Abstract

Like the other great cultural areas of the Indian subcontinent, the Punjab is endowed with a living heritage of oral tradition: all kinds of songs and tales are hawked by itinerant bards, and after the day's work is done, people particularly like listening to them reciting legends of love, the most moving passages of which they sing to their own accompaniment on various traditional instruments. The stories most popular with village audiences are local epico-lyrical legends; these function like myths for Punjabis, forming a symbolic system according to which they can organize and think through their experience.