Iqra Shagufta Cheema

“Paindoo Production” studies an anomalous case of language in postcolonial nations: Punjabi, a minoritized language of a majority in an Urdu-Anglophile postcolonial Pakistan. Taking the Indian partition in 1947 as its point of departure, it examines how the aural, lingual, visual, and medial vernacular lives of Punjabi are discursively produced as vulgar, crude, parochial, and working class—as paindoo—to consolidate Pakistan as a heteropatriarchal Muslim nation in South Asia. To examine constructions of race, ethnicity, caste, class, gender, and climate, this project traces Punjabi’s pre/colonial archives in India to its postcolonial feminist histories in Pakistan and to its nostalgic, aesthetic, and fetishistic reproduction by desi diaspora.