Writing Punjabi across borders
Anne Murphy2018, South Asian History and Culture
https://doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2017.1411049
Sign up for access to the world's latest research
Abstract
To write literature in any Indian vernacular today is, to some degree, to fight a battle. Salman Rushdie famously argued in 1997 for the ascendancy of Indian writing in English, such that fiction and nonfiction produced "by Indian writers working in English is proving to be a stronger and more important body of work than most of what has been produced in the eighteen 'recognized' languages of India"; V.S. Naipaul asserted a similar sentiment at a 2002 conference in Delhi. 1 While the problems with such assertions are obvious, the global politics of English and the economics of the publishing industry ensure a continuing embattled status for vernacular literary production in South Asia. This is all the more pronounced with respect to modern Punjabi language cultural production, where in Pakistan, according to Tariq Rahman, the "effort to teach Punjabi [has] floundered on the rock of cultural shame and prejudice," and in India, where Punjabi has achieved state support, the language loses ground to both Hindi and English, which are often chosen particularly by elites over Punjabi. Concern in the Punjabi Diaspora over language loss is even more intense. Punjabi overall has been erroneously declared to be at risk of extinction in recent years, based on a much-referenced United Nations report on languages at risk that does not in fact name Punjabi. 2 This latter "fact" does not need to be true to resonate with the experience of activists for the Punjabi language today, who rightly perceive a range of challenges arrayed against it. is not by any means to place "early Punjabi" within a longer "Hindi" literary history, but instead to challenge the notion of any of these early languages being subsumed within teleological accounts of later modern languages, as has been asserted effectively in recent discussion of "before the divide" of Hindi and Urdu. 5 Allison Busch has written eloquently of the broader difficulties of defining the boundaries of Braj itself, so this is not an issue that is specific to Punjabi; in her words, Braj "often appears to be congenitally impure, that is to say, hybrid and multiregistered," 6 with "considerable internal variation within the loosely defined larger rubric of Braj Bhasha" 7 ; the designation of identity and difference is almost always politicized. 8 As Busch notes, "during the seventeenth century [Braj] became a language that travelled vast distances, and along the journey it encountered a range of courtly contexts and regional linguistic practices, to which the poets adapted." 9 Punjab was one of its destinations, and there Braj flourished within Sikh literary production, in Gurmukhi. The common declaration of the Punjabi language as the special domain of the Sikhs and as somehow intrinsically linked to Gurmukhi, therefore, is not grounded in fact; indeed, as Christopher Shackle has noted, "it was precisely during this period of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when Sikhs were writing in Braj... that Punjabi was being developed as a literary medium for the creation of superb verse by Muslim poets." 10 We have relatively late manuscript evidence for such compositions, however, constraining our ability to speak definitively of Punjabi's development among Sufi poets. 11 There is much merit, as Francesca Orsini has advocated, in moving beyond the "constraints of teleological narratives of Hindi and Urdu," to understanding Punjabi within a "more spacious framework of 'north Indian literature,'" 12 where we can then appreciate the complexity of Punjabi's emergence alongside Sadhukkari (a mix of various vernaculars, and commonly used across North India in the early modern period), what Imre Bangha calls "Gurmukhi Rekhta" (exhibiting Khari Boli features, as associated with later Hindi and Urdu), and Braj.
