Noor Fatima

Citation

Thesis Title
Once Upon a Time in the Land of Five Rivers: A Comparative Analysis of Translated Punjabi Folk Tale Editions, from Flora Annie Steel’s Colonial Work to Shafi Aqeel’s Post-Partition Collection and Beyond

Read article at Massey Research Online:

Ms Fatima offers a comparative analysis of collections of Pakistani folk tales published at key points in the nation’s history and focused on folk tales from the now-divided Punjab region: (late) colonial, post-partition and contemporary. This is the first critical analysis of the primary texts: Flora Annie Steel’s Tales of the Punjab, Told by the People (1894), Shafi Aqeel’s Punjabi Lok Kahaniyan (1963) and Ahmad Bashir’s translation of Popular Folk Tales of the Punjab (2008). Through the comparative analysis of the collections; one by a Christian, female, British, colonial collector, in nineteenth-century British India, another by a post-Partition male, Muslim, Pakistani collector, and then by a twenty-first century Pakistani translator, her research highlights the historic-cultural “work” (gendered, religious, political, etc.) performed by the editors, collectors, translators and the tales themselves. Ms Fatima’s analysis included her own English translation of Aqeel’s collection, originally translated from Punjabi into Urdu.

Supervisors
Dr Kim Worthington
Professor Ingrid Horrocks