<論文>ワーリス・シャーの愛とエロス : パンジャーブ語のスーフィー文学『ヒール』

Abstract

The linguist Roman Jakobson, who studied oral poetry of various ethnic groups, observed that folk poets use a couplet as a figure of speech to connect two different levels of meaning. In such a couplet, every single grammatical element in the first line is often made to correspond to an element in the second line, so that an intricate metaphorical connection is created between the two lines. This produces an effect that resembles to a montage shot in a film, in which two images overlap. In this article, I, adopting Jakobson's theory, analyze the grammatical structure of several couplets contained in "Hīr and Rānjhā, " the love romance composed by Waris Shah (Wāriş Šāh), the Panjabi Sufi poet of the 18th century. The analysis revealed that the couplets describing the idyllic scenes of rural villages in Punjab are technically accomplished and stylistically sophisticated. Although this work is usually considered to be Waris Shah's original creation, my analysis suggests that his text is strongly influenced by the collective literature of Punjab, and inherits a lot of elements from antecedent oral texts. It is also observed that pre-Islamic characteristics are predominant in Waris Shah's language, containing a relatively poor vocabulary of Perso-Arabic. Instead, the vocabulary of this text largely consists of New Indo-Aryan words, and the poetical expressions are very often those inherited from the indigenous poetical tradition of South Asia. Thus, an aspect of the process of intermixing Islamic and indigenous South Asian cultures is elucidated on the basis of linguistic analysis of a lyrical text.