Saturday, 10 January 2026: 3:30 PM-4:45 PM
713A (MTCC)
The terrain of literary and cultural production in East and West Punjab from the mid-eighteenth to the early twenty-first century is characterized by its rich engagement with various languages, communities, genres, and scripts (Malhotra and Mir, 2012; Shackle, 2014; Murphy, 2018). While most scholarship examining Punjabi textualities has focused on the narrative content of texts, discussions of form, choice of medium, and genre have remained few. In the context of the academic study of Punjabi literature, it is not uncommon to focus on ideas, narratives, and facts according to historiographical and hermeneutical approaches, and discussions of genre have rarely gone beyond listing or mentioning formal features of texts. In the Indic literary context, form and content should be seen as inseparable and attention to content should not be subordinated to a careful study of literary forms, such as genre (Schomer, 1987). In a spirit of countering the colonial legacy of perceiving literary genres as more or less hermetic, this panel interrogates and complicates the category of genre, considering the relationship between literary genres more as contiguous than separate (Balbir, 1994). Anne Murphy proposes to explore the historical criticism and narrative poetic works of Najm Hosain Syed (b. 1936), a major figure in the Punjabi language advocacy movement of Pakistan and a prominent poet, playwright, and critic. Through an analysis of Syed's folk narrative poetic work (Vār), Murphy shows how Syed’s work complicates the idea of genre, working across historiography, ballad, and performance to engage with Punjabi lok rīt or “people’s/folk tradition.” Fatima Afzal's paper interrogates the relationship between Punjabi works of translation and the category of World Literature. Through an exploration of Barkat Ram's Anīs-ul-ghurbā, a Punjabi translation of Hunain ibn Ishaq’s (d. 873 A.D) Arabic translation of the Greek philosopher Hippocrates’s (d. 377 BCE) work on medicine and of Amar Singh’s Nītī Ratan, a Punjabi translation of the Greek storyteller Aesop’s (d. 564 BCE) Fables, Afzal interrogates what these translations into Punjabi can tell us about the Punjabi engagement with the category of World Literature in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Jvala Singh explores how the largest Sikh literary work in history— The Suraj Prakash (1843) by Santokh Singh (1787-1843)—can be seen at the intersection of biography and the commentarial tradition. Through an examination of Santokh Singh's fragmented social commentary on Sikh-led states in the Suraj Prakash, Singh's paper shows the complexity of the idea of genre in relation to Sikh sources and provides critical insight into courtly life, in historical terms. Julie Vig explores the question of genre in relation to the mid-to-late eighteenth century work Gurbilās Pātshāhī Das by Kuir Singh Kalāl. Categorized as vilāsa by the author himself, the Gurbilās Pātshāhī Das also lies at the intersection of other genres, as a type of historical writing that contains many modes (Rao, Shulman, and Subrahmanyam, 2001). It is inspired by courtly eulogies, puranic texts, and even gāthā (story/edifying tale), and caritra (life story). The four papers are closely connected in the ways they engage with the textured literary landscape of Punjab and question categories of genres.
This panel includes four 12-minute presentations and 15 minutes of unstructured discussion. The four speakers represent a diversity of voices across rank, gender, race, and geographic location.
Organizer:
Julie Vig
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