Frequency Counts in South Asian Poetry; Sultan Bahu’s Concept of Mystical Love

Abstract

Word frequency methods have been used by psychologists, linguists (and of these computational linguists), etc. with a variety of purposes. In this study the frequency count method has been applied in order to find out a thematic hierarchy within a group of related texts. The particular texts chosen are a group of 70poems of the XIII century South- Asiatic author Sultan Bahu. Sultan Bahu’s poems contain his interpretation of the Beloved and human’s relationship with Him. The importance of this research lies in the fact that Sultan Bahu’s texts have never been thoroughly analyzed from a linguistic point of view. Through the analysis of the results of the frequency counts a hierarchy of subtopics within the main topic will be revealed. The present research paper attempts to uncover and evaluate Sultan Bahu’s concept of mystical love and its components in a hierarchical manner