Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/434

 394 The Folklore in the Legends of the Pmijah.

any of them, and the stories about them are hopelessly mingled together. Be his origin Hindu or Muhammadan or merely animistic, the saintly or demoniacal, i.e. super- natural, hero's attributes, powers, characteristics, actions, and life-history are in Indian folklore always of the same kind and referable to the same fundamental ideas. He does not belong to any particular form of creed or religion, but to that universal animism which underlies the religious feeling of all the Indian peasantry. I can see no radical difference in the popular conception of the Hindu Guru Gorakhnath or the Muhammadan Sakhi Sarwar of the North, and the animistic Koti and Channayya of the South. The peculiarities of any one of them are proper to them all. They are best studied as a whole.

In the Legends holy personages play a larger and more important part than the Rajas or secular heroes themselves, and their characteristics and the notions about them are well displayed. Thus, in the quaint tales that have gathered round the memory of the Saints of Jalandhar, we find an account of the struggle for local supremacy between a Musalman saint and his rival and counterpart, a Hindu jogi ; and the point for the present purpose is that the characteristics and the powers of the pair are represented as being precisely the same : they both belong to the same class of supernaturally endowed beings, and the result of the contest clearly hinges on the sectarial proclivities of the narrator of the story.

Immortality and reappearance, ideas apparently common to the whole human race, are widely spread attributes of Indian holy men, the title of Saint Apparent (Zahir Pir) being by no means limited to the mixed Hindu-Musalman canonised warrior Guru Gugga ; and in these pages we have a case in which the opposing saintly personages, Hindu and Musalman, on both sides of a sectarian struggle, kill each other and all become living, i.e. immortal, saints (Jiute pir). But in other matters than immortality we find