Learning from Manuscripts: Waris Shah’s Sufi Narrative Hir in the Textual Evidence

This paper will discuss findings of an analysis of a series of early manuscripts held in India and Pakistan that provide the early evidence of Waris Shah’s 1766 narrative Hīr. which is named for the tale’s heroine Hīr and which relates the tale of Hīr’s ill-fated romance with Rāṅjhā. Utilizing three early manuscripts from Pakistani archives, and one from India, we address several questions that emerge in the manuscript evidence: how did the narrative develop over time? How did its inscription in two different scripts shape its development, and the nature of its language? What can these different ways of writing Punjabi tell us about the nature of the Punjabi language in the eighteenth century, as a language of literature? Finally, we will ask a set of questions about the interactions of such manuscripts with modern print: how have modern editions fared in representing the manuscript evidence, in both scripts, and what can these editions tell us about the ongoing reception of the text in the modern period? In this later investigation, we extend here on the ground-breaking work of Farina Mir, whose 2010 study of colonial period versions of the story of Hīr has enabled a nuanced understanding of the impact of print on Punjabi-language cultural production in that period. We will consider print editions of Waris Shah’s text to account for what these tell us about the reception of manuscript traditions, and the complexity of the text’s bi-scriptal lives