Society, Religion and Patriarchy : Exploring Medieval Punjab Through Hir Waris

Contents: Acknowledgements. 1. The narrative. 2. Culture of the people. 3. The cultural confluence in context. 4. The age of Waris Shah. 5. Waris Shah and the Qissa of Hir. 6. Social landscape. 7. Sufi, shrine and sacred space. 8. Challenge to patriarchy. 9. Conclusion. Bibliography. Index.

"The kind of social history of medieval Punjab, which has been attempted in this book, does not subscribe to a narrow communitarian employment of the people of the region. The author, has endeavoured to construct a fresh profile of the Punjabis from their own socio-cultural point of view.

The book involves investigations of the lived experiences and representations of everyday life of the people of medieval Punjab, who in the colonial and post-colonial historiography are presented as \'Muslim\', \'Sikh\' and \'Hindu\' Punjabis. Gaur has assigned them a prefix \'Punjabi\', and hence has presented the social and cultural profile of the \'Punjabi\' Muslims, instead of reading them as \'Muslim\' Punjabis. The book reveals the evolution of socio-cultural fusion in the land of five rivers, which a student of history discovers by employing folklore/people\'s literature as source-material. Thus the selection of Hir Waris, as an unconventional source of history writing, is a methodological departure, particularly when intervention of political ideologies in the craft of writing social history has been active since long, and when the semantic of culture has shifted from diversities to differences.

The present study does not simply \'reproduce\' the medieval Punjabi society as \'reflected\' in Hir Waris; rather it seeks to unfold the folk legend of Hir-Ranjha in the wider political, social, cultural and religious contexts of medieval Punjab. The volume suggests that a society, its folklore and history are organically linked with one another." (jacket)