Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/482

442 a means of expressing vindictiveness. In resorting to it there is no other ulterior motive. Enemies are cut to pieces, buried and burnt alive, shot to death with arrows, buried up to the neck to starve, in company on occasion with thorns, scorpions, snakes, and so on. There is much personal triumph mixed with the vengeance. Enemies' skulls are mounted in silver as drinking cups, strangled bodies are exposed, graves of enemies are ploughed up and walked over by the conquering hero and heroine, the ashes of victims of burning alive are sent to their mothers, and an unchaste wife is tricked into eating her lover's heart by the injured husband. Callously cruel as all these proceedings are, they may, as every reader of Oriental history knows, be fairly termed mild when compared with many that must have often been within the actual personal knowledge of the peasantry of all parts and at all times, even the most recent.

The lengths to which sacerdotal vindictiveness has often gone in India, is indicated by the well-established custom of ceremonial suicide, self-immolation, and self-injury, in order to bring divine or supernatural wrath on an opponent or enemy. Debased as such a custom is in its nature and object, it has given rise to another equally well established and as noble as its prototype is execrable: the old and often exercised Rajput sâkâ or jauhar, which meant the voluntary suicide of the women of a palace, while the men went out to make the last wild sally when it was no longer possible to continue a defence.

With this, perhaps the noblest outcome of all of Indian superstition and belief, I close my present remarks, in the hope that I have said enough to show that in the Legends of the Panjab we have displayed before us practically the whole machinery of popular Indian story-telling. Both the actors and their actions, so far as we have been able to regard them, have all shown themselves to be of the same descriptions, and to have the same characteristics as those in Indian folktales generally, whether purely narrative or