A Dataset Shah Jo Risalo: A Multilingual Verse Dataset of Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai's Sindhi Sufi Poetry

This dataset is a digital collection of 4,698 verses from Shah Jo Risalo, the famous poetry book of Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai (1689–1752), one of the greatest Sindhi Sufi poets in history. The set is stored as a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet (.xlsx) with a single data sheet with one row for each verse. There are 9 forms in every verse – that is original Sindhi text (in Arabic script), an English translation with words for Sindhi, a simple modern Sindhi translation, an Urdu translation, a detailed Urdu explanation, a detailed sindi explanation, a Sur name and a verse number. These poems are organised in 30 Surs (chapters) analogous to Raags (classical music) in which there are 152 Daastans (story sections). The largest Sur (chapter) is 374 verses, and the smallest Sur is just 31 verses. The completeness of almost all the data is from a top quartile of 99.6-percent with only 9 news data fields missing out of 4,698. The collection can be used by researchers, students, and developers for projects related to language translation, text analysis, Sindhi literature, Islamic poetry, and artificial intelligence related to multilingual texts.