The many tellings of Sassi and Punnun: A history of language order in Sindh and Punjab

Abstract

This article follows the story of two ill-fated lovers, Sassi and Punnun. Today, this tale is seen foremost as a Sindhi romance. However, since the sixteenth century, the tragedy has been recounted many a times in Persian, Sindhi and Punjabi, both as written text and oral performance. By following different tellings of the story, this article charts a history of language shift, multilingualism and connected literary cultures across Sindh and Punjab from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. It argues against a straightforward correspondence between region, language and literary culture, emphasising, instead, the connections between regional literary cultures, particularly through various oral routes. Moreover, in Sindh and Punjab, there was no straightforward process of vernacularisation, a direct shift from a cosmopolitan Persian literature towards regional languages over the early modern period. Multilingualism characterised the entire period, even as the language order that organised the relationship between diverse languages showed marked shifts. In investigating the order of languages, this article looks beyond the territorialisation of language and literature within modern spatial and political systems. It offers instead a historical vision of a connected cultural and literary milieu, where literary cultures developed across multiple languages, in knowledge of and engagement with each other.