A BARTHESIAN EXPLORATION OF LOVE AND TRAGEDY IN NEIL RATHMELL'S HEER RANJHA: THE ROMEO AND JULIET OF PUNJAB
Keywords:
Heer Ranjha, Love, Narrative Codes, Neil Rathmell, Roland Barthes, Romeo and Juliet, TragedyAbstract
This article applies Roland Barthes' five narrative codes, developed in S/Z (1974), to Neil Rathmell's Heer Ranjha: The Romeo and Juliet of Punjab (2014), a cross-cultural English prose retelling of one of Punjab's most celebrated tragic romances. Using the hermeneutic, proairetic, semantic, symbolic, and cultural/referential codes as interpretive instruments, the study examines how love and tragedy are constructed not as opposing forces but as mutually constitutive elements woven through the narrative fabric. Close reading of selected passages demonstrates that enigma and action generate tragic inevitability, that connotation and symbolic opposition collapse the boundary between love and death, and that cultural codes rooted in Sufi mysticism and Punjabi tribal society sacralize the lovers' fate. The article also reflects on the productive tension between Barthes' Western structuralist model and a South Asian narrative grounded in oral and spiritual tradition, arguing that the framework illuminates how meaning travels across cultures.
Downloads
References
Ahmad, K. (1998). A hermeneutical analysis of the Heer Ranjha legend: A study in religious tolerance. California Institute of Integral Studies.
Avezzù, G. (2015). Classical Paradigms of Tragic Choice in Civic Stories of Love and Death. In Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, and Civic Life (pp. 45-65). Routledge.
Barthes, R. (1972). Mythologies (A. Lavers, Trans.). Hill and Wang. (Original work published 1957)
Barthes, R. (1974). S/Z (R. Miller, Trans.). Hill and Wang. (Original work published 1970)
Butt, N. (2015). Transcultural Memory and Globalised Modernity in Contemporary Indo-English Novels (Vol. 20). Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG.
Chitra, C. (2017). ‘Kissa-Heer’: A Gem of Oral Tradition. In Performing Identities (pp. 41-61). Routledge.
Deol, J. S. (1996). Love and mysticism in the Punjabi qissas of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies (United Kingdom).
Feagin, S. L. (1983). The pleasures of tragedy. American Philosophical Quarterly, 20(1), 95-104.
Gaur, I. D. (2017). History, historiography, and Punjabi folk literature: Issues of canons and cultures. In Cultural Studies in India (pp. 139-169). Routledge.
Kamran, I. (2023). Folk Romance in Pakistani Culture. Bazyaft, 22(40).
Lee, S. (2025, May 28). The legacy of 62 Greek tragedians. Number Analytics.
https://www.numberanalytics.com/blog/legacy-greek-tragedians-literature-theatre
Mahn, C. (2017). Literary folk: Writing popular culture in colonial Punjab, 1885–1905. In Interventions (pp. 111-128). Manchester University Press.
Rathmell, N. (2014). Heer Ranjha: The Romeo and Juliet of Punjab. Southernwood Press.
Rosenthal, P. (1975). Deciphering S/Z. College English, 37(2), 125-144.
Sherman, J. (2015). Storytelling: An encyclopedia of mythology and folklore. Routledge.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Muneeb Hayat, Hadia Hasnain, Adeel Shahzada (Author)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
