Tales of the Punjab

About the book

Tales of the Punjab: Told by the People was published in 1894 by Flora Annie Steel (1847–1929), the Anglo-Indian writer who lived in British India for twenty-two years. It collects forty-three stories — instructive, humorous and, in her phrase, authentic — gathered from local storytellers in the Punjab and retold in English. The first edition was profusely illustrated by John Lockwood Kipling (1837–1911), the art teacher, museum curator and illustrator who was Rudyard Kipling's father.

Steel collected the tales while living with her husband in the north of the subcontinent, learning them — by her own account — from local women, at a time when she was also campaigning for education reform. Published while India remained under the British Empire, the book was a successful introduction to the legends and stories of the Punjab for children and adults back home in England.

Plot & themes

The forty-three tales range across the whole folk repertoire: animal fables ('The Rat's Wedding', 'The Tiger, the Brahman, and the Jackal', 'The Jackal and the Crocodile'), clever-wife stories ('The Barber's Clever Wife'), moral tales ('The Faithful Prince', 'The Grain of Corn'), and the great heroic cycle of Raja Rasalu — eight linked stories from 'How Raja Rasalu was Born' through 'How Raja Rasalu Played Chaupur with King Sarkap'. Other favourites include 'Sir Buzz', the story of a poor boy, a tigress with a thorn in her paw and a mysterious reward; 'Bopoluchi'; 'Princess Aubergine'; and 'The Lambikin'.

Read today, the book is two things at once: a genuine treasury of Punjabi folk narrative — many of these tales exist in no fuller English form — and a document of its moment, in which a colonial Englishwoman mediates village storytelling for a London audience. Steel's framing puts, as modern scholars note, 'a decidedly Western twist' on the material; the tales themselves, though, keep breaking through the frame with their own logic, humour and strangeness.

The author

Flora Annie Steel (1847–1929) spent twenty-two years in India, where she became noted for books set in the subcontinent. Her novel On the Face of the Waters (1896), on the 1857 uprising, was a bestseller. She had already co-written Wide-Awake Stories (1884) with R. C. Temple — a landmark that surveyed and classified the incidents of Indian folktales — before producing Tales of the Punjab on her own account a decade later.

Reception & legacy

The book has never been out of the scholarly eye: folklorists cite it as one of the foundational English collections of Punjabi oral literature, alongside Temple's Legends and Swynnerton's Raja Rasalu volume. It remains in print in modern reprints, and its Raja Rasalu stories are still the most accessible English entry point to the cycle. For Punjabi readers it occupies a complicated place — beloved as a treasury, read critically as a colonial mediation — which is itself a reason to read it with both gratitude and attention.

Read it if...

you want forty-three Punjabi folktales in one volume, from animal fables to the Rasalu epic; you are interested in how Punjab's stories first reached English readers; or you want the book that sits on the shelf between Temple's Legends and the modern retellings — the bridge volume of Punjabi folklore in English.