Evolving utopias : an overview of three representative Punjabi works from 1890s, 1910s & 1930s

• Main Author: Shason, Jan-Paul
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2009
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/12472

This thesis examines literary works from three critical periods in the history of colonial Panjab. The purpose of the examination is to understand the Panjabi society’s responses to the Raj and to trace the region’s social and intellectual history through these works. The first work, the 1898 ‘historical novel’ Sundari by Bhai Vir Singh, is from a time when the communities of the Panjab had begun to form collective responses to the new rulers and the Western education, religion and ideas they represented. It reflects the period of communal identity-building taking place by the three indigenous communities of Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs. From the 1910s, Ghadar Lahir di Kawita, the poetry of Ghadar (the political revolution contemplated by the mostly-Panjabi émigrés in the United States and Canada) just before the World War, reflects their response to the mis-treatment they receive in North America. Their desire and plans to regain personal and social honour is to vanquish their enemy, the British Raj. The world-view of this semi-literate community of the Panjabi diaspora is considerably different from the faith-based identity-building ideology of Sundari. From the 1930s, two nearly concurrent anthologies, Sawe Pattar and Kasumbharha, by the modern poet Mohan Singh are examined to trace the evolution of Punjabi into a modern language and of the region’s communities towards a more secular society. The three critical periods so examined through representative literary works show the evolution of Panjabi society’s aspirations from communalism to nationalism of political revolution to the building together of a secular society on “progressive” universalist grounds. These literary works idealize the aspirations of the society at three critical periods of history in differing responses to the challenges of those particular times by creating three different, and evolving, utopias.