The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab

By Farina Mir, Permanent Black, Ranikhet, 2010. Pages 277. Rs. 695

 Sumandeep Maan

The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab has been written by Farina Mir who teaches History at the University of Michigan. Trained as a historian of colonial and postcolonial South Asia, her research has focused on the social, cultural and religious history of late colonial India.

Mir has done a commendable job by making a comprehensive study of Punjabi literary traditions in the British colonial Punjab (1849-1947) with particular focus on qissa(s). She delves deep into the literary and cultural history of the time by skillfully exploring seventy-five different renditions of the qissa of Heer and Ranjha to unravel the composite culture of Punjab. There are three variables with which she deals: state, religion and language, keeping in view the history of the time which was marked by communal politics fomented by the colonial interests, social and religious reformist groups and language activists.

In the introductory chapter, Mir sketches an outline of the history of the qissa tradition, Punjabi print culture and Bengali publishing where the state played an extremely crucial role. The works of important qissa writers, activities of the missionaries and the agendas of Hindu (The Arya Samaj), Sikh (the Singh Sabha), and Muslim (Deobandis, Ahmadiyas and Barelvis) reform movements are recorded. These reform movements worked principally to strengthen their particular religions for which they employed the print medium also. Mir suggests that as far as Punjabi publishing was concerned, there was continuity between the pre-colonial and colonial periods which was absent in other vernacular literary cultures. Mir tries to take into account the changes in the language policy in colonial Punjab which characterized the marginalization of Punjabi through policies that denied the language and its literature almost any state patronage. Urdu was designated as the official language. This had considerable influence on literary production and the print culture in Punjab. In this lucidly written work, she analyzes a whole array of reasons behind it which also explain the limitations of the colonial state vis-à-vis the resilience of Punjabi literary tradition.

In the first chapter entitled “Forging a Language Policy”, Mir studies - by way of analysis of the language policies of the British - the marginalized status of Punjabi, but she also points out that Punjabi was indispensable for the colonial officials. Giving a brief history of early printing in Punjab, Mir discusses how Urdu became the predominant language of the press. In the publication of newspapers, periodicals and even books Urdu outnumbered other languages. The writer meticulously details the pre-colonial linguistic and literary practices in which Persian was the official language.

She also deals with the question of why the government adopted Urdu as the official language. The foremost reason was the connection between script and religious community. Punjabi was associated with the Sikh community. Some officials in the colonial administration feared that giving an official status to Punjabi and the resulting “confluence of sacred and spoken” might ignite the passions of the Sikhs and unite them which may pose a threat to the British power. Secondly, many colonial officials declared Punjabi as “barbaric”, “uncouth”, “the vulgarist Punjabi”, and mere “patios of Urdu.” So Punjabi was thought to be unfit to be used as administrative language. Thirdly, Urdu was preferred because many colonial administrators had knowledge of Urdu rather than of Punjabi. The promotion of Urdu also served the interests of the elite, which in turn helped the colonial state. Moreover, a plethora of Punjabi dialects were in use simultaneously in Punjab, and so it would have been difficult to pick up only one dialect and make it the official language. So Urdu was declared to be the linguafranca to help in the integration of Punjab into the company’s other territories.

Farina Mir

Mir observes that the language policy was not confined to the administrative arena but was employed in education also. A three-tiered system tehsili, Zillah schools and colleges in Lahore was established. The department of public instruction, government book depots and other organizations sponsored mushairas (poetry recitation gatherings) and gave patronage to Urdu poets and writers, commissioned books, and even subsidized Urdu newspapers.

The second chapter notes that Punjabi was not limited to any specific ethnic group; Punjabi print culture became witness to it. Here the observations made by the colonial officials seem to have been based on flimsy grounds. Punjabi texts were printed not only in Gurumukhi and Indo-Persian scripts but also in Devanagari. Mir notes that in the second half of the nineteenth century eighteen different editions of Adi Granth were published in the Punjabi in the Urdu script and five Punjabi translations of Ramayana were also published in this script. Since the publishers received no monetary reward from the state, they often did not officially register their publications, but numerous books related to Punjabi literary tradition were produced. Punjabi publishing was upheld as an industry by market forces.

One has to go beyond the colonial perceptions in order to analyze the thriving Punjabi print culture. These comprised the newspapers and journals, though these were based only on religious communities and needed state patronage. Books on the other hand dealt with a variety of themes. Pamphlets and chapbooks were published. A vibrant market also developed for the Punjabi print. Kashmiri bazaar in Lahore, Mai Sevan bazaar and Naval Kishore Press were some prominent sites of the book trade. Many liturgical texts were translated into Punjabi. Tracts were published and qissa(s) remained the outstanding genre - “a site for social commentary.”

Mir gives a brief detail of the qissa writers of the time also. She also covers the whole gamut of the colonial efforts to gain oriental knowledge which subsumed the understanding of vernacular language, administrative essentials, data collection of all kinds related with print proliferation in Punjab and other states, and even lifestyles, religion, shrines, festivals and celebrations etc.

In the third chapter, Mir examines the performance contexts of Punjabi literature focusing on the institutional sites where the performances took place. These sites were both secular and religious such as Sufi shrines where qawwalis and sama were performed, and gurdwaras, village chowks, melas and wedding celebrations, and these were free of colonial intervention. A key feature of Mir’s work is that her inquiry focuses also on cultural formation away from communal identities and nationalistic politics. This cultural formation refers to “a group constituted through its members, shared practices of producing, circulating, performing, reading, and listening to Punjabi literary texts, qisse in particular” (Mir 97). This was not gender, class, caste or religion specific but involved active participation in which women, the elite such as Diwans, low status performers such as qawwals, mirasis, dhadis, dums, qalanders, putlivads, bhirains, and the audience comprised a cross section of. There was a distinct type of patronage for the performance specialists and it became the reason of vibrant Punjabi literary tradition during the colonial Punjab. A community flourished around these qissa(s) which marked tradition’s durability and presented a contrast to the communal historiography which focused on class, caste and religious formations.

The next two chapters discuss how the themes emerging in these qissa(s) contribute to our understanding of the colonial Punjab. As Punjabi print culture was market driven, so it evolved around specific themes, which suggests that these themes had considerable significance for the poets as well as their audiences: zat as a determinant of self and community but not of any specific religious community, representations of women who disregarded the traditionalist reformist dialogue of the day which emphasized subdued gender identities, more emphasis on local than on national, the notion of multiple religious identities, and shared notions of piety without leaving one’s Sikh, Muslim, Hindu and Christian affiliations which present a contrast to the communal discourse of the day. These qissa show the devotional practices of Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, and Sufis, and their religious figures find places in these qissa(s). Mir successfully connects these themes through the analysis of different renditions of the qissa of Heer and Ranjha. Thus the text in a way celebrates the cultural and religious diversity of Punjab which was threatened by communalized politics.

Mir’s work however leaves a few questions unexamined. Firstly, when the Sikhs rose to power in the pre-colonial period under the leadership of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, they persisted with Persian instead of introducing any change in the language policy. Persian remained the official language during the rule of Ranjit Singh until 1837. Was not Punjabi marginalized at that time? Was the advent of colonial rule solely responsible for the marginalization of Punjabi?

Another point to be noted is that the popularity and presence of qissa(s) were not restricted to Punjab. The qissa itself as a genre was adopted from Persian and Arabic story-telling. Mir while speaking of the social space of language restricts her work to only the qissa of Heer Ranjha. Was the Punjabi literary formation based only on qissa(s)? In the colonial period other genres like novel, short story, ghazals, songs and plays also became prominent in Punjabi. KaviDarbars and other poets’ gatherings were held; and in them qissa was not the only focus. Can one not include these genres in the Punjabi literary formation? Mir’s work does not deal with this question.

It is quite paradoxical that Mir on one hand points out that the region was the site of particularly intense and brutal religious violence during the partition, yet she also states that important realms of activity in Punjabi society remained unaffected by the communal discourse of the day. She also points out that the two were not mutually exclusive. Studying the role of the colonial state, religious reform movements and language activists and the simultaneous existence of the composite culture of Punjabi literary formation raises the question whether the appearance of communalism was sudden or not? If the qissa(s) presented a counter-historiography, a composite culture of Punjab and were deeply rooted in the psyche of people, did this literary formation not contribute in mitigating the communal divides? If the people shared a composite culture why did such incidents as partition and division of Punjab come to happen?

But all said and done, Mir’s engaging study is an invaluable contribution to analyzing the Punjabi literary traditions in colonial Punjab and is greatly helpful in understanding the complexities of post-colonial history of South Asia.

Works Cited

Diwana, Mohan Singh. A History of Punjabi Literature. Amritsar: Kasturi Lal & Sons, 1956.

---. An Introduction to Punjabi Literature. Amritsar: Nanak Singh Pustakmala, 1951.

Gundara, Jagdish S. “Linguistic Diversity in Global Multicultural Civic Politics: The Case of Urdu.” Social Scientist. 31.5/6 (2003): 38-56. JSTOR. Web. 26 November, 2011.

Mir, Farina. The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture of British Colonial Punjab.

Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2010.

[Courtesy: South Asian Ensemble, 4/4, Autumn 2012]