Canadian South Asian Studies Association
Congress 2024, McGill University (Montréal, June 15-17, 2024)
Panel 3.1A – New Work in the Textual Studies of Punjab
Introduction
I am very happy to have this opportunity to comment on these papers and glad that Anne has brought me to yet another very exciting city and another new venue for deepening my engagement with South Asian studies.
Time is a bit short and I should zero in as much as possible into this wonderful set of papers that together very much live up to the title of the panel, in that they are all new, bringing to light phenomena that have rarely surfaced in scholarly publications, and also in that they bring to the fore key theoretical questions regarding textuality in Punjabi language and literature.
- Jvala Singh, “All-Metal Text (Sarbloh Granth):A Sikh Retelling of a Jain Text?”
Jvala Singh’s paper on the mysterious and rather contested Sarbloh Granth brings out some key qualities of Sikh textuality that demand theoretical grappling on a par with its inner richness and complexity.
Textuality in this instance signifies a site for intervening in and contesting canons, as well as asserting new works as equally “granth”-like in status. I was reminded of how other genres such as Janamsakhis work along similar lines, that is, as vehicles for establishing alternative social possibilities. This is a feature of the Janamsakhi tradition worked out in Hardip Singh Syan’s Sikh Militancy in the Seventeenth Century where janamsakhis become textual arenas for enacting rival guru lineages.
Even at such a late stage of pre-colonial Sikh textuality (mid-eighteenth century), one finds an interplay with puranic and tantric sources of a bygone era along with tropes from Jain traditions, all of which suggests a centrifugal textual web that knows no bounds, and which can catch within its interwoven structure any number of phenomena flitting through. These traditions are not thought obsolete in the period of gunpowder empires, as Marshall Hodgson would put it in his third volume of The Venture of Islam. What we have in this form of textuality is a mélange of meanings moving in different directions, toward different temporalities, in a seemingly chaotic fashion.
Contradictions are bound to arise, and this means that for a figure like Tara Singh Narotam, the Nirmala scholar of the late nineteenth century, who views the Sarbloh Granth with a skeptical eye, questions of authenticity are inevitable. What are the implicit criteria by which a text can be judged authentic or inauthentic? Why does the imperative arise at different times to clean the canon? And what does one do with the apocryphal elements of a work of such widely dispersed textual referentiality?
- Fatima Afzal, “Propaganda Against Punjabi:Muslim Nationalism in the Punjabi-Urdu Debate of 1909”
Fatima’s paper also breaks new ground by having us grapple with the hegemony that led to the demotion of Punjabi in colonial Punjab itself in the era of separatist nationalisms (in the wake of the Swadeshi Movement). The Punjabi-Urdu debate manifested normative understandings of language that would do tremendous damage to Punjabi to this very day. The idea that a language has to be one and must correlate with a religious community meant that the regional cohesiveness provided by a common tongue could be rent asunder along communal lines. Nationalism demands linguistic standardization, tightly managed communal boundaries, and populational conformism. Urdu equals Muslim, and Punjabi seems by default to mark Sikhism, even though it is spoken by a widely variegated population of all religious stripes. Nationalism, as Roberto Schwarz notes in a different context, operates by a logic of subtraction.
The textuality that emerges in this context is one in which language is the medium of elite class self-consciousnes and assertion against less well-off and influential populations and subjects. This means that the narrative Fatima gives us is one of linguistic subalternization. She displays an especially acute sensitivity to the process at hand, and I would only recommend developing more theoretically adequate models – perhaps from Gramsci, or Voloshinov/Bakhtin – for capturing the tragic dimensions of this process. This is a domain that Subaltern Studies left for others to tend to, and that is perhaps for the best.
- Anne Murphy, “A Magazine for Change:Pritlari and the Vision of a New India in Late Colonial India”
Anne’s paper introduces at long last a very popular publication and the figure that spoke through it to a wide-ranging Punjabi-speaking world of the mid-twentieth century. Contemporary intellectual and literary history will benefit from Anne’s engagement, which is characteristically rich and nuanced. The questions this work raises are manifold, but again bring up textuality in distinct ways.
What is the form of discourse that Pritlari enacts in the public sphere? Why are there so many limitations with respect to a philosophical treatment of this subject rather than an occasional, peripatetic, open-ended and internally irresolved style of discourse?
What is the connection between this form – qauasi-open-ended – to the question of love, especially “radical love”? And furthermore, what is the genealogy demanded of this notion of love, which seems more suited to the impersonal world of the public sphere rather than to face-to-face relations?
Is “radical love” absolute, unconditional love – that seems unlikely in the public context – and how does it reconcile itself with instrumentality as the soft charm offensive for forming civility in a deeply divided and inflammatory political context? Is this love Platonic or profane, meaning ready to sully itself with worldly politics? And how does it not dissolve or become ineffectual in the sphere of friend-enemy relations that mark late colonial and post-Independence India?
Concluding Comments: Barthes on Textuality
Time is nearly up, but for the moment I have remaining I would urge our field to continue to undo its own marginality and subalternity by engaging with theoretical works that might speak more to it than their own cultural spheres. I have in mind, for instance, Roland Barthes’s “De l’oeuvre au texte” from 1971. The irrepressible dynamics of a textuality that is plural, liminal, centrifugal, and in some sense uncontainable resemble more the world of Punjabi and its milieux than the staid canons and standardized forms of modern French. We would benefit from extending Barthes insights from this subaltern world which has much to offer for extending the domain of contemporary critical theory. Thank you.
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