2025 Theses Doctoral

A Performance History of Baba Farid

Kaur, Manpreet

This dissertation tells the story of the reception of the enduringly influential thirteenth-century poet Farid ud-din Ganj-i Shakar (d. 1265 CE). He is remembered as a Chishti Sufi (Sheikh Farid) in Persian hagiographical genres, a Sikh canonical figure (Baba Farid) in early Punjabi hagiographies, and an unusual saint, i.e., poet-saint (Farid Ji) in early Hindi hagiographical genres.

Vernacular poetry attributed to him circulated across these interlocking networks of devotion that flourished in northern India in the early modern period (16th to the early 19th century CE). The remarkable array of regions, religions, languages, and scripts across which collections of Farid’s poetry and narratives of his life circulated from the thirteenth century onward compels us to identify the driving forces that propelled this dispersion.

By giving detailed attention to three hagiographical accounts of his life as they emerged in very different circles, and by mapping the similarly dispersed poetic repertoires that bear his name, I attempt to show that the dominant mode of circulation, reception, and indeed poetic inspiration was aural throughout. Extant written and visual materials relating to Baba Farid repeatedly point to the primacy of performance as the crucial medium through which he made his impact. Literary conventions that lie behind and shape hagiographical genres foreground performance as a dominant mode of reception, while genres that characterize Farid’s poetic utterances bear equal witness to the importance of performance and repertoire at several levels.

By appreciating the modes of performativity associated with Baba Farid, we can understand better both his transregional celebrity and the literary genres of early modern religiosity as they appear across multiple communities and regions.