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- Author: Churnjeet Mahn x
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This chapter identifies some of the ways a Punjabi literary sphere was (mis)understood in the late-Victorian empire through the curation of a canon of Punjabi folk-culture by R. C. Temple, Flora Annie Steel and C. F. Usborne. These people lived and worked in Punjab as an extension of colonial administration. The chapter offers an overview of a partial and an incomplete project to variously transcribe, translate, curate and analyse a version of 'common' Punjabi culture conventionally divorced from official literary contexts. It does this by analysing the boundary between oral culture and print culture. Temple's three-volume Legends of the Punjab brought together texts that were mostly circulated through performance, but were also appearing in Punjabi print. Based on stories she had heard or collected, Steel published Wide-Awake Stories, which was later published as Tales of the Punjab and From the Five Rivers.
Churnjeet Mahn considers the novel within the context of a travel writing genre historically intertwined with questions of racial and colonial othering. Mahn’s analysis reveals Kunzru’s ironic manipulation of academic discourses surrounding diasporic identity to be played out at the level not only of theme but also genre, as Kunzru employs a parody of dominant colonial modes of representation in travel writing to expose the apparatus of structural inequalities faced by marginalised minorities in the Western world. Mahn employs the work of Homi K. Bhabha to trace the anxious journey of Pran as he attempts to cross the boundaries of race, gender and sexuality, not in isolation from each other or in favour of straightforward models of hybridity, but rather with a problematised discourse that very much positions Kunzru as an interlocutor in existing postcolonial fictions.