse and a Punjabi Pop Moment

Hans came up in the cassette boom of the 1980s and 1990s, when Punjabi music was being sold in enormous quantities across north India and the diaspora. He proved unusually adaptable. He could hold an audience through a long, slow Sufi kalam, then turn to the brighter, more rhythmic material that the market wanted, and later release out-and-out Punjabi pop albums without losing the older constituency. That range is the reason his career has now run for more than four decades rather than the four or five years typical of the genre.

The international breakthrough came through cinema. He shared the soundtrack of the 1999 Hindi film Kachche Dhaage with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, an association that carried real weight given Nusrat's standing. His voice and his presence subsequently turned up in a string of films that reached audiences well beyond Punjab — the wedding-house world of Monsoon Wedding, the British Punjabi comedy Bend It Like Beckham, and later mainstream Hindi productions including Mausam, for which he was nominated as male vocalist of the year at a national music awards ceremony, and Sonu Ke Titu Ki Sweety. He has also taught, holding honorary music appointments at universities in the United States, a reflection of how large the Punjabi diaspora audience for his work has become.

The Padma Shri and a Second Career

In 2008 the Government of India conferred the Padma Shri on him for his contribution to the arts, and the award was presented at Rashtrapati Bhavan in May of that year. For a singer who had started at village functions, and from a community with very little historical access to that kind of recognition, it was a landmark that Punjab noticed.

His political career has been more restless. He joined the Shiromani Akali Dal in January 2009 and contested the Jalandhar parliamentary seat that year without success. He moved to the Indian National Congress in February 2016 and then to the Bharatiya Janata Party in December 2016. In 2019 he was elected to the Lok Sabha from the North West Delhi constituency, serving a full term from May 2019 to June 2024. He contested again in 2024, this time from Faridkot in Punjab, and finished fifth. Voters and commentators have not always been kind about the party changes, and it is fair to say his political record is less distinguished than his musical one.

The Village and the Family Line

Music, at least, has stayed in the house. Both his sons, Navraj Hans and Yuvraj Hans, are singers and performers in their own right, with Yuvraj also working in Punjabi cinema — the ustad-shagird chain that began in a hut at Shahkot continuing inside one family.

What makes Hans Raj Hans matter to a village-heritage account is not the Lok Sabha term or the film credits. It is the specific shape of the journey: a Dalit boy from Shafipur, in a state where caste is rarely discussed openly but is felt everywhere, apprenticed himself to a teacher with no money and a great deal of knowledge, learned a devotional poetic tradition that predates the borders of modern Punjab, and carried it into concert halls in three continents. Sufi verse in Punjabi has always insisted that rank and lineage count for nothing beside sincerity of voice. His career is, among other things, a demonstration of that claim.