Narrating Ishq: Mythopoesis, Body and Authority in “Heer Waris Shah”

Myth is not merely a legacy; it is manufactured. This paper explores mythopoesis through vernacular narrative. It focuses on “Heer Waris Shah,” composed within an already-circulating Heer Ranjha legend (includes earlier tellings like one of Damodar Gulati). It examines how mythic signification is produced through processes of transformation; this shapes identity, gender, and social order, conveying Sufi understandings of divine love (ʿishq) as lived through longing, separation (hijr), suffering, and desire. Engaging with folklorists James George Frazer, Jane Ellen Harrison, and George Laurence Gomme, alongside the literary theorist Roland Barthes, anthropologist Lévi-Strauss, and historian of religion Mircea Eliade, the analysis treats “Heer” as an endeavour towards re-articulation. Here, an inherited narrative metamorphoses to generate nuanced meanings: human love becomes Sufi ishq, Heer’s longing and torment become sites of societal control and moral relevance; Ranjha’s transformation into a jogi alters identity through self-mortification. The antagonism between juridical authority of Qazi, and desire, climaxes in the town’s miraculous conflagration, thereby converting social experience into mythic truth. Deriving from Regina Bendix’s appraisal of authenticity, the paper argues that “Heer Waris” derives authority not from originality but from its ongoing reworking of narrative tradition, through which myth, identity, and social meaning are incessantly constituted.