Article by Puneet Kaur
Edited by Jenica Amalita

Introduction

It is a hot summer evening in the month of Jeth–Harh (June) in Punjab, and not a single leaf stirs anywhere. The constant jhin-jhin of cicadas fills the air. A single oil lamp burns faintly in the temple. As the sun sets, the village is plunged largely into darkness save for a few flickering lights emanating from the temple and a few wealthy houses. People wait for the night air to cool down before they can retire to their hand-woven cots. To pass the time, someone begins a story, “Ikk vaar di gal hai… (Once upon a time…)“

A crowd slowly begins to gather to hear the adventures of the legendary Punjabi hero, Raja Rasalu, known for his acts of bravery and defiance. Despite their having heard this story many times, they sit engrossed as they are told of his many exploits. Today’s story deals with how he was exiled by his father and had to leave his kingdom. On his way out of the palace, he hears his mother crying and stops to talk to her.

When Raja Rasalu speaks, everyone joins in,

And she replies,

This was a common scene in nineteenth century rural Punjab, where daily life was hard, as most villagers spent long hours working in the fields during the day. There was no formal education, forms of entertainment were limited, and oral storytelling was the most common and popular form of entertainment available. Therefore, various qissas and folktales were narrated orally and had been transmitted across generations in this manner. Oral stories relied on rhyme, rhythm, and refrain¹ to make them memorable.

As these tales were sung or recited, certain lines were repeated again and again, allowing the audience to join in the storytelling, thus fixing them in the listeners’ memories.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, a British woman named Flora Annie Steel set about collecting and translating folktales from Punjab. Her aim was not only to collect and preserve these tales, but to publish a book for English readers, which would give them a deeper understanding of the culture of India. She was the Chief Magistrate’s wife and also the Inspector of government aided schools in Punjab. Her unique position brought her in close contact with local women and children, and she was able to gather tales directly from them. Working with R C Temple, who provided extensive annotations and analysis, she eventually published them in a book titled Tales of the Punjab: Folklore of India.

However, publishing a book of folktales also involved translation from vernacular to English in addition to their collection, and these tales were rich in short poems, couplets, verses and refrains that are meant to be sung or chanted during storytelling. A key feature of these folktales is their mixture of prose and verse. While prose is generally easier to translate, the translation of verse is complicated and requires replacing colloquial expressions with words suitable to the target language. Although this may preserve the basic meaning, it often results in a loss of musicality and subtle layers of meaning.

Using Steel’s collected tales, this article explores why rhyme and rhythm are so important in Punjabi folktales and how these stories preserve fragments of cultural memory. When folktales are translated and preserved by those outside a culture, an important question arises: whose voice remains after centuries of oral transmission? Is it the voice of the native storytellers, or that of the colonial translator?

The importance of rhyme, rhythm, and repetition

Punjab has always had a strong tradition of oral storytelling. Every story changed with the respective storyteller, leading to multiple variants of the same tale. In his book The Singer of Tales, American scholar Albert B. Lord explains how oral narrative poetry is learned, composed, and transmitted by illiterate bards. Storytellers improvise while reciting the tale due to which there is no original version of a tale – multiple versions exist simultaneously, which highlights the idea of collective ownership, where no individual can claim exclusive authorship and the tales belong to the culture. Each time a storyteller improvises during narration, they reshape the story. They use formulas² to memorize the stories, maintain metre, and allow smooth, fluent composition while reciting (Lord, 1960). Consider the story ‘A Grain of Corn’ where a sparrow drops her grain of corn in the roots of a peepal tree. She asks the tree to give the grain back to her, but the tree refuses. The storyteller then recites this rhyme –

The story then continues with the sparrow going to the fire and asking it to burn the tree down, but it refuses to do so, and the storyteller recites,

The sparrow then goes to many others for help – water, elephant, rope, mouse, and cat. With every new character, one line is added to the same formulaic rhyme, and by the end of the story the rhyme becomes considerably long, yet easily remembered by everyone –

The phrase ‘Chiri vichari ki kare, Thanda paani pi mare’ (what can the poor sparrow do? She drinks cold water and dies) functions as the formula that maintains the flow in the recitation. Many tales also make generous use of stock epithets like ‘nau-lakha haar’ (a necklace worthnine lakhs), ‘ikk si raja’ (there once was a king), or ‘nani kol jawanga, mota ho ke awanga’ (I’ll go to my grandmother’s and come back nice and plump).

Lord also states that oral stories are built around recurrent themes like heroic battles, journeys, love stories and moral teachings, which can be seen in many of the stories in this collection. While the tales of ‘Raja Rasalu’ and ‘The Two Brothers’ are heroic adventures, the tales of ‘Bopoluchi’, ‘The Tiger, The Brahman and The Jackal’, and ‘The Rat’s Wedding’ deal with outwitting tricksters. The story of ‘Valiant Vicky’ is a story of wonderful luck, and the tale of ‘Peasie and Beansie’ addresses the theme of good fortune for the good of heart and bad luck for the evil doer.

The example of the following story of Chidi (sparrow) and Kaan (crow), where they both cook khichdi (porridge), reiterates this. Chidi tells Kaan to go and take a bath before eating the khichdi. Kaan goes to do so, and Chidi eats all of the khichdi because it was very tasty and she was extremely hungry – she even eats Kaan’s share. When Kaan comes back, he is enraged when he finds that his share of khichdi is gone. Now Chidi has hidden herself from Kaan as she expected him to be upset/angry. However, unknown to her, a part of her tail is sticking out of her hiding place. Kaan sees it, takes a piece of burning coal and sticks it into Chidi’s tail. Her tail gets burnt and she cries out – ‘Hai hai, mera poonjha sadeya’ (Oh, oh! My tail is burnt!), and Kaansays, ‘Kyon begana bhapa khada? (Why did you eat someone else’s share of porridge?)’.

This is the version I heard from my parents, but there are at least two other versions I’ve come across. One of them is that when Chidi cries out, she says, ‘Cheen cheen, mera poonjha sadeya’ (Tweet, tweet! My tail is burnt!) and then, there is a very elaborate version recorded in Steel’s book, where Kaan is made to go to many other entities (a pond, a buffalo, a deer etc) and ask for favours from them, and there are elaborate poems for each situation characterized by much repetition and refrain –

This suggests that the tale of chidi and kaan has been in circulation since the nineteenth century at least, which is when Steel heard and recorded it. Presumably, it is much older. It was an elaborate story with an elaborate rhyme, and a different ending, but by the time it reached me in the 1980s, it had become much shorter and concise; the ending had changed and the long elaborate rhyme had been forgotten somewhere along the years. All that remained was the brief last line, or the concluding rhyme of the story, where the story teller enacts the sparrow’s exclamation ‘haye, haye’ in a rising, expressive tone, followed by the lament ‘mera poonjha sadeya’, answered by the crow’s query – ‘kyon begana bhapa khada?’, both recited in a singsong, chanting manner. The repetition and the dialogic pattern between lament and query produce a distinct, musical effect.

Situating folktales in cultural memory

Sociologist Maurice Halbwachs argued that memory is shaped socially, not individually. It is shaped by the social frameworks of language, religion, community, and class (Halbwachs, 1992). Expanding this idea, Jan Assmann developed the concept of cultural memory, (preserved through cultural forms like texts, myths, rituals and festivals), as different from communicative memory (based on the everyday communication of individuals). Communicative memory lasts only for three to four generations (about 80-100 years), whereas cultural memory can last thousands of years; thus, maintaining continuity with the past beyond the lifespan of individuals (Assmann, 2011). Folktales act as powerful carriers of cultural memory through generations, particularly in predominantly oral cultures. At the same time, they stand at a crossroads between cultural and communicative memory as their adaptability and collective ownership by a culture create a hybrid space where multiple versions of the same tale may exist.

The tales collected by Steel are veritable windows into the culture, traditions and lifestyle of people in Punjab two hundred years ago. We get a glimpse of the local beliefs, superstitions, myths, the food people ate, their beliefs and values, as well as their social attitudes towards gender, family, and class. Many of the characters in these folktales are sadhus, jogis, pirs, and fakirs (holy and wise men) who have divine powers by which they might bless or curse people. There are jinns, rakshasas, deos, and churails (genies, demons, giants and witches) that cause harm to people, animals, and plants; there are tales of dutiful children, stories of parents longing for a male child, and accounts of clever heroes outwitting evil doers. When two brothers set out on an adventure, they have a hearty meal first and also carry some food with them (‘Kahin mat jao khali pet, hove haad ya hove jeth’ – Never go anywhere empty stomach, no matter what time of the year it is). When a sparrow and a crow decide to cook together, they make khichdi, which is also the dish promised by an old woodcutter to a bear in exchange for ‘14 maunds’ of wood – a unit of measurement not in use anymore.

The language of some of the original verses is a Western Punjabi dialect, whereas some other verses show a strong influence of Hindi, Awadhi, and Brajbhasha. Western Punjabi dialect can be clearly discerned in the following verses –

The use of Western Punjabi lexicon like bansan (become), kassan (do), banasan (make), wohtri (bride) in these verses situates the tale in the North Western region of undivided Punjab.

In another story, the line ‘billi re billi, musa khaogi?’ (Cat O cat, will you eat a mouse?) illustrates the influence of Hindi and Sanskrit on the language of orally transmitted tales, as the word ‘musa’ is derived from the Sanskrit word for mouse. In another example, the lines ‘Tu deo pharwa, Main khodun ghasarwa, Khilawen bhainsarwa, Chowen dudharwa, Pilawen hirnarwa’ which are part of a longer poem, use words with a –wa suffix (dudharwa, pharwa, ghasarwa, bhainsarwa etc). These point strongly towards Eastern Hindi or Awadhi influence, indicating that tales were recited by people in mixed dialects.

The coexistence of Western Punjabi dialects and Hindi expressions in Punjabi folktales supports Halbwachs’ theory that cultural memory is shaped by social and linguistic frameworks. The wide variety of dialects and the influence of other languages reflect the cultural and regional interactions that shaped collective memory in undivided Punjab. Therefore, folktales are not mere means of entertainment; they are living archives of cultural memory.

Translation and cultural memory

When Steel collected, translated and edited folktales from various parts of India, she was targeting the English reader who had never travelled to India. The stories were narrated to her in the vernacular language, full of colloquialisms, not comprehensible to the English reader without cultural and linguistic context. Therefore, she edited the stories and changed names (e.g. the names ‘Motho’ and ‘Mungo’ became ‘Peasie’ and ‘Beansie’, ‘Giteta Ram’ became ‘Little Anklebone’, ‘Shehzadi Mircha’ was ‘Princess Pepperina’, ‘Sherdil Shehryar’ became ‘Lionheart’, ‘Baingan Shahzadi’ became ‘Princess Aubergine’, and ‘Fatteh Khan’ became ‘Prince Victor’).

She erased the colloquialisms and rewrote the stories in such a way that they read fluently, as if originally written in English. This process of translation is what Lawrence Venuti describes as domestication, where a translated text is altered and adapted for the target readers. Domestication erases foreign cultural elements. The translated text can be read fluently and smoothly. However, Venuti argues that with domestication, translation ceases to be merely a linguistic activity and becomes a cultural and political one, reinforcing cultural ethnocentrism (Venuti, 1995).

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak talks about the voice of the subaltern being distorted, interpreted and represented by those in power, often silencing them further by forcing their experiences into Western theoretical frameworks (Spivak, 1988). When Steel collected tales told by the subaltern people, she found that the stories, in their original form were “uncouth and even unpresentable to ears polite”, “scarcely intelligible” and at times, too vulgar to be published.  Therefore, the stories we read in the book today are a sanitised version of the original ones – a hybrid of Punjabi folktales and Western folk literature traditions. The reader encounters the folktales of Punjab through the lens of the colonial ruler raising an important question: whose voice is being heard – that of the original storytellers or that of the translator?

Domestication and sanitation as translatory practices lead to a blurring of the line between the native and the foreign as the stories do not faithfully transmit the voice of the original storyteller. Instead, what we encounter is the foreign translator’s perception of the original, shaped by their understanding of the native culture.

Conclusion

Folktales are repositories of cultural memory, handed down from generation to generation through centuries. Their simple rhyming couplets and refrains ensure that they can be easily memorised, recited, and transmitted. Steel’s work of collecting and documenting folktales from India has been invaluable in preserving them. Without such effort, these tales might have been lost or significantly altered over time. However, this preservation has come at a cost. The very act of writing them down records only one particular version of these tales. Passed down through oral tradition, these tales, which have been dynamic are now subjected to a process of authentication, preserving one version while ignoring and marginalising all others.

Folktales are a part of the collective memory of a culture, and keep traditions, myths and rituals alive. But when a foreigner like Flora Annie Steel collects and translates these stories from the native language to English, their flavour and essence is inevitably altered. Told through a foreigner’s voice, the reader gets a hybridised version of the folktale, devoid of the nuances and musicality of the native language, particularly the rhyme and rhythm. In such a case, the preserved tales can be understood as a collaborative project between native and foreign voices. Rather than despairing over the loss of the original, it may be more productive to recognise the preserved tales as projects with a shared narrative voice.

Endnotes:

1. A refrain is a line, phrase, or group of lines repeated at intervals in a poem or song, often at the end of a stanza, to add emphasis, structure, or musicality ↩︎
2. Formulas in folktales are traditional, recurring structural patterns (repeating sequences), stylistic clichés, or opening/closing phrases (e.g., “Once upon a time”) used in oral storytelling to aid memory and structure the narrative.  ↩︎

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BIO: Puneet Kaur is, first and foremost, an avid reader who has been immersed in books since childhood. A travel enthusiast with a deep interest in cultures and folklore, she explores literature through critical analysis, poetry, and thoughtful commentary. She also co-hosts the podcast Sisters Sips and Stories on Youtube, where she discusses books and reading.

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References:

Assmann, J. (2011). Cultural memory and early civilization: Writing, remembrance, and political imagination. Cambridge University Press.

Halbwachs, M. (1992). On collective memory. University of Chicago Press.

Lord, A. B. (1960). The singer of tales. Harvard University Press.

Spivak, G. C. (1988). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson & L. Grossberg (Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271–313). University of Illinois Press.

Steel, F. A. (2023). Tales of the Punjab: Folklore of India. Double 9 Books. (Original work published 1894)

Venuti, L. (1995). The translator’s invisibility: A history of translation. Routledge.