Shah Abdul Latif of Bhit (1688–1751) is Sindh's most celebrated poet. The Risalo, his collection of Sindhi verse, is sung by his devotees daily at his tomb. It is also recited, studied, and set to pop music. It has inspired political commentaries, poetry, and religious works. Latif is a venerated saint, whose tomb at Bhit attracts many visitors, especially on his death anniversary. His visitors include people of diverse genders, religious affiliations, and sectarian identities. Recent studies have shown that Latif's poetry was elevated by colonial scholars and officials, forging a Sindhi literary canon, as they oversaw a change in the language of administration from Persian to Sindhi. However, Latif's life and poetry were also significant in his own time, marking a radical shift in individual subjectivity while also contributing to the emergence of a written Sindhi literary culture.

During Latif's time, a new social order was emerging in Sindh. This was a slow process unfolding at various loci without predetermined outcomes. The set of religious scholars in Thatta, including Makhdum Muhammad Hashim, who were the subject of the previous chapter, constituted one such locus. Latif, who was the head of a contemporaneous Sufi order, and the subject of this chapter, was another important innovator of self and community in the eighteenth century. Hashim and Latif both responded to the same context, where neither elite subjectivity nor society could be ordered anymore around the axis of the emperor.

Even as Hashim and Latif were frequently at loggerheads, their oeuvres had three features in common. They shared an interest in refashioning elite male subjectivity in relation to new communities that incorporated layfolk and women. They used a new medium, written and literary Sindhi, to formulate their idioms for individual and community. Lastly, both imagined the relationship between elite individual and popular community in less hierarchical ways than at the height of Mughal rule, when layfolk and women had been pointedly excluded.

The differences between Latif and Hashim are substantial, too. Hashim and his descendants created and upheld boundaries between Muslim and Hindu, men and women, Sunni and Shia. They also insisted on the primacy of a new Sunni Muslim order, produced out of everyday religious practice, which aspired to incorporate layfolk, women, non-Muslims, and non-Sunnis.