Biography
Sana Iqbal has recently earned her PhD in Cultural Geography from the Centre for Arts, Memory and Communities at Coventry University (UK). Her research was interdisciplinary and was focused on exploring the everyday narratives around the agency of Muslim women through studying their representation in contemporary literary voices from Pakistan. She was also interested in how the theme of gender intersects with that of migration and mobility in the context of South Asia in general and Pakistan in particular. She is currently working on studying the content of ginans (as a form of Satpanthi religious literature) with an eco-critical lens.
Paper Abstract
The use of figurative language in Satpanth ginans has been studied for their appropriation of indigenous Hindu, Islamic and Sufi discourses for supporting Ismaili dawat in the sub-continent. Although there has been previous research on how these ginans can be interpreted to understand the significance of social piety (Asani, 2002) exploration of cosmological and mythical symbols (ibid), and the importance of faith and community rituals (Moir 1992), the use of this figurative language needs to be explored in the context of human's status of being the vicegerent of Allah on earth, enjoying the status of ashraf-ul-makhluqat, i.e., the noblest of all creatures and thus being the steward of nature on the planet. The proposed study explores how these ginans can be studied as tools to conceptualise this role and stimulate environmental consciousness among Satpanth Ismailis of South Asia. It thus aims to study how the concepts of environmental consciousness/sensitivity and human's social responsibility related to the environment are provoked by some prominent pirs in their ginanic texts. The research would benefit not only literary scholars but also those working in the field of environmental humanities to understand how environmental consciousness is provoked by ginanic literature.