Bhai Vir Singh and the public sphere in colonial Punjab

ABSTRACT

My paper proposes to assess the contributions of Bhai Vir Singh to the newly emergent Punjabi print spheres in the late colonial period. Critical literature on the print and public spheres in colonial Punjab has described these as imitative of the prototype of western models and as ‘derivative' discourses. It is through the example of Bhai Vir Singh that we can argue otherwise. This paper argues that the print sphere made it possible for newer subjectivities and modes of agency to emerge and it is through this politically critical idea of agency that Bhai Vir Singh’s work can be examined.

KEYWORDS:

• Public sphere
• agency
• print
• women readers
• colonial Punjab
• genre

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Bayly's use of the term as distinct from ‘public sphere’ to suggest that public spheres that developed in colonial India were different from those in modern Europe that have been taken as a prototype, in Bayly (1996, 180).

2 For example, Macauliffe's The Sikh Religion: Its Gurus, Sacred Writings and Authors (1909), a project undertaken from 1889 to 1909 has been regarded as a collaboration by Sikh elites. Bhai Kahn Singh Nabha and Giani Hazara Singh helped Macauliffe in compiling this work.

3 Some seminal works on South Asian print cultures that have argued that print was not a radical rupture are: Fraser (2008); Scott and Ingram (2015); Freitag (1991); Orsini (2009); Naregal (2001); Dharwadkar (1997); Gupta and Chakravorty (2016). In the context of Punjab, the links between the oral, performative and print have been explored by Malhotra (2002); and Mir (2010).

4 Dharwadker discusses this question in the context of the subjectivity and agency of the colonized people. Dharwadkar (1997, 113).

5 Vivek Bhandari talks about the anjumans, sabhas and samajes that were new forms of association in the public sphere. Bhandari (2007, 269).

6 Reports on Publications Issued and Registered in Several Provinces of British India in 1909 (Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1910). This is also taken from information on KTS publications in Bhai Mohan Singh Vaid Collection at Kahn Singh Library, Punjabi University, Patiala.

7 This has been argued by Anshu Malhotra in (2002; 2012, 159).

8 An example of a work that brings together the discussion of historical and fictional is Anne Murphy (2012, 134).