Waris Shah's Heer

Subversion and Radicality in the Qissa and Postcolonial Punjabi Poetry

Abstract

This paper explores the feminist poetics of Punjabi Qissas with special focus on Waris Shah’s Heer. At the outset the paper explores the critical question whether Waris Shah’s Heer should be regarded as a Qissa (in the typical Arabic/Persian tradition) or as an Epic (in the conflated Eurocentric sense). It further draws parallels with postcolonial Punjabi poetry, focusing on poets like Amrita Pritam. Through a close reading of her poems like “Ajjaakhan Waris Shah nu” [“Today I Call on Waris Shah”] by Amrita Pritam, I try to establish that these progressive poets have deployed the contestatory and popular genre of Heer to critique the intersectional patriarchies of nation, region and community. Their radical and nuanced re-working of Heer’s voice seems to de-center male authorial privilege in the Punjabi literary formation, constituting Punjabi language as a potent site for engaging with tradition under modernity. Together, their poems seek to offer an inversion of the existing gender dynamics and offer a historiographical and literary reconstruction of cultural identity to locate women as active subjects and narrators of history. As the paper develops it becomes evident that the Qissa is not so much about Ranjha’s devotion and piety as it is about Heer’s attempts to question and then rebel against the law enforcing authority of her father, and by extension, that of a paternalistic, oppressive feudal order embodied by the Qazi, thereby de-legitimising all known notions of heroism endorsed by patriarchy.