One of the most common charges against Pakistan’s feminist movement has consistently been the refrain that efforts made for women’s emancipation are ‘foreign funded’ and Islam already awards women ‘all the rights they will ever need’. Pakistani feminists repeatedly reject the idea that female rebellion is an inherently western import and that feminine silence is the hallmark of South Asian culture. My work on feminist folklore has helped me confront this notion by redeploying indigenous heroines such as Heer, Sassi, and Sohni as agents of uprising against traditional sociocultural frameworks. This paper unpacks the transformative potential of intergenerational dialogue through this prism of South Asian oral traditions featuring iconic female protagonists drawn from Punjabi and Sindhi Sufi poetry. These figures have primarily been reduced to romantic archetypes, but carry immense potential as feminist resistance warriors and affective agents of spiritual sovereignty. Invoking the stories of Heer or Sassi as dialogic tools allows for a feminist intervention across class and generational lines in Pakistan, given indigenous narratives are ubiquitous and embedded with a template for female rebellion against the sociocultural status quo.
Framing these tales within contemporary urgencies of gender-inclusive governance, curriculum development, and entertainment can help recraft traditional frames of power, mobility, and agency. The paper draws on feminist decolonial theory and peacebuilding praxis by mapping the potential of storytelling spaces to foster a new site for feminist dialogue such as communal gatherings, mehfils, qawwali performances and digital dialogues. My work engages with Uma Chakravarti’s concept of historical memory, Shail Mayaram’s work on oral histories and resistance traditions, Sara Ahmed’s work on the politics of emotion, and Maria Lugones’ concept of the coloniality of gender.