Journal of Research in Humanities

A Vernacular Historiography of the Punjabi Poetic Genre of the Kāfī: A Review of Shah Hussain, Bulleh Shah and Piro Preman’s Works

Ayesha Latif — 2024-07-08

This paper critically examines the formation of the Punjabi poetic tradition known as the kafi in the works of Shah Hussain, Bulleh Shah and Piro Preman, and presents an analysis of the genre as a vernacular medium. By situating the poems in the pre-modern Indian historical context, the article is an attempt to analyze the origin and the evolution of the poetic form known as the kafi. Drawing from scholars who propose a diverse and multifaceted outlook on the formation of Punjabi literary traditions, I review the genre from a framework known as a critical aesthetics of assimilation. In addition, this paper points out the structural and thematic changes introduced by the nineteenth-century poetess Piro Preman in the work called Āik Sau Sath Kāfīaṅ. I argue that the evolution of the kafi from Shah Hussain to Piro Preman’s compositions attests to the resilience and dynamism of the Punjabi poetic form.

Decolonization and Contemporary Art of Pakistan

Sadia Pasha Kamran — 2024-07-30

Decolonization as a topic of scholarly investigation and as a conceptual framework is of top priority for focused research and meaningful scholarship in the global-modern world. This study while establishing art as a medium of investigation and a manifestation of socio-political and cultural convictions of a decolonizing Pakistani society aims at exploring the contemporary visual culture and matters of image production to develop an understanding of the processes entangled with issues of sovereignty, self-determination, and territory. The creative legacies, state, and status of art institutions, academic and commercial, as well as the role of artists who helped art maintain its relevant countenance in Pakistan, are also probed. This contextual, theoretical analysis of visual arts finds ‘multiple modernities’ of the ‘global world’ as the most important integer of a ‘decolonizing’ Pakistan. The diversifying effects of global-modern; transformative, differentiated, individualizing, worldwide, and increasingly market-oriented character of Pakistani art is traced through contemporary examples that are well received in the global art market. The main discussion revolves around the often-contested narratives about art in contemporary Pakistan which are illustrative of an ever-evolving society. The periphery of investigation ultimately expands to the subject of decolonization; to claim sovereignty of mind, thoughts, and attitude in order to apprehend the colonial past to make sense of the present, and to explicit the future as per the inclinations of contemporary times. With an acknowledgment that Pakistan has earned a very respectable place in the global art world and our artists have created a niche in the most powerful and effective industry that administers the world, the paper presents the case of contemporary art in Pakistan as it affects and gets affected by society. Along with established approaches to historiography – collecting, documenting, digitizing, and analyzing the information, research methods are borrowed from sister fields of social sciences only to be tested against the established theoretical frameworks adopted as part of the global discourse on art.

A Discourse on Muslim Women’s Rights in 19th century India: Translated Excerpt from Maulavī Sayyid Mumtāz ‘Alī’s Huqūq un-Nisvāñ (1898)

Sarah Abdullah — 2024-07-30

The nineteenth century was a time of vigorous social reform in public and private spheres for Indian Muslims. The Muslim household, and especially its female inhabitants became the key ground of contestation in this regard with both assimilative and acculturative movements taking up the issue of women's rights with great zeal. Many texts, including prescriptional novels like Mirat ul-‘Arus and religious treatises like Bahishtī Zewar, were written on women’s duties and responsibilities and soon attained cult status. However, some texts like Maulavī Mumtāz ‘Alī's Huqūq un-Nisvāñ that openly challenged all assumptions regarding women's rights, duties and even traditional exegesis, were precluded from the mainstream narrative. This article includes an extract from a translation of Huqūq un-Nisvāñ that we are presently undertaking. Through this translation, we aim to recover the voice of subversive Muslim reformers like Mumtāz ‘Alī whose discourse has been missing from contemporary understanding of the history of women’s rights in South Asia.

Alienated Amusements: The Pleasures of Objective Enjoyment and Popular Narratives

Babur Khan Suri — 2024-07-30

The current paper seeks to critically analyze the contemporary notion of enjoyment and its ideological hegemonic functioning within contemporary popular culture. The present critique will employ and elaborate upon Todd McGowan’s idea of a cultural turn in terms of a commandment to enjoy in association with Robert Pfaller and Zizek’s notion of ‘interpassivity’. All three of the theorists mentioned above are highly influenced by the thought of Jacques Lacan and his reworking of Freudian analysis of the human self and culture. I will argue that the capitalist commandment to enjoy is the direct cause of the condition of interpassivity underlying the operative function of popular culture. This is a state beyond passivity where even passive enjoyment is fetishistically relegated to the objects of desire. The more we move towards interactive and popular modes of narrative and symbolic mediation the more we become unaware of our passivity of response. My argument does not criticize the digital media alone but also the function of popular works of Literature and how they engender this particular form of enjoyment by presenting and propagating clichéd and watered-down images of cultural types which attempt at not moral standardization but rather the dissipation of socio-political anxiety for the sake of the smooth functioning of the capitalistic apparatus.

Site of Memory and Mourning: Metaphor of War in Atiq Rahimi’s Selected Novels

Zahida Younas — 2024-07-30

The study undertaken analyzes three novels named as Earth and Ashes, A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear, and The Patience Stone, written by Atiq Rahimi. These novels tell the stories of families affected by the 1979 war. There is no direct reference to war and violence however, war keeps popping up in the textured background during the narration of the normal experiences of characters in the novels. These novels are enriched with the metaphors embedded in texts that complement the voice which is absent and yet it makes its presence felt throughout the text. The objective of the paper is to bring forth the role of metaphors in war literature. It concludes that metaphors are significant as on the one hand, they create a site for memory for both the part of reader and writer, yet on the other hand, they evoke pathos which invites the reader to mourn the loss of the war-torn community. This study is qualitative in nature and is conducted through the close textual analysis of all the mentioned texts under the lens of theories related to metaphors, war, memory and mourning۔