Talk by Sara Kazmi (English, University of Pennsylvania)

This talk will focus on left, feminist, and anticaste literatures produced by radical intellectuals from Punjab, a border region split between India and Pakistan. I show how Punjabi writers deployed regional oral poetic and performative forms to critique caste, patriarchy, authoritarianism, and dominant religion in postcolonial South Asia. Focusing on Marxist playwrights Najm Hosain Syed and Gursharan Singh, the talk will analyze how they interpreted and referenced key genres embedded in poetic cultures that predate the national divide, like the Var of Dulla Bhatti, a historical ballad that celebrates 16th-century rebellions against the Mughal throne. In doing so, these authors responded to the rising significance of the peasant as a political actor in 1960s Punjab in both India and Pakistan, intervening in global debates around revolutionary transformation and decolonization. Moreover, they constituted a border-crossing literary practice that traversed, and indeed, actively challenged the colonially drawn boundary between the two nation-states.

Sara Kazmi is an Assistant Professor of English with affiliations in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, and Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies. She is a scholar and translator whose work takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of anticolonial, left, and oppositional literary production in the global south. Sara focuses on the Panjab region, and more broadly, on South Asia and South Asian diasporas, combining methods in literary studies, performance, and history to examine how marginal and vernacular writing engages planetary debates around decolonization, Marxism, and revolutionary transformation. Sara is also part of the Revolutionary Papers collective, which is a transnational research collaboration exploring 20th-century periodicals of left, anti-imperial, and anticolonial critical production. In addition to her work as a scholar, she is a performer and student of Indian classical music. She blends ragas with folk tunes in renditions of protest music from South Asia, some of which are archived at mein.beqaid (I, Uncaged). Prior to joining the University of Pennsylvania, Sara Kazmi was a Postdoctoral Fellow at LUMS University in Lahore, Pakistan. She received a PhD in Criticism and Culture at the Department of English, University of Cambridge, an MA in South Asian History at SOAS, London, and a B.A. (Hons) in Humanities from LUMS University.