From Folklore to Subjective Human Experience: A Thematic Analysis of Traditional and Modern Punjabi Poetry

This study examines how thematic concerns in Punjabi poetry have shifted from the traditional folk and Sufi corpus to the popular Punjabi music of the early 2020s. Three classical texts, Waris Shah’s “Heer” (1766), Bulleh Shah’s “Sufi kafi Tere Ishq Nachaya”, and the folk tragedy “Mirza Sahiban” first recorded by the seventeenth-century poet Pilu, are compared with three widely circulated contemporary songs: Brown Munde (2020), Excuses (2020), and Pasoori (2022). Using Braun and Clarke’s (2006) six-phase model of reflexive thematic analysis, the study identifies the dominant themes in each corpus and traces the changes between them. The analysis argues that traditional Punjabi poetry foregrounds collective values such as honour, kinship obligation, fate, and devotional love, situating the individual within a moral and communal order. Contemporary Punjabi songs, by contrast, foreground individualism, interior emotional experience, diasporic identity, and globalised aspiration. A consistent thread of emotional intensity links both corpora, suggesting that the shift represents an evolution of poetic voice rather than a rupture with the tradition. The study also notes that the increasing presence of English and globalised idioms in modern lyrics raises questions about linguistic and cultural continuity. The paper does not claim the superiority of either corpus; it offers a comparative thematic reading of how poetic expression in Punjabi has moved from communal storytelling toward subjective human experience.