Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/269

 B aloe hi Folk lore. 253

portion of the heroic ballads, as well as a good deal of more modern poetry. These ballads are the most valuable material for the legendary history of the race. They date probably for the m.ost part from the early part of the sixteenth century, and relate mainly to the last great migration of the Baloches which led them to their present positions. Some of the prose narratives are also derived from ballads, and occasionally embody fragments of poems which are now lost. There is less foreign influence in these than in the majority of the prose stories, which are evidently to a great extent borrowed from Persian or Indian neighbours ; picked up, perhaps, in the bazaars of Kalat, Quetta, Shikarpur, or Dera Ghazi Khan, from Per- sians at Bampur, Arabs at Gwadar, Panjabi soldiers at Rajanpur or Bombay sepoys at Jacobabad.

The ballads, though never hitherto written down, yet have a distinct style of their own which may be called literary ; and new ones are still composed and sung on the old pattern. There is a stock of poetical or archaic words and phrases which are not used in the language of common life, but which inevitably appear in the war-ballad or the love-song. Every tribe has attached to it a few families, called by the Indian name Do7n or the Persian Lori, who are not Baloches by blood or in features, but live among them and speak their language. The Doms are of Indian origin, probably aboriginal. Among the Baloches the tribal Dom quite identifies himself with the tribe, and sings their war-songs with great spirit. But the Doms do not them- selves make the ballads. The poets are invariably pure- blooded Baloches, but it is not consistent with their dignity to sing them in public, so the poet always gets a Dom to whom he teaches the words. The Dom sings them in public to the accompaniment of the dambiro or sarindd. Both of these are stringed instruments, the dambiro being played with the fingers like a guitar while the sarlnda, a more elaborate instrument with six or seven gut strings.