Language, the Nation, and Symbolic Capital: The Case of Punjab by Alyssa Ayres
Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 67, No. 3 (August 2008): 917–946.
ABSTRACT
A movement to “revive the spirit of Punjab and Punjabi” in South Asia has enabled a surprising thaw between the two Punjabs of Pakistan and India. That this revival movement has been catalyzed from within Pakistan rather than India raises intriguing questions about language, nationalism, and the cultural basis of the nation-state. Although the Punjabiyat movement bears the surface features of a classical nationalist formation—insistence upon recovering an unfairly oppressed history and literature, one unique on earth and uniquely imbued with the spirit of the local people and the local land—its structural features differ markedly. Pakistan’s Punjab has long functioned as an ethnic hegemon, the center against which other regions struggle in a search for power. Yet the Punjabiyat movement presents Punjab as an oppressed victim of Pakistan’s troubled search for national identity. This essay argues that a theory of symbolic capital best explains this otherwise peculiar inversion of perceived and actual power, and underscores culture’s critical role in the nation’s political imagination.
Read further: http://alyssaayres.com/2008/08/language-nation-symbolic-capital-punjab/
Wichaar – old Punjabi films
Wichaar has uploaded some famous punjabi movies of 60′s era that are not easily available.
Malangi
http://www.wichaar.com/videos/malangi/part-1-video_ce7f98646.html
Yakke Wali
http://www.wichaar.com/videos/yakke-wali/part-2-video_a12d47ab7.html
Mahi Munda
http://www.wichaar.com/videos/mahi-munda/part-1-video_645e3bc4c.html
Sassi Punnu
http://www.wichaar.com/videos/sassi-punnu/part-1-video_c0ad4e9a6.html
Chan Makhna
http://www.wichaar.com/videos/chan-makhna/part-1-video_063136f90.html
Punjabi to be Canada’s 4th biggest language by 2011
September 26th, 2009
TORONTO – Punjabi is set to become the fourth largest spoken language in Canada by 2011 after English, French and Chinese, according to Canadian Immigration Minister Jason Kenney.
The minister made the announcement Friday night after inaugurating the seventh Spinning Wheel Film Festival at the Royal Ontario Museum here that will feature films by or about Sikhs.
Read further: http://blog.taragana.com/law/2009/09/26/punjabi-to-be-canadas-4th-biggest-language-by-2011-13178/
Review of film Rabba
Here is a review of Rabba..in Frontline. Hope you enjoy it.
ON a balmy afternoon under the monsoon sky in Atalahn village in Punjab’s Ludhiana district, four elderly men sitting under a banyan tree are animatedly discussing Urdu. “A beautiful language, with nuances neither Hindi nor Punjabi can equal,” says one. “It’s our language, forged from Arabic and Punjabi,” says another.
The third one remembers how, when Partition was announced, “all of us in Class III, studying lesson number 14 in Urdu, threw our Qua’ida in the air and said, ‘Urdu ud gaya, Urdu ud gaya’ [Urdu has flown away].” The fourth friend ruminates: “We used to think Urdu belonged to Muslims; nobody knew it was a language.” Sixty years on, the partition of India continues to cast a shadow on the subcontinent, shaping individual destinies and cultural lives in unforeseen ways – constantly provoking new explorations to unravel its many dimensions. How does a society or a generation culturally come to terms with having lived through a moral vacuum at a time of genocidal violence?
The link is:
http://flonnet.com/stories/20081121252309300.htm
or PDF: partition-documentary
Language, the Nation, and Symbolic Capital: The Case of Punjab
Alyssa Ayres is an international consultant based in Washington, D.C., and a contributing editor of India Review. Please see an abstract of her latest article appearing in the latest edition of JAS, http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayJournal?jid=JAS
Alyssa Ayres, ‘Language, the Nation, and Symbolic Capital: The Case of Punjab’ in the The Journal of Asian Studies (2008), 67:917-946 Cambridge University Press
Abstract
A movement to “revive the spirit of Punjab and Punjabi” in South Asia has enabled a surprising thaw between the two Punjabs of Pakistan and India. That this revival movement has been catalyzed from within Pakistan rather than India raises intriguing questions about language, nationalism, and the cultural basis of the nation-state. Although the Punjabiyat movement bears the surface features of a classical nationalist formation-insistence upon recovering an unfairly oppressed history and literature, one unique on earth and uniquely imbued with the spirit of the local people and the local land-its structural features differ markedly. Pakistan’s Punjab has long functioned as an ethnic hegemon, the center against which other regions struggle in a search for power. Yet the Punjabiyat movement presents Punjab as an oppressed victim of Pakistan’s troubled search for national identity. This essay argues that a theory of symbolic capital best explains this otherwise peculiar inversion of perceived and actual power, and underscores culture’s critical role in the nation’s political imagination.
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