A01=Farina Mir
Author_Farina Mir
british colonial era
british india
Category=NHF
colonial dominance
colonialism
cultural history
epic romances
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
language
late colonial india
linguistic historians
linguistics
literary genres
literary tradition
moral sensibility
multidisciplinary study
nationalist politics
north india
poetics
popular literature
print literature
punjab
punjabi language
punjabi stories
qisse
regional languages
religious communal identities
social history
south asia
symbolism
vernacular culture
Product details
- ISBN 9780520262690
- Weight: 544g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 04 Jul 2010
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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.
Farina Mir is Associate Professor of History at the University of Michigan.
