Notes
From a Punjabi Literature Conference in Vancouver
Amardeep Singh
Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University
I was recently in cool Vancouver to give a talk at a conference on
Modern Punjabi Literature. The
conference was at the University of British Columbia, and it was
hosted by the Asian Studies department (which has a strong program
in Punjabi language instruction, part of which includes the study of
literature).
The community was invited in, and they most definitely came --
including a number of poets and novelists in Vancouver's
surprisingly large Punjabi language writers' community. One of the
best-known Punjabi poets in Vancouver is of course
Sadhu Binning,
who has also taught Punjabi at UBC for more than 20 years (he's now
retiring, sadly). His collection,
"No More Watno Dur" is one of
the very few collections of Punjabi poetry I've seen to be published
in a bilingual edition (which is especially helpful for someone like
me -- a person who reads Punjabi only haltingly, and always with
reference to a dictionary).
It was great to meet, for instance, the Punjabi-Pakistani poet,
Fauzia Rafiq (who didn't
mention she had a blog!). Another writer who seems well worth
checking out is
Ajmer Rode.
At the poetry reading on the last night of the conference,
Nadeem Parmar sang a ghazal in
Punjabi. I Googled him today, and was surprised to find that he's
written lyrics for many well-known singers, including Jagjit Singh.
I also Googled
Darshan Singh Gill, and was
intrigued to find that he had actually been featured in a CBC
documentary about new immigrants in Canada, back in 1958. And those
were just a few of the names.
I also met a Dhol player for a Vancouver Bhangra band. He also plays
Dhol for a "world music"/fusion group called
"Delhi To Dublin", which seems
worth checking out. He also plays Dhol for a "pure" Bhangra group
called
En Karma, which I'm looking
forward to listening to.
Those are some links to start off. Below, I'll discuss some of the
more substantial issues discussed at the conference.
I was surprised by the number of writers who showed up, and how
prolific they all seemed to be. One of the questions we've sometimes
discussed on Sepia Mutiny is the
future of the Punjabi
language (and other Indian languages) at a moment
when English and Hindi seem ever more culturally dominant in India.
But even more urgent in some ways right now than language in general
is the question about the status of Punjabi literature -- with the
commercial market for Punjabi-language books apparently drying up
quite quickly within Punjab (Punjabi writers in India have an
obvious commercial incentive to write in English). Several writers
at the conference voiced concerns to the effect that Punjabi
language literature runs the risk of becoming more parochial and
isolated -- no longer a natural, organic part of the culture (where
people publish in Punjabi because they think of it as their primary
literary language). Even if it doesn't disappear entirely, there is
certainly a live danger of literature written in the Punjabi
language becoming a kind of museum piece.
Of course, that is only one part of the discussion. The more
"internal" academic issues, including some close readings of major
Punjabi writers from the mid-20th century, including Gurdial Singh,
Nanak Singh, Bhai Vir Singh, among others. A number of diasporic
writers were discussed, including especially Gurumel Sidhu and
Gurcharan Rampuri.
There were also discussions about the
mistake entailed in
conflating "Punjabi literature" with "Sikh literature."
Most of the authors discussed in the scholarly talks were Sikhs (in
fact, most of the authors were Sikh men -- I did discuss a short
story by Ajeet Cour in my talk, but I was one of the few to do so.)
But of course, there is a considerable body of writing in Punjabi by
Pakistanis. The problem, of course, is that while the language is
very close, Muslim Punjabis tend to write in
Shahmukhi
script (based on Urdu), while Sikh and Hindu Punjabis tend to write
in Gurmukhi
(the script thought to have been invented by the Sikh Gurus).
The conflation of "Sikh" and "Punjabi" is also an issue when we're
thinking about the disciplinary questions surrounding "Punjab
Studies" and "Sikh Studies" in North American universities. The Sikh
community has, in recent years, raised money to create a handful of
Sikh Studies endowed chairs at different universities -- including
the University of Michigan, Hofstra University in Long Island, and
UBC itself. And while these universities have learned, sometimes the
hard way in some cases, that they must retain control when it comes
to hiring and evaluating faculty for these positions, questions
about how independent these scholars really can be have remained in
some people's minds, in part because of recent history.
Those of us who want this kind of scholarship to happen are in
somewhat of a double-bind. Without support and encouragement from
the community, it is highly unlikely that there would be much
interest in studying Sikhism and Sikh history seriously in North
America -- universities aren't funding it widely enough to support a
sizeable community of scholars on their own, and very few religion
departments are well-staffed enough to justify more than one "South
Asian religions" person. But then, if scholars in "Sikh Studies"
positions partially endowed by the community come out with scholarly
work the community doesn't particularly like, the universities find
themselves on the receiving end of vehement criticism.
My own paper was called
"Secular Sikh
Writers," and I was trying to do two things: first,
provoke a debate about what is entailed in identifying oneself as a
"secular Sikh." In my view, one of the unusual features of the idea
of secularism in (and
from)
South Asia is the possibility that one can retain an "observant"
relationship to a particular religious community, while also being
strongly committed to freedom of religion (or even freedom
from
religion), socially and politically. By contrast, in the west,
secularism usually is thought to be more or less synonymous with
"atheism."
The paper I gave also tried to briefly chart a history of
secularization in fiction by Punjabi Sikh writers, starting with
Bhair Vir Singh (who was not, I don't think, "secular," according to
my definition), then moving forward to Social realist writers like
Kartar Singh Duggal in the 1950s and 60s, and finally to the
"contemporary" moment, with writers like Ajeet Cour. My argument was
that even the contemporary writers continue to interrogate the line
between "religious" and "secular" experiences of the world.
A full essay on "secular Sikh writers" would obviously also include
some secular Sikhs writing in English, including of course Khushwant
Singh and Shauna Singh Baldwin, and maybe also figures like Rajinder
Singh Bedi (who wrote in Urdu). This being a Punjabi literature
conference,I focused on writers working in Punjabi. Since, as I
mentioned, my Punjabi reading skills are weak, I relied heavily on
translations, and then checked the original texts where I could find
them (mostly at the library at the University of Pennsylvania, here
in Philly).
Most of the discussion of my paper, not surprisingly, revolved
around the first topic -- what is a "secular Sikh"?
Overall, a fun -- and humbling -- weekend.
Lehigh.edu
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