Abstracts Geography

Writing Resistance in the Three Punjabs: Critical Engagements with Literary Tradition

by Sara Kazmi

This dissertation analyses post-colonial Punjabi writing on the left as a critical engagement with literary tradition that re-interprets tropes of resistance embedded in popular, oral genres to articulate political critique in the contemporary. Drawing on Punjabi texts from India, Pakistan, and Britain, I show how this corpus constitutes an imaginative geography of an un-Partitioned Punjab by re-working regional oral texts like the Hir qissa, the Bulleh Shah kafi, and the var of Dulla Bhatti. However, this turn to regional roots can by no means be read as a nostalgic paean to a pristine pre-colonial past. Instead, these post-colonial interpretations of literary tradition are informed by resistance against the oppressions of caste, class, patriarchy, race, dominant religion, and statist authoritarianism. Thus, my readings of Amrita Pritam, Nasreen Anjum Bhatti, Gursharan Singh, Najm Hosain Syed, Ustad Daman, Sant Ram Udasi, Niranjan Singh Noor, Ajmer Coventry and Avtar Singh Sadiq highlight the centrality of contestation and resistance to the living Punjabi literary tradition. I focus attention on how Punjabi intellectuals continued to resist and defy the physical, conceptual, and political borders that empire and post-colonial state alike sought to entrench, de-provincialising Punjabi writing and connecting it with wider debates around decolonisation, feminism, Marxism, revolutionary culture, anti-imperialism, and popular struggle in the global South. More broadly, I draw on this selection of Punjabi writing to explore the relationship between tradition and modernity, and orality and print culture, interrogating the link between pre-colonial pasts and post-colonial futures in visions of liberation.