Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/469

 The Folklore in the Legends of the Panjab. 429

recollection of details and surroundings in " a former life." On the other hand, there is in one instance a reference to that widespread, practical form of identification, which is embodied in the custom of placing a stamp or mark on the body or clothes, as a voucher of a visit to a shrine or of a pilgrimage completed, where the hero's camel carries away betel-leaves and water to show that he had really been to the heroine's abode, and so knew the way thither.

The favourite folktale form of ordeal is the impossible task, and naturally so, as the individual fancy can here range at will ; while the poverty of peasant imagination is also shown by the constant resort of the story-tellers to well-known stock tasks. In one form, however, the im- possible task is of exceptional interest, for when it is imposed as a condition of marriage with the heroine, the Legends show that it is the poor remnant of the once important political manoeuvre of the swayamvara, or public choice of a husband by girls of princely rank.

There are two common variants of the impossible task frequently occurring in the Legends — riddles and ceremonial gambling. Conventional riddles preserved at the present day in garbled traditional verse, and usually perfectly un- intelligible, are used for all the purposes of their prototype — for identifying the hero ; as necessary preliminaries to marriage, and even to an illicit intrigue ; as a variant of the swayamvara ; as a kind of initiation into saintship ; in fact, wherever an ordeal is for any reason desired. But the more legitimate use of riddles as a symbolical, or secret, or private form of speech is merely hinted at in the Legends, as where a birth is announced in the form of a riddle, and where the female attendants of a princess make com- munications in the same form.

Gambling is looked on by the Indian populace as the usual and proper occupation of the great and rich ; and so a good deal is heard of it in the Legends. But the cere- monial gambling occurring in them bears evidence of its