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INTRODUCTION
Imagining Punjab and the Punjabi diaspora: after more than a century of Punjabi migration
Anjali Gera Roy
Department of Humanities & Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur, India
This special issue foregrounds the region within diaspora studies through examining the representations of Punjab, a land-locked region divided between India and Pakistan after the partition of 1947. By bringing together papers that focus on plural imaginings of the region, the special issue throws light on the importance of the region rather than the nation for Punjabi diasporas. Through focusing on a number of Punjabi spaces and communities and engaging with Punjab as a geographical region, social construct and state of consciousness, the papers hope to contribute to broader debates on transnationalism, postnationalism, micronationalism and new identity narratives emerging in the twenty-first century.
The special issue’s engagement with the region is framed within but also differs from transnational, Sikh and Punjab studies. Vertovec (1999, 1–2) described transnationalism
as a condition in which, despite great distances and notwithstanding the presence of international borders (and all the laws, regulations and national narratives they represent), certain kinds of relationships have been globally intensified and now take place paradoxically in a planet-spanning yet common – however virtual – arena of activity.
Vertovec also suggested several themes – ‘social morphology, as a type of consciousness, as a mode of cultural reproduction, as an avenue of capital, as a site of political engagement, and as a reconstruction of – “place” or locality’ to disentangle the term (1999, 1). Punjabi diasporas, marginalized within the larger discourse of diaspora studies, have begun to receive due attention within the newly formed field of Sikh and Punjab studies that largely focuses on Sikh tradition (McLeod 1989; Singh and Barrier 1996; Grewal 1998) but has also directed academic attention to the region and the communities originating there (Dusenbury 1999; Gilmartin 2004; Talbot and Thandi 2004; Talbot 2007; Nesbitt 2011). In his essay ‘The Diasporic Imaginary’, Brian Keith Axel contested the ‘place of origin’ thesis dominating diaspora studies by arguing that ‘for many diasporic groups, place, or place of origin, is not the primary issue’ (2002, 411) citing the particular case of the Sikh diaspora and concluded that the ‘imagined homeland’ is the product of ‘the diasporic imaginary’ (Mishra 1996). Axel’s book The Nation’s Tortured Body: Violence, Representation, and the Formation of a Sikh Diaspora (2001) that developed the idea further has radically altered the understanding of the relationship between the diaspora and the homeland. The idea of the homeland as a diasporic construct has been taken up in a number of essays that focus on the performance of Punjab through diasporic cultural practices (Baumann 1990; Bennett 2000; Dudrah 2002). However, Talbot (2007) has uncovered imperial acts of geographical and social reengineering that produced the region of Punjab that foreground construction as an intrinsic feature of the imagining of the Punjabi homeland. Similarly, Shackle (2014) has called attention to the repression of other languages such as Siraiki through their classification as dialects of Punjabi by the British to produce a unified Punjab and to the ‘growing pressure for official recognition of Siraiki as a language distinct from Punjabi, and the consequent demand for the separation of the main Siraiki-speaking region from Punjab province’. Gilmartin (2004) interrogates the rural imaginary (Tatla 2004) charted on Punjab by asserting that both the Punjabi village and the Punjabi villager were colonial constructs.
Sensitive to these studies, this special issue focuses on the imagining of Punjab. In doing so, it deconstructs Punjab as an ethno-spatial but also as an ethno-linguistic and ethno-cultural construct produced through its imagining by the communities who dwell there, those who have left it and those formed by new narratives of the region. The idea behind the special issue was to move away from the originary myths of the region and identity that have dominated academic and mediatized representations of Punjab and to focus on the role of the imagination in producing Punjab. In particular, it hoped to reveal ‘the rural imaginary’ (Mooney 2011) to be a specifically Jat Sikh imaginary that has been historically mapped on Punjab through the production of Punjab as the granary of the British Empire during colonialism, a policy that was carried over in the post-colonial Indian state’s rhetorical homage to the Punjabi farmer. This special issue aims to isolate imaginings of Punjab that are not centred on exclusivist regional, linguistic, sectarian or caste perspectives to propose the concept of free-flowing cartographies in relation to Punjab that facilitate its imaginings as a geographical region, a social construct and a state of consciousness. The region is imagined as a small place, a neighbourhood, a city, a village but also as performative traditions and everyday practices governing social relations and certain ways of doing things. While the essays engage with the particular region of Punjab, the ideas developed there have implications beyond Punjab. Thinking in terms of Punjab’s free-flowing Punjabi cartographies underlines the constant crossing of boundaries between languages, cultures and sects in the Punjabi village (Oberoi 1994; Ahmed 2003; Ram 2008).
The papers in the special issue engage with plural imaginings of the region across several cities, nations, ethnic groups and genres. Through examining the fiction of two writers from Pakistan Punjab, Bapsi Sidhwa and Mohsin Hamid, Claire Chambers foregrounds their representation of Lahore, a province which had come to be equated with Punjab in the time of Akbar, as a post-colonial megacity that can be made to serve as a microcosm of Punjab and the nation. Arguing that Lahore is ‘an unevenly developed, international urban centre, which constantly interpenetrates with and is cross-fertilized by its Punjabi rural hinterland’, she points out that the representation of the interrelationship between heterogeneous groups of people in the two loci in the novels, the red light district of Heera Mandi and the nearby Badshahi mosque, enables exploration of metropolitan/hinterland dynamic in West Punjab. If Chambers foregrounds the diasporic imagining of Punjab through historically layered neighbourhoods of the ‘Mughal City of Gardens’, Kaveri Qureshi focuses on the deterritorialized ‘Little Punjabs’ of UK through tracing the established geographies of Punjabiness as illustrated by Thandi coach route maps and the significance of these interconnected hubs of Punjabiness for the emergence of belonging among second generation Punjabis. Through examining life history interviews of second generation Punjabis who grew up in provincial cities and towns off the Thandi coach route, she shows that they construct places like Southall Broadway and Soho Road as authentically Punjabi to demonstrate that such places can be crucibles of diasporic nostalgia and can ‘decouple diaspora from originary homeland’. Virinder Kalra’s essay contributes to the under-theorized idea of Punjabiat through exploring the biography and music of one of the most popular South Asian singers Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. Through examining the relationship between non-essential Punjabiat and musical performativity, Kalra argues that the processes that ‘operate to sustain musical and cultural continuity’ tend to ‘oscillate between the normatively demarcated zones of East Punjab, West Punjab and Punjabi diaspora’. In sharp contrast to Kalra who focuses on musical continuity to make a strong case for non-essential Punjabiat, Nukhbah Langah explores the poetry of two Siraiki poets, Khwaja Ghulam Farid and Riffat Abbas, to deconstruct the notion of an essentialized Punjabiat through their appropriation of the musical genre of Kafi. Through comparing the Kafis of the nineteenth century mystic poet with those of Abbas, she reveals Siraiki poets’ appropriation of poetic and musical genres to resist colonial or Punjabi dominance and demonstrates how Abbas departs from the images and style of traditional Kafis of Farid to make a case for Siraiki difference. While Kalra cites linguistic and musical continuity to dissolve geographical boundaries, Langah reveals linguistic difference repressed in the construction of a generalized Punjabiat to strengthen claims for Siraiki separatism. Abbas Zaidi’s essay brings another dimension to the linguistic debate through systematically investigating the paradoxical disappearance of Punjabi from West Punjab despite its Punjabi dominance. Through calling attention to the diasporization of Punjabi from Punjab, Zaidi disengages language from ethnic identity formation that has implications for the emergence of ethno-linguistic regionalisms. The final paper in the special issue brings a gendered perspective to bear upon the continuity of the Punjabi cultural precept of izzat in the diaspora through examining the biographies of two diasporic women, Provoked by Kiranjit Ahluwalia and Rahila Gupta; and Shame and Daughters of Shame by Jasvinder Sanghera. Through examining how the notion of izzat continues to regulate female behaviour even in diasporic families, Shweta Kushal and Evangeline Manickam reveal that resistance to Punjabi patriarchal structures is always contained through the recall of rural Punjabi norms.
The essays in the special issue bring a variety of disciplinary approaches to engage with the imagining of Punjab ranging from literary and cultural studies to sociology and sociolinguistics. They also draw on a wide range of methodologies, including literary and cultural analysis, ethnographic research (narratives and observation) and quantitative data analysis. There is clearly more room for research on the imagining of Punjab and that of other regions, communities and places of settlement. While most of the papers focused on the Pakistan Punjab and diasporic Punjab and literary and cultural texts produced there, there is ample scope for research that foregrounds its similarities for the Indian Punjab and other Punjabi communities. The essays in the special issue demonstrate the connections of Punjabi diaspora with the Punjab region that is imagined as a physical, social and mental construct rather than nation, language, religion or ethnicity, which has implications both for the importance of the imagining of the region within diaspora studies and the notion of the region itself as an imagined construct.
References
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