The history of late colonial Punjab has primarily been understood in terms of the growing tensions arising from the sharpening of community identities by religious reformers and their subsequent politicization. Even those accounts which do not see Partition as an inevitable outcome of these processes focus on the role of such political contingencies as the impact of the Second World War on the region, rather than questioning the received wisdom of the reformers' destruction of what Harjot Oberoi terms the ‘enchanted universe’ of a pluralistic Punjabi culture (Harjot Oberoi, The Construction of Religious Boundaries: Culture, Identity and Diversity in the Sikh Tradition [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994]). Farina Mir in this pioneering study interrogates a too ready acceptance of the reformers' transformation of Punjabi culture and self-identity. She acutely raises the point that the volume of material generated by reformers of the Arya Samaj, the Singh Sabha movement and the Muslim Anjumans, together with a reading back of the divisive and traumatic Partition experience into the understanding of the late colonial era may have over-determined the transformative impact of religious reform.

Mir then further supports this argument by drawing on a previously largely untapped vernacular archive of folkloric material. At its heart are the various poetic renditions in the form of the Punjabi language Qissa of the famous folk tale about the “star-crossed lovers” Hir and Ranjha. Ranjha leaves his home at Takht Hazara to serve as a cowherd so that he can see his beloved Hir the daughter of a leading Sial landowner from Jhang. When their dalliance on the banks of the Chenab River is discovered, Hir is married against her wishes to an influential landowner Seido Khera from whom she elopes to be reunited with Ranjha. Most texts do not have a happy ever after ending but one in which the lovers die. Their story's popularity has seen it in circulation over the past four hundred years. After tracing its development Farina Mir uses the Hir-Ranjha Qisse produced in the colonial Punjab to reveal a more nuanced picture of community and gender relations than has emerged from the prose archive of religious tracts, pamphlets and the didactic novels of such authors as Bhai Vir Singh. The deconstruction of the meaning of the Qisse carries added significance in that they were intended as social commentary and to be performed as well as to be consumed by the solitary reader.

The colonial era texts of the Hir-Ranjha narrative reveal locally specific “social and religious values” (p. 177) which stand independently of the reformers' bounded Muslim, Sikh and Hindu identities. The same texts are revealed to have Sufi and Sikh invocations, and “multiple registers” (p. 166) in which Sufi and Krishnaite symbolism operate. Mir also shows that they portray a shared piety centered on the Sufi shrines, which is both critical of the hypocrisy of established religious institutions and practitioners and “operates as a parallel arena of belief” to the major religious traditions. (p. 182). This leads Mir to the striking sentiment that “Hir-Ranjha texts thus open an alternative history of religion and culture in colonial Punjab” (p. 182).

Just as the Qisse renditions of the Hir-Ranjha story could be understood at a number of levels, from that of a romance complete with Krishna-Radha motifs, to a Sufi allegory in which Ranjha represents the figure of God, Hir the Sufi seeking union with Him, so this book addresses a number of themes and audiences. Along the way, it not only traces the emergence of the Punjabi Qissa from its Persian original and of the pre-colonial narratives of the Hir-Ranjha romance, but sheds light on the growth of Punjabi print culture. This developed without state support because of the colonial administration's privileging of Urdu as the official language. Punjabi's marginality thus gives it a very different history from other Indian vernacular languages. Mir also sheds light on colonial education policy in the Punjab and delineates what she terms as a Punjabi literary formation' which helped sustain the Punjabi language, “through its members' shared practices of producing, circulating, performing reading, and listening to Punjabi literary texts, qisse in particular” (p. 97). This is thus a multi-valenced work which encompasses literary, cultural and colonial administrative history. It also however has important implications for those concerned with the background to the 1947 Partition and the role, or rather its absence in the case of Pakistan, of the Punjabi language in post-independence ethno-nationalist movements. The work thus is important to many South Asia specialists, although its central theme of the Hir-Ranjha story may be unfamiliar to some.