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From Ravidas and Nanak to Waris Shah: Texts, Languages, and Religious Imaginaries in Early Modern Punjab

Author:Anne Murphy
Series:Sanctum Studies in Indian Intellectual, Cultural, and Historical Traditions
Binding:Paperback
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About the Book
From Ravidas and Nanak to Waris Shah explores the textual, linguistic, and religious worlds of early modern Punjab through figures and traditions that shaped the region’s cultural imagination. Moving from the devotional voices of Ravidas and Guru Nanak to Waris Shah’s eighteenth-century Hīr, Anne Murphy examines how religious communities and literary traditions took form in relation to one another across a multilingual and culturally connected landscape.

Rather than reading Sikh, bhakti, and Sufi traditions through boundaries that became more firmly established in later periods, the book attends to the languages, texts, manuscripts, and forms of circulation through which religious difference was articulated and negotiated. It reveals early modern Punjab as a region in which locality and wider literary and religious networks continually intersected, and in which texts could participate simultaneously in distinctive traditions and shared fields of cultural exchange. Murphy’s work on Hīr, in particular, emphasises precisely these regional, linguistic, and cross-regional affiliations.

Bringing literary history into conversation with the history of religion, From Ravidas and Nanak to Waris Shah offers a new account of how texts and languages helped shape religious imaginaries in Punjab. In doing so, it illuminates a formative period in which religious identities became increasingly distinctive while remaining embedded in a wider world of encounter, circulation, and intellectual exchange.
About the Author
Anne Murphy

Anne Murphy is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia and Chair of Punjabi Language, Literature and Sikh Studies. A cultural and intellectual historian and historian of religion, her work focuses on Punjab in India and Pakistan, with particular interests in Punjabi language and textual cultures, the formation of religious communities in the early modern and modern periods, Sikh history, historiography, memory, material culture, and the history of ideas.

She is the author of The Materiality of the Past: History and Representation in Sikh Tradition and the forthcoming Decolonization and the Imagination of the Political: A History of Ideas, in Punjabi, and translator of Zubair Ahmad’s Grieving for Pigeons: Twelve Stories of Lahore. Her current research examines the early modern history of Punjabi language and manuscript culture, including a full translation of Waris Shah’s eighteenth-century Hīr based on its early manuscripts.
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