The legends of the Panjâb

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PEEFACE.
There are several kinds of bards.
There is the bard proper, kept
at the courts of native grandees who sings, inter alia, national
legends and warlike feats, and is the depositary of the genealogy
and family history of the local chief, which alas !
he shifts
and changes to suit the exigencies of the hour, till a mushroom
family develops a linfeage adequate to its present position.
is not always a very reputable personage, and is a fair representative
of the lower classes that hang about an Indian chief's
palace. Then there is the priestly depositary of the sacred
legends of the Hindus, who with his company sings swangs,
those curious semi-religious metrical plays that are partly acted
and partly recited, and are of such unconscionable length. He
is called in—on payment always—to performat the various stated
festivals—at the Holi (in Spring) and at the Dasahra (in Autumn
especially. Of the same description is the wandering devotee
who attaches himself to some saint—Hindii or Musalman—and
sings laudatory legends at the festivals peculiar to his hero.
He frequently makes it his business to collect alms for the
benefit of his patron's shrine, often situated at a great distance
from the scene of his labours, which alms are faithfully collected
and clubbed with those of others similarly engaged, and then
divided between themselves and the shrine.
He
There is also the professional
ballad singer or mlrasi, who accompanies dancing girls,
and sings for hire at the various joyous ceremonies connected
with marriages and the like. He will sing any kind of song,
from a fine national legend to the filthiest dirt imaginable, and
he is invariably a most disreputable rascal.
Quite another kind
of being is he who performs, as one of themselves, at the feasts
and festivals of the low 'out-castes' of India—in imitation of the
Brahman reciter of the true swang. With a prodigious
memory and some notion of verse and metre he will drone
away in language suited to himself and his humble audience
through hundreds of lines of legend, sometimes a story picked
up from the regular professional singers, and sometimes a tale
connected with the object of worship peculiar to his class or
sect, and always valuable. And lastly, thei-e is the rough
villager—especially in the hills—with a turn for poetry and