Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/447

 The Folklore in the Legends of the Panjah. 407

and hence the very high praise and the very great super- natural and future rew^ards offered to the " generous," w^hich are not confined to any particular creed or country. The Indian saint, and after him the attendants and hangers- on at his shrine, live on alms; and so "charity" and "gene- rosity " on the part of their adherents and audiences are " virtues " that naturally loom very largely in their tales and poems. The ceremonial nature of the " generosity " comes out in the fact that the gifts to be efficacious must be of the conventional sort ; and we have repeated instances in the Legends of the wrong kind of alms being refused by saints and holy men, however valuable and lavish.

It is obviously necessary, when dwelling on the import- ance of such a virtue on behalf of a hero, that the hero him- self should not be represented as being wanting therein ; and hence "generosity" is an invariable attribute of the saints. Every saint has been wildly and extravagantly generous, what- ever else he may have been. Sakhi Sarwar, Shams Tabrez, and the rest of them are all heroes of generosity. So also on the other hand are the folk-heroes Hari Chand and Raja Amba, while the Baloches have a special hero of their own, Nodhbandagh the Gold-scatterer. The extravagance of the acts of generosity attributed to saints and holy men is boundless. Self-mutilation and self-blinding to gain small objects are among them, stretched in more than one notorious instance into the impossible feat of striking off his own head as alms. Extreme self-sacrifice of this kind assumes a curious form, when a jogi is credited with cere- monial cannibalism, in allusion, perhaps, to the well-known real or attributed habits of the Aghori faqirs.

Offerings of all sorts, and under whatever name, involve the giving up of something, if of value to the giver the better. A notion that has universally led to such concrete ceremonies as sacrifices of all kinds of things of both material value, like cattle, and of purely ceremonial value, like the blood spilt in a notable fight detailed in the Legends. All