Sympathy and the unbelieved in modern retellings of Sindhi Sufi folktales

This thesis examines Sindhi Sufi folktales as retold by five “modern” individuals: the nineteenth-century British explorer Richard Burton and four Sindhi intellectuals who lived and wrote in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Lilaram Lalwani, M. M. Gidvani, Shaikh Ayaz, and Nabi Bakhsh Khan Baloch). For each set of retellings, our purpose will be to determine the epistemological and emotional sympathy the re-teller exhibits for the plot, characters, sentiments, and ideas present in the folktales. This approach, it is hoped, will provide us a glimpse inside the minds of the individual re-tellers and allow us to observe some of the ways in which the exigencies of a secular western modernity had an impact, if any, on the choices they made as they retold Sindhi Sufi folktales. A central guiding principle of this thesis is its attention to preserving and reproducing the worldviews encapsulated in the primary sources it uses.