Radical Re-tellings of Hir: Gender and the Politics of Voice in Postcolonial Punjabi Poetry

This paper explores the feminist poetics of postcolonial Punjabi poetry, focusing specifically on Amrita Pritam and Nasreen Anjum Bhatti. Through a close reading of their poems, “Ajj aakhan Waris Shah nu” [“Today I Call on Waris Shah”] and “Nil karaiyan nilkan” [“Blue Cloth Dyed Blue”], I argue that these progressive poets deployed the contestatory genre of Hir to critique the multiple patriarchies of nation, region and community. Their radical re-working of Hir’s voice attempts to de-center male authorial privilege in the Punjabi literary formation, constituting the regional vernacular as a potent site for engaging with tradition under modernity. Together, their poems offer a historiographical and literary reconstruction of cultural identity to locate women as active subjects and narrators of history.