The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab (South Asia Across the Disciplines)

This rich cultural history set in Punjab examines a little-studied body of popular literature to illustrate both the durability of a vernacular literary tradition and the limits of colonial dominance in British India. Farina Mir asks how qisse, a vibrant genre of epics and romances, flourished in colonial Punjab despite British efforts to marginalize the Punjabi language. She explores topics including Punjabi linguistic practices, print and performance, and the symbolic content of qisse. She finds that although the British denied Punjabi language and literature almost all forms of state patronage, the resilience of this popular genre came from its old but dynamic corpus of stories, their representations of place, and the moral sensibility that suffused them. Her multidisciplinary study reframes inquiry into cultural formations in late-colonial north India away from a focus on religious communal identities and nationalist politics and toward a widespread, ecumenical, and place-centered poetics of belonging in the region.

Browse Our Catalog.

View More In History & Criticism.

Grammar-school students in Shakespeare’s time were taught to recognize the two hundred figures of speech that Renaissance scholars had derived from ...

This highly regarded English Composition text teaches students to read argument and provides material around which they can write their own argumentat...

This book examines the epistemological assumptions about language and writing that were persistent throughout the course of imperial Chinese history (...

A History of the Korean Language is the first book on the subject ever published in English. It traces the origin, formation, and various historical s...

This book surveys the two main indigenous languages of Japan, Japanese and Ainu. No genetic relationship has been established between them, and struct...

A Nebula and Hugo Award-winning writer of science fiction presents a collection of essays that explores the various issues, concepts, challenges, and ...

From a linguistic perspective, this book is a practical explanation of how confessions work. Roger Shuy, author of the 1993 benchmark work, Language C...