Writing Punjabi across borders:

The poetics and politics of a transnational language movement

With the generous support of the SSHRC Insight Grant program (2017-22), Professor Anne Murphy is constructing a social and cultural history of the modern Punjabi language movement and its creative expressions from the 1940s to the present in multiple locations around the globe, with attention to early modern antecedents. The goal of the project overall is to understand and analyze this language movement, its cultural products, and the political and social imaginaries associated with it. It builds on an Insight Development grant (“Modern Punjabi Literature and the Pursuit of the Secular,” 2013-5, extended to 2016) that explored the social imaginaries that undergird the choice for Punjabi in diverse locations–India, Pakistan, Canada, and the UK–and the political possibilities that it represents across and within national boundaries. The Insight Development project allowed for preliminary exploration of writing and writers, including extensive interviews in Pakistan, India, the UK, and Canada that are being made available on this site. The Insight Grant project, which is ongoing through 2022, brings this research to fruition, exploring the history of Punjabi language cultural production broadly–given the dearth of scholarship on this topic in English–and contextualizing its social and political commitments.