Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/449

 The Folklore in the Legends of the Punjab. 409

a strong indication of the objects held to be sacred in any given form of belief, e.g., swearing by touching the sacred thread {janeu), or by tearing the thread off a cow's neck by a Hindu, by touching the Quran by Muhammadans or the Bible by Christians, are sure references to things held specially sacred under each form of faith. So also when a warrior swears by drinking the milk of his own mother, or when the hero swears by placing his hand on the body of the person adjured, or by drawing a line on the ground with his nose, we are taken back to survivals of forgotten animistic belief. That there should be in the Legends occasionally a mixture of Hindu and Musalman ideas in the forms of oaths will not surprise my readers ; and of this a fine example is the phrase : " The Ganges is between us and above us is the Quran," said by so strict a Musalman as one must presume a Qazi to be.

The object of the ceremonies and forms used in taking oaths is of course to render them binding ; but it must long ago have been equally important at times to avoid the con- sequences of rash and indeed deliberate oaths ; and the inventive ingenuity of the folk has been turned on to this side of the question with considerable success. E.g., it is a happy and simple, not to say a convenient, expedient to interpose the presence of a pigeon's egg as an effectual stopper to the binding effect of an oath on the Quran.

In the matter of vows and oaths the Legends give a great number of instances in which a certain form of oath or vow, used for many purposes, but generally for emphasis, has become common to both Hindus and Musalmans. It has arisen out of the Muhammadan custom or law of divorce, tin taldq as it is called in India. The custom is due to a passage in the Quran which lays down that if a man with the proper ceremony pronounces dismissal {taldq) three times to his wife, he cannot marry her again until she shall have been married to another man and divorced by him. Now this solemn performance of tin taldq, or three