Intertextuality and reception history: Connecting Bhai Vir Singh’s Srī Kalgīdhar Camatkār to gurbilās literature

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how notions of intertextuality and reception history unfold in a Sikh literary context by examining interactions between Bhai Vir Singh’s Srī Kalgīdhar Camatkār and gurbilās literature. These texts’ portrayals of an important battle of Sikh history, the battle of Bhangani, illustrate how the various historical circumstances of the seventeenth to twentieth centuries shaped the modes and content of historical representation of the Sikh past at different points in time. It also sheds light on the life and reception of gurbilās texts beyond the nineteenth century and allows us to further interrogate the relationship between the literary premodernity of gurbilās texts and the literary modernity of Bhai Vir Singh’s historical writing in colonial Punjab.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Anne Murphy discusses connections between gurbilās texts and Bhai Vir Singh’s novel Sundarī in her monograph Murphy (2012a). Purnima Dhavan discusses the adaption of gurbilās literature into Persian court histories in the nineteenth century in Dhavan (2011a). ‘Devotion and Its Discontents: The Affective Communities of Gurbilas Texts.’ Chap. 7; and Dhavan (2009).

2 ‘Horizon of expectations’ is an expression used by Jauss in Toward and Aesthetic of Reception and derived from Edmund Husserl’s work.

3 See for instance popular online encyclopedia and websites such as sikhiwiki.org and thesikhencyclopedia.com to name a few.

4 Dasam Granth, chapter 8, verses 1–3, MN-000106, www.panjabdigilib.org

5 See for instance the discussion of Sundarī in Murphy (2012a) and of Rāṇā Sūrat Singh in Matringe (1996).

6 Thank you to Adheesh Sathaye for his input on the translation of baitāla.