Abstract
This paper explores how Ghadar’s legacy is interpreted by the Punjabi literary movement in Punjab, Pakistan. Putting Ghadar’s poetry into conversation with the work of these contemporary activists sheds light on unexplored facets of both. It unveils how these writers and thespians invoke Ghadar to subvert the narrow discourse of “Punjabiyat” and ethno-nationalist identity, and allows us to appreciate the politics of language that underpinned Ghadar di Goonj. The intertwining of these histories of literary dissent raises key questions for debates around radical literature and progressive writing in South Asia, by highlighting the role of vernaculars in reading subaltern consciousness and native traditions of revolt.
Highlights
The air is cold but the sun shines bright onto the mud courtyard
A contemporary Punjabi play, Sammi di Vaar is being performed in a small village in Chakwal by the Sangat troupe, the small but active group of intellectuals and artists who constitute a Marxist stream within the Punjabi movement
This paper explores the interpretation of the Ghadar legacy in contemporary West Punjab
Summary
The air is cold but the sun shines bright onto the mud courtyard. The surrounding walls are neatly scrubbed, mud and thatch, enclosing a group of around 50 women, young and old, with their eyes trained onto a lean man clad in blue, and a vivacious young girl in pink. That is why Ghadri poetry, composed overwhelmingly in Punjabi, is read as a “Sikh manifesto” rather than an anti-colonial literature of resistance, and why plays like Takht Lahore are analysed from the lens of “Punjabiyat,” despite Syed’s clear use of “Marxist-inspired literary methodologies” (Kalra and Butt 2013) In this way, colonial linguistic policy created the conditions that marginalized cultural production in the vernacular. The colonial state’s need for Indian scribes and functionaries educated in the language of administration led by the mid-19th century to the creation of what Hamza Alavi has termed the “salariat,” a class of urban-based professionals, sections of which would later play an important role in the Pakistan movement (Alavi 1988, 68) Their distinct identity as the “governing class” which served the interests of the “economically dominant classes” through their “direct grip over the colonial state apparatus” (Alavi 1988, 68) was cemented through the cultural bond of Urdu, the language they spoke, wrote and worked in, and came to enjoy in literature, music and theatre.. Its surviving reverberations would be picked up in 1960s Pakistan, with the birth of a literary movement that combined rebel peasant consciousness and radical language politics in a historical tradition of resistance that stretched back from the Mazdoor Kissan Party to Ghadar, and all the way to the pre-colonial institutions of radical Sufism in Punjab
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