The Legends of the Punjab

About the book

The Legends of the Panjab is the monumental folklore collection of Sir Richard Carnac Temple (1850–1931), the British administrator, anthropologist and editor of the Indian Antiquary. Published in three volumes between 1883/1884 and 1890 (Bombay: Education Society's Press; London: Trübner & Co.), it gives the great Punjabi legends in the vernacular with English translation — the fullest record ever made of the heroic and religious folk narrative of 19th-century Punjab.

Temple, posted as a cantonment magistrate in Punjab in the 1870s and 1880s, believed that a knowledge of local folklore was useful both to ruler and ruled — 'close acquaintance and a right understanding begets sympathy, and sympathy begets good government.' Whatever one thinks of the colonial frame, the work he left is a treasure-house: legends narrated and sung by professional bards, transcribed and translated with scholarly care.

Plot & themes

The volumes cover the great heroic cycles: Raja Risalu (Rasalu) of Sialkot — the semi-mythic Rajput prince whose adventures run from his miraculous birth to his dice-match with King Sarkap; Sakhi Sarwar, the Muslim saint of the western Punjab; Goga Pir, the snake-deity hero; Dani Jatti, Isa the Bapari, Dhanna Jat, Negi Bahadur, Lal-Beg and others. Together they give a vivid account of valour, bravery, historical events, religious and spiritual personalities, rituals, beliefs and the social systems of the Punjab.

Temple's method — vernacular text facing translation, with notes on the bards, their versions and variants — set the standard for Indian folklore scholarship. The legends are epico-lyrical: sung narratives, halfway between epic and ballad, performed by hereditary bards (dhadis and mirasis) whose versions Temple recorded from named informants, including farmers, bankers and princes.

The author

Sir Richard Carnac Temple (1850–1931) was born in India to Sir Richard Temple, once governor of Bombay Presidency. After Punjab he served in Burma, eventually becoming Chief Commissioner of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. He joined the Folklore Society in 1885, wrote The Andaman Language (1887), co-wrote Wide-Awake Stories (1884) with Flora Annie Steel, edited Fallon's Devil-Worship of the Tuluvas (1897), and for the Hakluyt Society edited the travels of Thomas Bowrey and Peter Mundy. He was editor and proprietor of the Indian Antiquary from 1884 and founded Panjab Notes and Queries (1883–87).

Reception & legacy

The Legends was highly acclaimed by the academic world on publication and became, as one Indian publisher puts it, 'a legend in itself' — translated into Urdu, reprinted by Arno Press (1977) and Lok Virsa, Islamabad (1981), and still in print from Indian publishers. Modern scholars read it with a double lens: as an irreplaceable archive of 19th-century Punjabi oral literature, and as a document of the colonial 'folklorist' project — the ethnographer Sadhana Naithani's term 'colonizer-folklorist' was coined with Temple in mind. Both readings are true, and both are reasons to read it.

Read it if...

you want the Raja Rasalu cycle and the other great Punjabi legends in their fullest 19th-century form; you are interested in how folklore was collected under the Raj; or you want to see the raw material from which every later retelling — including Flora Annie Steel's — was drawn.