Permission to tease

Gurdit Singh Premi’s university reference essay defines sithnian as women’s wedding songs mocking the groom and his party. His emphasis is amusement: the occasion permits guests to become subjects of public teasing.[1]

Ask whom the laughter targets

Social criticism becomes clearer when the target of a joke is specified. In Navneet Kaur’s study of Punjabi parody, wedding verses help explain the context of verbal humour. She discusses a sithni that mocks the groom’s extended family while using a degrading caste comparison. The joke can make the visiting family ridiculous and still depend on stigmatising other people. Kaur’s reading keeps social power inside the analysis of playful speech. Calling every joke liberating would lose that distinction. The published text preserves criticism, but also the hierarchies through which criticism could be expressed. A complaint directed at one powerful party does not necessarily challenge the wider ordering of society.[2]

Criticism and discipline can coexist

The paper also discusses a verse warning a young woman against displaying her earrings and attracting village gossip. Kaur reads it as guidance favouring modesty over appearance. This broader folk-song comparison concerns a judgement about acceptable behaviour. Its inclusion in the study does not establish that it was sung at a particular wedding.[2]

Virinder Kalra and Navtej Purewal offer a related framework in Beyond Religion in India and Pakistan. Their discussion explicitly allows women’s customs and popular performance to affirm and challenge patriarchal ideology simultaneously. This is a broader argument about practice, rather than a field description of the wedding verses above. Applied here, it keeps expression and constraint in view together. Songs can preserve a form in which grievances and judgements remain sayable, while the consequences depend on occasion and relationships. The critical question concerns who can speak, whom the words address and which expectations they leave in place.[3]

Sources & notes

Source records include access dates and, where known, limits on what was examined. Checks used AI assistance; independent human or specialist review has not been completed.

  1. Principal Gurdit Singh Premi; Punjabi University, Patiala; PunjabiPedia. Sithni: separately signed Sahit Kosh block ↗signed university reference essay · Source date: 2015-08-07 online posting; original print date not established · Locator: Actual retained singular-page web-reader, Sahit Kosh block: wedding/mockery passage lines 70–97; signed source/date lines 103–104. Accessed 2026-11-02.Actual selected body inspected in the research team’s retained web-reader file, copied with locator into this pack after live retrieval timed out. The introductory patronage/Nabha/Punjabi Pingal material and neighbouring dictionary blocks are excluded. No lyric is quoted.Return to Permission to tease, paragraph 1 ↑
  2. Navneet Kaur; dialog, Panjab University. Humour and Identity through Parodic Dubbing: The Punjabi Adaptation of Shanghai Knights ↗authored textual analysis · Source date: Autumn 2024 issue label; PDF cites 2025 access dates; exact first-publication day not established · Locator: Actual 16-page article: printed pp.271–272 / PDF pp.4–5, wedding sithni/caste example and earrings/modesty analysis; bibliography printed pp.282–283. Accessed 2026-11-02.Actual full PDF obtained; specified body and bibliographic lineage read. This is a parody/dubbing paper using wedding examples, not new wedding fieldwork. Its caste-example text comes from Punjabi Kavita; the earrings verse is credited to Veerdeep Kaur 2020. Those underlying works were not claimed separately inspected through the paper, and the same verse is not charged or presented as independent corroboration elsewhere. No caste insult or song lyric is reproduced.Return to Ask whom the laughter targets, paragraph 1 ↑Return to Criticism and discipline can coexist, paragraph 1 ↑
  3. Virinder S. Kalra and Navtej K. Purewal; Bloomsbury Academic. Beyond Religion in India and Pakistan: Gender and Caste, Borders and Boundaries ↗authored scholarly book · Source date: 2020 on inspected imprint; filename contains 2019 · Locator: Actual 241-page book PDF: imprint PDF p.5 states first published 2020; printed pp.72–73 / PDF pp.87–88, women’s customs/popular performance affirming and challenging patriarchy, with citation to Purewal and Kalra 2010. Accessed 2026-11-02.Actual full PDF obtained from the author’s university page; specified imprint and relevant body read. The whole book was not read. The general interpretive argument is distinguished from wedding-specific observation. This book and the related 2010 Women’s Popular Practices as Critique article are conservatively one pool, including prior COM0040-S5 abstract derivation. Return to Criticism and discipline can coexist, paragraph 2 ↑
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Record PH-JOU-0035 · English edition · human review not performed