Sassui the Divine Feminine Metaphor: A Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis of Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai’s Shah Jo Risalo

Abstract

The legend of Sassui Punhoon, echoing through the ages in Sindhi oral tradition, has its textual basis in Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai’s verse compendium Shah Jo Risalo; a tale where Sassui, one of the nine principal heroines, is identified with an understanding of divine and female efforts towards transcendence. Set in the framework of the five Surs, her tale gradually unfolds with intense suffering she endures from Bhambhore up to Kech while searching for her beloved Punhoon, elevating physical agony to a sort of metaphor metonymizing spiritual awakening and revolt. This research uses a combined framework of the Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (FCDA) and Ideational Conceptual Metaphor (ICM) theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) to unravel how Bhittai’s representation of Sassui reconceptualizes gender, love and power within patriarchal constraints. Metaphors that are found in more than one Sur are located and decoded based on the InVivo method, and they are compared in terms of their cognitive structure as well as ideological function. The results locate Sassui at the nexus between Sufi mysticism, oral tradition and feminist discourse, as her journey is one of a woman’s quest for self-actualization and self-agency within cultural and spiritual limitations. Her suffering, silence, and resilience are recalibrated as acts of discursive resistance and moral endurance, projecting her away from the figure of the romantic heroine and towards the locus of feminine spiritual subjectivity. By placing Sassui in the native epistemology of Sufi humanism, the research presents a decolonial and localized feminist interpretation that moves beyond Western feminist theories. It shows how Sufi metaphors act as tools for intellectual and ideological resistance, uncovering Shah Jo Risalo as a rich site wherein mysticism and feminism meet to voice new forms of gender, spirituality, and power in South Asian thought.