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Once Upon a Time in the Land of Five Rivers: 

A Comparative Analysis of Translated Punjabi Folk Tale Editions, from 

Flora Annie Steel’s Colonial Collection to Shafi Aqeel’s Post-Partition 

Collection and Beyond 

 

 

 

 

A thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of 

Doctor of Philosophy, in English Literature 

Massey University, 

Manawatu Campus, 

New Zealand 

 

 

 

 

Noor Fatima, 

2019 

 

 

  



 

 

 

  



i 

 

Abstract 

This thesis offers a critical analysis of two different collections of Punjabi folk tales 

which were collected at different moments in Punjab’s history: Tales of the Punjab (1894), 

collected by Flora Annie Steel and, Popular Folk Tales of the Punjab (2008) collected by 

Shafi Aqeel and translated from Urdu into English by Ahmad Bashir. The study claims that 

the changes evident in collections of Punjabi folk tales published in the last hundred years 

reveal the different social, political and ideological assumptions of the collectors, translators 

and the audiences for whom they were disseminated.  

Each of these collections have one prior edition that differs in important ways from 

the later one. Steel’s edition was first published during the late-colonial era in India as Wide-

awake Stories in 1884 and consisted of tales that she translated from Punjabi into English. 

Aqeel’s first edition was collected shortly after the partition of India and Pakistan, as Punjabi 

Lok Kahaniyan in 1963 and consisted of tales he translated from Punjabi into Urdu. Taking as 

my starting point the extensive (often feminist) scholarship on the ideological functions of 

folk lore and tale-telling, I explore the assumptions affirmed or challenged in these 

collections. My particular focus is on the differences between Steel’s late nineteenth-century, 

female-edited, Western/colonial Indian collection and Aqeel’s post-partition, ‘native,’ male-

edited, Islam-inflected Pakistani collection, keeping in mind the collectors’ sociohistorical 

and political backgrounds along with differences in their implied audiences.  

The first chapter considers the history of and motivations for folklore collection in 

nineteenth-century British India and the colonial folklorists who were involved in this 

activity, especially in the Punjab. The second chapter offers a discussion of Flora Annie 

Steel’s biographical background and her various writings in order to suggest how her position 

as a (ostensibly) feminist colonial Memsahib, along with the editorial supervision of Richard 



ii 

 

C. Temple, may have influenced her collection and translation of Punjabi tales. The chapter 

also discusses how, at the time, female collectors like Steel relied on the authority of men to 

secure the validity of their work, needing a male scholarly stamp of approval. The third 

chapter discusses the life and works of Shafi Aqeel and the differences between the two 

editions of the collection (one published in Urdu in 1963, the other in English almost fifty 

years later in 2008). My own translation of the Urdu version illuminates the extent to which 

the English translator of Popular Folk Tales of the Punjab, Ahmad Bashir, added yet another 

level of appropriation to what were originally oral tales from the Punjabi region. Chapter 

Four provides a comparative analysis of selected tales from each collection focusing on the 

differences evident between similar tales that appear in each collection and discusses the 

reasons behind the changes introduced. Building on this, my concluding chapter, makes 

claims about what is distinctive about each version of the tale and collection, and offers 

possible reasons for their differences. As a supplement to the thesis I have included my own 

translations of selected tales from Aqeel’s Urdu edition as an Appendix, along with a note 

detailing the principles followed in the preparation of these translations. I have also appended 

two scanned versions of one tale from Aqeel’s Urdu edition and its English version, my own 

translation of which is already in the appendix.  

Through the analysis of the historical, social, political, and authorial background of 

the collections, and the analysis of the prefaces and notes to these, my study concludes that 

each collector (and/or translator) has imposed their own particular set of assumptions and 

values on the tales they have chosen to collect. The differences I observe between the 

collections and editions are often subtle but sometimes startling. These differences, I argue, 

can be attributed to the historical moment in which they were collected/published, and the 

ideological/political persuasion of the collectors and their anticipation of readers’ 

expectations. Differences between the editions not only prove revealing about the workings 



iii 

 

of folktales but also about how the collection of these might reflect cultural and social shifts 

and understandings, particularly in the Punjab region of Pakistan.  



iv 

 

Table of Content 

Abstract ...................................................................................................................................... i 

List of Figures .......................................................................................................................... vi 

Acknowledgments .................................................................................................................. vii 

Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 1 

 

Chapter One: The role of the Indian Antiquary and the Folklore Society in the 

collection and dissemination of folk tales in colonial India ................................................ 29 

1.1 Folklore as a New Science ............................................................................................... 30 

1.2 The British in the Indian subcontinent .......................................................................... 42 

1.3 Three phases of folklore collection in India ................................................................... 46 

1.4 Travellers’ Tales............................................................................................................... 54 

1.5 The culture of gender....................................................................................................... 60 

 

Chapter Two: Representations of pre-Partition Punjab and Punjabi people in the Tales 

of the Punjab disseminated by Flora Annie Steel in 1894. ................................................. 65 

2.1 Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 65 

2.2 White woman’s burden ................................................................................................... 67 

2.3 Flora Annie Steel and her collection of Punjabi tales ................................................... 69 

2.4 Steel’s wider writings in context ..................................................................................... 87 

2.5 Richard Carnac Temple: The Coloniser-Folklorist ..................................................... 92 

2.6 Collecting, Interpreting, and Scripting Tales of the Punjab......................................... 94 

2.7 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 120 

 

Chapter Three: Shafi Aqeel and his Popular Folk Tales of the Punjab .......................... 122 

3.1 Historical background ................................................................................................... 122 

3.2 Shafi Aqeel (Mohammad Shafi): 1930-2013 ................................................................ 135 

3.3 Popular Folk Tales of the Punjab .................................................................................. 144 

3.4 Analysis of the tales ........................................................................................................ 152 

3.5 Differences between the English and Urdu edition ..................................................... 163 

3.6 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 168 

 

 



v 

 

Chapter Four: Twice upon a Time in the Land of Five Rivers: A Comparative Analysis 

of selected tales from Steel’s Tales of the Punjab and Aqeel’s Popular Folk Tales of the 

Punjab.................................................................................................................................... 170 

4.1 Issues to do with Translation ........................................................................................ 172 

4.2 Historical background ................................................................................................... 179 

4.3 Size of the collections ..................................................................................................... 184 

4.4 Tales: Structure, Characters, Plots, Endings .............................................................. 187 

4.5 Variants of “Prince Ruby” ............................................................................................ 188 

4.6 “Princess Pepperina” (Steel) and “Princess Pomegranate” (Aqeel) ......................... 194 

4.7 Themes ............................................................................................................................ 206 

4.8 Wise, kind old men and cunning, greedy old women, hags........................................ 210 

4.9 The “fairy tale” endings ................................................................................................ 211 

4.10 Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 213 

 

Chapter Five: Conclusions and Findings: Khattam-Shud ............................................... 215 

5.1 Steel’s collection and inferences ................................................................................... 221 

5.2 Aqeel’s collection and inferences:................................................................................. 224 

5.3 Comparisons between the collections ........................................................................... 225 

5.4 Significance of the Study ............................................................................................... 230 

 

Appendix 1: Translations of selected tales from Shafi Aqeel’s Punjabi Lok Kahaniyan

................................................................................................................................................ 233 

Translation Principles ...................................................................................................... 233 

1. Sweet as Salt  (pp. 13-26) ............................................................................................. 235 

2. The Fan of Patience (pp. 27-44) .................................................................................. 243 

3. Princess Pomegranate (pp. 61-88) .............................................................................. 252 

Appendix 2: Selections from Shafi Aqeel, “Meetha Namak” Punjabi Lok Kahaniyan 

(1963) and “Dear as Salt,” Popular Folk Tales of the Punjab. Translated by Ahmad 

Bashir, OUP, 2008. ............................................................................................................... 264 

 

Works Cited: ........................................................................................................................ 283 

 

 

  



vi 

 

List of Figures 

Number                                                                                                                        Page 

Fig. 1. 

Fig. 2. 

Fig. 3. 

Fig. 4. 

Fig. 5. 

John D. Batten. Indian Fairy Tales. Joseph Jacobs. 1912.  

J. Lockwood Kipling. “The Two Brothers.” Tales of the Punjab. 1894  

J. Lockwood Kipling. “Little Anklebone.” Tales of the Punjab. 1894. 

J. Lockwood Kipling. Book Cover. Tales of the Punjab.1894. 

Ustad Allah Bakhsh. “Hir-Ranjha.” Book Cover. Popular Folk Tales 

of the Punjab. 2008. 

78 

99 

100 

185 

186 

 

 

 

  



vii 

 

Acknowledgments 

I am indebted to my supervisor, Dr Kim Worthington, and my co-supervisor, Dr 

Ingrid Horrocks for the help, support and intellectual and academic guidance that they 

provided me for the last four years. Their considerable experience has been invaluable in 

helping me to channel my energies and transform my work into a polished piece of academic 

writing. This would not have been possible without their help and guidance. 

I am thankful and indebted to the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan for 

granting me an overseas Doctoral Scholarship, which enabled me to pay full attention to my 

studies without any financial distractions. I am also very thankful to Punjab Higher Education 

Department, Collegiate Division, for granting me study-leave.  

I am grateful to my family, especially my Abu (dad) and Ami (mom), who have 

always been supportive of my academic dreams and endeavours. My father has always been a 

driving force that kept pushing me to go further and farther. I am deeply grateful for the 

support of my friends and colleagues here in New Zealand, who have become my family 

away from family. 

I know I cannot name all of the people who have helped me in some way or the other 

in my doctoral journey, but I thank all of them, for their kind wishes, their prayers, their love, 

and understanding.  

Thank you.  

 

 



1 

 

Introduction 

 

Once Upon a Time in the Land of Five Rivers 

In Pakistani Punjabi culture, oral storytelling occupied a special place until very 

recently because electronic media had not yet entered the lives of its people. Also, the joint 

family system, in which extended family members lived together, was very common. 

However, nowadays Pakistani/Punjabi families are more nuclear and family gatherings are 

less frequent. Before the emergence of electronic and social media, wherever people 

gathered, a popular pastime was to share personal experiences with the group, be it friends or 

family, by telling inherited, adapted or newly-minted stories. I remember as a child I loved 

going to my family gatherings, because once all the activities of the day were finished—Eid 

festivities or a wedding—it was time for everyone to come together in a living room or 

around a fireplace (if it was winter), and the hosts, mostly women of the family, would make 

and serve tea for everyone in the party. And then the storytelling session began. The stories 

ranged from personal experiences to fictions. Most popular among children were the ones 

about supernatural beings or experiences of paranormal activity: jinns, fairies, witches and 

talking animals. In summer, the story-telling session moved outside in the open yard, where 

charpoys (wooden, moveable lightweight beds) were lined in front of pedestal fans, and 

people found spots wherever they could. Then one or another child would ask someone 

known for their mastery of telling stories to tell some interesting tale. Sometimes we knew 

the tale already, but would ask the storyteller to tell us that story again. It never failed to 

entertain us. Now, when I think back, I realise it was the way they told the stories—the 

performance—that made the story interesting every time.  

I am a Pakistani Muslim woman from the Punjab region, and while I recognise the 

biases this might bring to my research, I believe that my gendered, geographically and 



2 

 

historically situated position provides me with a valuable perspective on the ways that 

Punjabi oral folklore has been collected, translated, rendered in print and disseminated since 

the late colonial era. As a child I was oblivious to what I now recognise as the cultural and 

ideological work folk tale telling often involves — and the impacts of the “fossilisation” of 

tales once they are fixed in print. However, my studies, first in Pakistan and now in New 

Zealand, have encouraged me to think carefully about such issues. 

My study seeks to explore the changes introduced in published Punjabi folk tales over 

the last hundred years, and the relationship of these changes to the different social, political, 

and ideological assumptions of the collectors, translators, and the audiences for whom the 

tales were intended. The choices made by the collectors, translators and editors of Punjabi 

folk tales are a product of their sociohistorical, geographical, cultural and ideological contexts 

coupled with the consideration of their intended audiences. Terry Eagleton defines ideology 

as “the process of production of meanings, signs and value in social life” or as “a body of 

ideas characteristic of a particular social group or class” (1-2). In my study, I have taken the 

concept of ideology in a similar way: understanding it is a body of ideas that a particular 

social group or class follows and cherishes. This could be imperialist ideology, orientalist 

ideology or the Islamic ideology, all of which can be traced in the re-workings of these tales 

in different historical moments.  

My research journey began by learning that in the last decades of the twentieth 

century and the first decades of the twenty-first century, considerable scholarly attention, in 

the West, was focused on fairy tale and folklore genres. This Western scholarship has made 

claims for both the subversive potential of these forms and their tendency to normative 

inscription, particularly regarding the representation of gender and class. The Disney 

(re)productions of fairy tales and the Hollywood remakes of the classic fairy tales into movies 



3 

 

for popular and consumer cultures remain a major part of our lives—but one open to 

increasing scrutiny and criticism. A notable trend in the field has been the contributions of 

feminist readings and retellings of classic fairy tales, such as Angela Carter’s The Bloody 

Chamber and Emma Donoghue’s Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins. These retellings 

act as a medium to subvert the stereotypes often embedded in these tales and highlight the 

hidden sexist and misogynistic elements that have gone unremarked for centuries. Inspired by 

my readings of these feminist retellings, I commenced research into such retellings of 

Pakistani tales. Unfortunately, I was unable to uncover any contemporary feminist variants of 

these tales. As I dug deeper, I realised that there is a great deal that is unexplored about 

Pakistani folklore, and found a basic lack of research on folk tales from a purely Pakistani 

viewpoint. It is this lack of scholarship that has inspired my work. 

From the mid-twentieth century there are extensive scholarly studies of the role and 

function of western folk tales and fairy tales, pioneered by, for example, Marcia Lieberman 

(“Some Day My Prince will Come” 1972), Bruno Bettelheim (The Uses of Enchantment 

1976), Jack Zipes (Breaking the Magic Spell 1979, Fairy Tale as Myth/Myth as Fairy Tale 

1993, Grimm Legacies 2014), Kay Stone (Some Day your Witch will Come 2008), and 

Cristina Bacchilega (Postmodern Fairy Tales 1997, Fairy Tales Transformed 2013). Much 

attention has been paid by these feminist scholars to the normative (gendered, class) 

assumptions encoded in familiar fairy tales (often based on generations-old folk tales and 

their variants) such as those collated by the Grimm brothers in nineteenth-century Europe. 

Donald Haase, in his essay “Feminist Fairy Tale Scholarship,” quotes Andrea Dworkin’s 

observation that “fairy tales shape our cultural values and understanding of gender roles by 

invariably depicting women as wicked, beautiful, and passive, while portraying men, in 

absolute contrast, as good, active, and heroic” (3). These patterns are the major ingredients of 

all the tales with ‘happily ever after’ endings. However, I came to understand that there is a 



4 

 

great deal more to feminist scholarship on folk and fairy tales than simply identifying the 

prevalence of passive female figures and lamenting the ways in which such portrayal might 

influence the gendered understandings of young women (and men). Such an approach is far 

too simplistic, as Haase notes in his introduction to Fairy Tales and Feminism (2004): 

Some feminist fairy-tale analyses remain stuck in a mode of interpretation able to do 

little more than reconfirm stereotypical generalizations about the fairy tale’s sexist 

stereotypes. Such studies are oblivious to the complexities of fairy-tale production and 

reception, sociohistorical contexts, cultural traditions, the development of the genre 

and the challenges facing fairy-tale textuality. (ix-x) 

As I began my work on Pakistani folk tales, I wanted to investigate the kinds of 

“complexities” Haase alludes to, particularly issues to do with “production and reception, 

sociohistorical contexts [and] cultural traditions.” 

When it comes to the discussion of fairy or folk tales, India’s name appears as “the 

cradle of folk tale tradition or as the land of plenty” (Bacchilega “Genre and Gender” 179). 

For the most part, in the western idea of the Indian “wonder” tale, India has been appreciated 

for its wonders, while its people have been ignored or misrepresented. Its women, in 

particular, have been represented as both submissive and lacking agency or as controlling, 

mysterious beings, hidden in zenanas, often plotting evil, hence posing a threat. With respect 

to the latter, Bacchilega notes that “while underplaying its threat, it [“India as a wonder tale”] 

evokes mystery. In Western imagination the racialized figure of [Indian] woman has centrally 

represented the mystery and fascination of the Other” (“Genre and Gender” 180). It is the 

representation of this mysterious and fascinating “Other,” and the stereotypes embedded in 

these tales from an outsider’s and an insider’s perspective, that this study seeks to explore. 



5 

 

 Through comparative analysis of the two folk tale collections (and their various 

editions)—one, Tales of the Punjab, by a Christian, female, British, colonial collector, in 

nineteenth-century British India, and the other, Popular Folk Tales of the Punjab, by a post-

partition male, Muslim, Pakistani collector—I explore the portrayal of gender, culture, 

religion, and hidden biases and stereotypes evident in the collections. Kathleen Ragan’s work 

(among that of others) has drawn attention to how “the editor, the collector, and the 

storyteller” act as “filters” through which tales pass until a significantly mediated version 

achieves publication (230). Similarly, Haase notes that “editors and collectors have a shaping, 

authorial role in the construction of the texts they are transmitting. This is also true of 

translators who transmit and spread texts by copying them into other languages (“Reception” 

541). “What,” he asks, “do collectors, editors and translators use to frame the stories they are 

making available to [readers]? How do their prefaces, introduction, notes, and other paratexts 

try to shape [readers’] understanding and response to folk tales and fairy tales?” (541). These 

questions are important. Focusing on the representation of female characters, my study also 

seeks to reveal the differences that are added to oral tales when they are filtered through 

collectors and translators with varied backgrounds, interests and ideological motivations, and 

in different sociohistorical moments, before they are fixed in print. I examine how the 

religion, the society, the culture and different aspects of the life of Pakistani/Indian folk are 

portrayed in these texts. 

While India occupies a significant position in the study of folklore, there has been 

almost no scholarly attention focused on the folklore of Pakistan—perhaps because Pakistan 

was a part of India before 1947, and after Partition has been overlooked. There is also little 

work by Indian scholars and none by Pakistani (Shafi Aqeel lacks any claim to certified 

“scholarship”). I have made use of western scholarship, where it seems applicable, as the 

means of understanding and interpreting the folk tales I consider. Along with western 



6 

 

scholarship, I have made use of the relatively few works by Indian scholars on Indian 

folklore, such as those by Sadhana Naithani, Kirin Narayn and A. K. Ramanujan. 

There was much activity involving folklore collection in India under the British Raj 

and this has received considerable attention, especially from western postcolonial scholars. In 

the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries in particular, collectors from throughout the 

subcontinent variously sourced tales, transcribed and translated them into English, and 

published them for British and Anglo-Indian readers, or for an Indian cultural elite.1 In 

general these works were intended for leisure reading, and/or for armchair folklorists to 

analyse ‘scientifically.’ Discussions of the activities of these collectors have largely been 

from a postcolonial perspective, with an emphasis on the ways in which colonial folklore 

collection functioned as part of a larger project of “ethnographic surveillance which strove to 

produce the space of British India in order to control it” (Crane and Johnston 2007 82).2 In 

these terms, Indian folklore collection is most often understood as an activity that served the 

larger Occidental project of ‘knowing’ the Orient as a means of exerting power over it. 

Scholarship with this postcolonial focus, influenced by the works of Michel Foucault and 

Edward Said, almost unanimously considers the act of collecting folk tales in relation to the 

British imperial endeavour in colonial India. 

In my research I take seriously Haase’s suggestion, quoted above, that the study of 

folklore should take into account not only what is represented in individual tales but also their 

“production and reception [and] sociohistorical contexts.” My dissertation considers 

                                                           

 

1 To name a few—Romesh Chunder Dutt, Indian Civil Service officer (1848-1909), Toru Dutt, a poet and a 

linguist (1856-77), Rabindranath Tagore, the first non-European to win Nobel Prize in literature (1861-1941), 

Syed Ahmad Khan, a philosopher, Islamic reformist and educationist (1817-98), Sarojini Naidu, a poet, and 

activist (1879-1949)  

2 See also Kabbani (Imperial Fictions Europe’s Myths of Orient, 1994) and Naithani (“The Colonizer-

Folklorist,” 1997, The Story-time of the British Empire, 2010).  



7 

 

examples of the collection and publication of folk tales in a specific region, the Punjab, over 

an extended period, beginning with the 1880s, through the aftermath of Partition in 1947, and 

into the present. My research is based on two collections of Punjabi folk tales, each of which 

has two different editions; thus it is effectively a comparative analysis of four books. The first 

collection, by a colonial folklorist, Flora Annie Steel (1847-1929), was initially published in 

Bombay for a mix of British and elite Indian readers as Wide-awake Stories in 1884, with 

notes and few tales collected by Richard Carnac (R. C.) Temple. It was then republished in 

England in 1894 for British readers as Tales of the Punjab with considerable “scholarly” and 

paratextual additions by Temple. The second primary text is a postcolonial and post-partition 

collection by Shafi Aqeel (1930-2013). It was first published in Urdu in 1963 as Punjabi Lok 

Kahaniyan [Folk tales of Punjab] and later published in English by Oxford University Press 

(Pakistan) in 2008, translated by Ahmad Bashir (1923-2004), as Popular Folk Tales of the 

Punjab. As their titles suggest, both collections are presented as tales specifically from the 

Punjab. Of particular interest to me is the fact that some of the tales in each collection are 

clearly drawn from the same originals, but they are rendered in such a way that, despite 

similar plot elements, they appear as very different works in each publication. I have used the 

later, translated English version of Aqeel’s collection as a primary text for my study for the 

obvious reason that many in my likely reading audience will not be able to read his Urdu 

original. However, I have also personally translated a selection of tales from the 1963 Urdu 

edition and compared these with Bashir’s 2008 translation (Appendix 1) as a means of 

discussing the significant “filtering” role performed by translators. 

My research is based on close analysis of formal and structural elements in the 

selected tales, with a particular emphasis on narration, characterization, and plot (especially 

in relation to the ways in which the stories conclude). Read together, these collections reveal 

how much collectors/editors and translators, in addition to cultural context, sociopolitical 



8 

 

scenarios, and historical moments, influence how the tales are “told.”  A guiding question for 

me has been, “How can a comparative reading of these texts together help us to better 

understand what is at stake in the collection and publication of folk tales and, more 

specifically, the folk tale traditions of the Punjab?”  

Folklore collection in India, Pakistan and the Punjab 

 

Folklore collection in Europe was booming in the second half of the nineteenth 

century and the trend expanded to the British colonies, such as India, where gathering 

information about the “natives” became something more than a mere leisure activity and 

contributed to the consolidation of anthropology as a distinctive academic discipline. The 

formation of the Anthropological Association (1863) and the Folklore Society (1878) is 

evidence of the rise of this new science, intimately linked to the imperial project of 

“knowing” its colonial subjects3. In India, folklorists, notably Richard Carnac (R. C.) Temple 

and William Crooke, began collecting all kinds of folklore material from different parts of the 

country. The conjunction of scholarly endeavour and political expedience is evident in 

Temple’s assertion that “We foreigners cannot hope to understand them rightly unless we 

deeply study them, and it must be remembered that close acquaintance and a right 

understanding begets sympathy, and sympathy begets good government.” (qtd. Gerry Abbott 

& Khin Thant Han 20). 

A year after the ‘Mutiny’ of 1857, the British monarch took charge of India from the 

East India Company and the British began to take their role as colonial agents (not just 

traders and profiteers) in India more seriously. This increasingly involved studying Indian 

                                                           

 

3 R. C. Temple in his addresses delivered at the meetings of the British Association at Birmingham and 

published as Anthropology as a Practical Science 1914 details the anthropological significance of folklore from 

colonies. 



9 

 

people and their ways of life in order to control them more effectively. One way of doing so 

was to collect and analyse Indian folklore, to better understand the culture and beliefs of their 

subjects. Until recently, there have been few Indian contributors to scholarly debates about 

the western collection and dissemination of Indian folklore, but in the past decade or so a 

number of Indian scholars have begun to address this, notably Naithani. Naithani coined the 

term “colonizer-folklorist” to describe Temple and the conjoined words emphasise the 

connections between the two activities in which he engaged (1997). These colonial folklorists 

were colonising the people and their folklore, and in turn the folklore was being used as a tool 

to colonise the people as well.  

Naithani’s important discovery of the British archives of William Crooke led her to 

question the authenticity of these colonial folklorists’ collections. In the course of archival 

research into Indian folklore, Naithani uncovered a unique relationship between two 

folklorists. One was William Crooke, “a doyen of colonial Indian folklore scholarship” (“To 

Tell a Tale” 201), who along with Temple was one of “the ‘twin giants’ of colonial folklore 

scholarship” (In Quest vii-viii). On returning to England after many years in India, Crooke 

was awarded an honorary doctorate from Oxford University for his contributions to the 

discipline. The other was a local Indian man, “Pandit” Ram Gharib Chaube.4 Naithani closely 

considers original manuscripts and correspondence between the two men held by the Folklore 

Society, London, and explains that Chaube was the one who collected, translated, added 

notes, and provided Crooke with information regarding the native terminology and 

significance of the folklore items. Naithani writes: 

In 1996, I tracked down an unpublished collection of the folktales of Northern India, 

said to have been collected in the last two decades of the nineteenth century by 

                                                           

 

4 “Pandit” means scholar, teacher, religious leader. 



10 

 

William Crooke, a doyen of colonial Indian folklore scholarship ... as I started 

reading, it soon became apparent that the writer of these English texts was not the 

British civil servant William Crooke, but rather an Indian called Pandit Ram Gharib 

Chaube. (201)  

Crooke added paratextual apparatus to Chaube’s collected and translated tales, including a 

systematic attempt to index types and themes in the tales, as was common practice in the 

“science” of folkloristics at the time. While Chaube rendered hundreds of Indian folk tales 

into English, he has, Naithani claims, been “anonymous and unacknowledged for one 

hundred years,” his work appropriated and counter-signed by Crooke (In Quest xiii). Chaube 

died, apparently unrecognised, impoverished and insane, in stark contrast to the success and 

fame achieved by Crooke. Naithani proposes “a new identity and voice [for Chaube]; that of 

an Indian folklore scholar in colonial India” (xiii). She maintains that the Crooke-Chaube 

relationship developed at a time when “[t]he British in India settled down to establishing 

distinctively their identity as rulers, which meant distancing themselves more from the local 

people, codifying their social behaviour, and generally asserting an English way of life” 

(“The Colonizer-Folklorist” 3).  

Crooke never gave any literary or scholarly recognition to Chaube. After Crooke left 

India, Chaube wrote asking him to provide a reference regarding his ongoing research, but he 

did not respond. Chaube was thus a “pandit” at the wrong time and in the wrong place. He 

died, “insane and destitute” because “in the colonial scheme of scholarship, there was no 

place for his name” (Naithani 213). He was a victim of Victorian attitudes towards class and 

race, where urban, lettered, white male authority was supported even by natural science, and 

where works by women and non-white people required white male scrutiny and approval. 

In my thesis I take as a starting point Naithani’s assertion that “we need to read the 

history of British scholarship of Indian folklore anew, with a special interest in the processes 



11 

 

of collection and translation” (In Quest 38). However, while I am indebted to her work, my 

interests extend further than her emphasis on the colonial/British mediation of Indian 

folklore, and the unacknowledged contributions of “native informants” like Chaube. My 

original contribution in this thesis is in my extension of Naithani’s postcolonial appraisal of 

the colonial collection of Indian folk tales by comparing two specifically Punjabi folk tale 

collections published in two very distinct moments in the region’s history. If Naithani’s quest 

was to learn more about the mysterious Chaube and shine a light on his previously ignored 

(and significant) contributions to colonial Indian folklore collection, my own smaller 

discovery is that of Shafi Aqeel. While his name and work have not been overwritten by that 

of another, as was the case for Chaube, he has nonetheless all but disappeared from 

discussions of Pakistani literary endeavour despite his huge contributions to a specifically 

nationalised approach to the nation’s literature, especially in the first decades after the nation 

was formed. I was particularly excited that in my search for more information about Aqeel, a 

librarian at Government College University Lahore showed me a copy of his original Urdu 

collection of tales, which Aqeel translated from the local Punjabi tongue. This Urdu 

collection has almost completely gone out of circulation and has never been analysed. Rather 

mysteriously, however, a version of it was translated into English by Bashir and published in 

2008 by OUP, Karachi, Pakistan. I say “mysteriously” because despite numerous approaches 

to OUP (England, India and Pakistan) I have not been able to gain any information about why 

it was published, on whose recommendation, or for what intended audience. There is further 

work ahead for me as I try to establish answers to my questions about its publication. 

Nonetheless, the Bashir translation of Aqeel’s Urdu original (itself a translation from Punjabi 

sources), has provided me with the opportunity to carefully consider the several translations 

(from Punjabi to Urdu to English) the collected tales have undergone. 



12 

 

Considerations of colonial collection of Indian folklore, explored in terms of imperial 

dynamics, tend to ignore the cultural and religious tensions that had arisen in India under the 

British rule and which resulted in its partition by the departing colonisers in 1947. With the 

focus on colonial folkloristics and imperialism, Indian folklore is most often discussed in 

monolithic terms that ignore local differences, and is routinely set in relation to the British 

Empire and its “scholarly” endeavours, with an emphasis on the knowledge-power nexus 

involved. This critical focus on colonial folklore collection largely ignores the kinds of 

culturally specific ‘work’ such tales might have originally performed in specific regions prior 

to partition—like the Punjab, a region in which three major religious groups resided side by 

side: Muslim, Hindu and Sikh. The tales collected during the colonial era, although collected 

from different people belonging to different religious groups, completely ignore these 

religious and cultural differences and generally represent the Hindu majority. This is certainly 

evident in Steel’s collection which makes comparison with Aqeel’s decidedly Muslim 

collection all the more important. 

There has been no attention given to the ideological function of folklore promoted as 

Pakistani (a country whose creation, ostensibly, was premised on its Muslim identity). My 

study begins to address this lack in scholarship by analysing folk tales from the Punjab 

collected under British rule and comparing them with the folk tales of Pakistani Punjab after 

freedom from the British. The title of my dissertation has two phrases: “Once upon a Time” 

and “in the Land of Five Rivers.” The first phrase is very familiar to everyone—it can 

teleport someone into the past, or to a magical world of fairy tales. The second phrase will 

sound familiar only to those who have some connection with Pakistan and India and/or the 

region (province) called Punjab. The phrase refers to the rivers that flow through this region: 

Sutlej, Beas, Ravi, Chenab, and Jhelum. The word Punjab is a combination of two Persian 

words, “panj” which means five and “aab” which means water, thus it literally means five 



13 

 

waters referring to the five rivers in the Punjab. In the introduction to the English edition of 

Aqeel’s collection, Popular Folk Tales of the Punjab, Navid Shahzad throws light on the 

origin of the word, Punjab: 

Geographically, Punjab is an area that lies to the north-west of the Indian 

subcontinent. While the Vedic era identifies this region as Sapt Sindhu or the land of 

seven rivers; the Persianized version of the name reduces the seven to five and 

renames it the Panj-Aab meaning the land of five rivers. (xiii) 

As my study is a comparative analysis of the two collections of Punjabi folk tales 

(each with two variant editions), the title could have been “Twice upon a time” rather than 

“Once upon a time.” Steel’s and Aqeel’s collections were initially published in two different 

historical moments, one during the heyday of British colonial rule of India, and the other not 

long after the creation of Pakistan. My thesis discusses three different historical moments of 

Punjabi folk tales’ publication, through analysis of collections published seventy years apart 

(by Steel and Aqeel), and the translation of Aqeel’s collection published forty-five years after 

the original. Steel’s 1894 collection has been repeatedly reprinted (most recently in 2015), 

and is available on multiple websites; it has thus attained seminal, even representative, status. 

The authority of Aqeel’s edition, originally published in Urdu in 1963, is less secure but the 

fact that it was published (reprinted, translated) in a 2008 Oxford University Press, Pakistan 

publication suggests its importance and credence, although the circumstances surrounding 

this publication remain obscure. A comparison of the two is validated not only by their 

editors’ assertion of the centuries-old Punjabi (rather than ‘Indian’) status of the tales, but 

also by the re-publication of both in the last decade. 

My comparative analysis explores how, in these editions, a colonial ‘outsider’ and a 

Pakistani ‘insider’ portray the people and culture of the Punjab region via the collection and 



14 

 

translation of folk tales, with a particular emphasis on the portrayal of gender roles and how 

these might be reflective of cultural difference. Besides consideration of the collection, 

selection and compilation process, my comparative analysis discusses the collectors’, 

translators’, publishers’, and the intended audiences’ influences on the representations of the 

tales, and the effect of these influences on what might be called their ideological function. 

Salman Rushdie gets to the heart of my interest in these tales and their various 

retellings: “Every story one chooses to tell is a kind of censorship. It prevents the telling of 

other tales” (Shame 68). From the very start, a collector begins making choices—choosing to 

tell some stories, and rejecting others. Thus, the process of “censoring” the tales is already at 

work. In deciding which tales to select for publication and which not to, the collector makes 

important choices based on certain external factors. My discussion explores the factors that 

influence these choices in the selection process. Both these collections, in their titles, claim to 

be collections of Punjabi tales, and they each (re)present to their readers/audiences a selected 

sample of Punjabi tales. Both the collectors claim to have gathered different versions and 

variants of the tales, and then to have selected one over the others, or combined elements of 

these variants in their published version. Their selection choices invite comparative 

discussion. 

Obviously even the same storyteller would not be able to re-tell a story in the exact 

same way (something that was a great delight in my childhood experiences of listening to 

oral tales)—let alone a collector listening to a tale told in one language in a very informal 

style, translating it into another language, writing it down, and imposing upon it a definite 

shape and order. My research considers how the changes imposed by collectors, and what 

Steel refers to as the necessary introduction of “literary sequence” (Steel 2), affects the 

meanings they convey, and to what end. Where appropriate, I have made use of Western 



15 

 

scholarship on folk tales to approach this work, but always within the context of the particular 

historical and cultural moment in which the tales were collected and published. 

Folk, Folklore and Folk Tales 

Most written folk tales have their origin in oral tales passed down through centuries 

and later collected, transcribed, edited and disseminated by folklorists, translators, and 

publishers. Folk tales come under the umbrella term of folklore. The word folklore is a 

combination of two words, folk and lore: a particular group of people (“folk”) and their 

customs and knowledge (“lore”). As an oral form, folk tales were reshaped by tellers’ 

modifications and often changed with each retelling. As a result, there can be various 

versions of the same folk tale and those collecting them for publication make decisions about 

which oral version they prefer and will prioritise. When rendered in writing by collectors, the 

organic reshaping practised by oral tellers comes to an abrupt end. Folklore, in its oral form, 

is super-organic because, as argued by Dan Ben Amos, an American folklorist and a 

professor at the University of Pennsylvania, it flourishes beyond the culture in which it 

originated, and can exist for centuries even after the extinction of its culture of origin. 

Crossing borders and swimming across rivers, these forms of literature mingle with the folk 

culture of other parts of the world (Ben Amos 2)—and can be subject to appropriation, or 

simply mistranslation, especially when they are set in print. They begin as an integral part of 

the culture from which they originate but any kind of displacement in folk tales (and songs, 

and other arts) from their indigenous locale invariably results in qualitative changes (Ben 

Amos 2). It is best to observe such changes via comparative analysis of similar translated and 

printed tales from a specific culture or region. 

Folk tales are among the most common types of folklore narratives. The history of 

modern folk tale collection began with the publication of a volume of German folk tales 



16 

 

under the title Kinder-und Hausmärchen [Children’s and Household Tales] in 1812 by the 

Grimm brothers (Zipes 54). However, the definition of both folklore and folk tales remains 

contestable. According to Jacqueline Simpson and Stephen Roud in A Dictionary of English 

Folklore,  

‘Folklore’ is notoriously difficult to define with rigour, and the term now covers a 

broader field than it did when invented in 1848, linking many aspects of cultural 

traditions past and present.5 It includes whatever is voluntarily and informally 

communicated, created or done jointly by members of a group (of any size, age, or 

social and educational level); it can circulate through any media (oral, written, or 

visual); it generally has roots in the past, but is not necessarily very ancient; it has 

present relevance; it usually recurs in many places, in similar but not identical forms; 

it has both stable and variable features, and evolves through dynamic adaptation to 

new circumstances. The essential criterion is the presence of a group whose joint 

sense of what is right and appropriate shapes the story, performance, or custom—

not the rules and teachings of any official body (State or civic authority, Church, 

school, scientific or scholarly orthodoxy). (v; my emphasis) 

This is a very broad definition including all aspects of life of a group of people and whatever 

they do “voluntarily and informally.” Importantly, however, there is an emphasis here on the 

fact that folklore “recurs in many places, in similar but not identical forms” and that it 

“evolves through dynamic adaptation to new circumstances.” Just what this “dynamic 

adaptation” might involve is a key concern in what follows. 

                                                           

 

5 The term was in fact suggested or “invented” by William John Thoms on August 22, 1846 in his letter to the 

Athenaeum (Duncan Emrich “‘Folk-lore’: William John Thoms” 1).  



17 

 

Once the discipline of folklore attracted the interest of antiquarians, and folklore study 

became a popular genre, the scope of folklore widened. But it remains true that it evolved as 

a means of understanding a group of people “whose joint sense of what is right and 

appropriate shapes the story, performance, or custom” (Simpson and Roud v; my emphasis). 

This group of people are the “folk” who shape the lore, and the lore in turn shapes the people. 

For the purpose of this study, I have focused on one category of folklore, folk tales, as 

defined by Simpson and Roud: 

In the broad sense it [folk tales] applies to all prose narratives following traditional 

storylines, which are told orally, or were so told in previous generations. It thus 

covers fairy tales, legends of all types, memorates, fables, tall tales, and humorous 

anecdotes. The original author is always unknown; in the rare cases where an 

individual who shaped the current version has been identified, the tellers are 

unaware of this… (132) 

The notion of ‘folk’ was defined by an American folklorist, Alan Dundes, in this way: 

The term ‘folk’ can refer to any group of people whatsoever who share at least one 

common factor. It does not matter what the linking factor is—it could be a common 

occupation, language or religion—but what is important is that a group formed for 

whatever reason will have some traditions, which it calls its own. In theory, a group 

consists of at least two persons but generally most groups consist of many 

individuals. A member of the group may not know all other members, but he [s/he] 

will probably know the common core of traditions belonging to the group, traditions 

which help the group have a sense of group identity. (The Study of Folklore 2) 



18 

 

Broadly speaking, the “folk” in my study are the people who live in the Punjab—this is the 

“linking factor” they share.6 Punjabi people have a distinct and rich culture, a way of life, 

cuisines, festivals, rituals, dresses, tales, poetry, songs, dances, and music. Their folklore 

engages with their culture and traditions. 

There are different theories about the origin of folk tales. Some, like Joseph Jacobs 

(1969) quoting Emmanuel Cosquin (1860), claim that “India is the Home of the Fairy Tale, 

and that all European fairy tales have been brought from thence by Crusaders, by Mongol 

missionaries, by Gipsies, by Jews, by traders, by travellers” (Jacobs viii). Others, like Stith 

Thompson (1951), disagree because of certain prominent differences found in the tales of 

India and those of Europe, and maintain that  

[t]he ordinary wonder tale is given as a piece of pure fiction in Europe but is 

expected to be believed as true in India. Such tales are nearly always localized in 

India. … The structure of the complicated tale is very loose [in Indian tales], so that 

the plot is often very difficult to fit into patterns determined by European analogues. 

(16) 

Thompson’s Eurocentric perspective is evident here in the way he discusses how Indian 

“wonder tales” differ from what he takes as his norm, “European analogues” and their 

“patterns.” This is not surprising as the global history of folkloristics has for the most part 

been Eurocentric in its approach (Naithani 1). Colonial collections identified and isolated the 

“other,” placing the “self” [Europe] at the upper end of the developmental ladder, and 

locating the “other” at its lower end, in ways that have been discussed in detail by Edward 

                                                           

 

6 The word Punjabi refers to those who live in Punjab but it also refers to the people who speak Punjabi 

language. There are many other languages spoken in Punjab, such as Urdu, Saraiki, Hindko and Potohari.  



19 

 

Said. Thus, in the very act of folklore collection, superiority was asserted and the process of 

marginalisation begun, with a view to dominating colonised peoples. The first chapter of my 

study discusses this European (British) interest in Indian folklore and its socio-political 

motivations. As I discuss, European folklore studies had an inherent objective of dominating 

the knowledge system of the “other,” collecting it and appropriating it if useful, and if not, 

defining and dismissing it as inferior. 

The intermingling of folk and culture, and the fusion of different disciplines such as 

Anthropology, Sociology, Psychology, Literary Studies, Gender Studies, Education and 

Linguistics have changed the scope of Folklore Studies since the colonial era. In more recent 

approaches any item of folklore is considered as a living aspect of a valuable—if different—

culture. Contemporary folklore studies incorporate multidimensional approaches responding 

to contemporary socio-cultural and economic theories and methodological concerns. 

International folkloristics has broadened its scope from the analysis of folklore texts to the 

study of their performances, functions and social sphere of impact. It is with these approaches 

that my work engages. The analysis of folk tales is particularly complicated, as I have 

suggested, because there is no one definite form of each tale and not a single author; from the 

listening and performance phase to the textualising of the tale, a collector is engaged in a 

process of selection and deselection. They select one version of the tale out of many heard, 

and decide to place it in their collection, alongside others selected, after “restoring order to 

their plots” (Aqeel x) and imposing on them a “greater literary sequence” (Steel 2). These 

mediating factors make definitive analysis of any tale difficult—indeed impossible. What is 

perhaps of more interest and relevance is the differences that can be noted between 

collections. Indeed, differences between the two collections I consider, and their collectors’ 

backgrounds, have enabled me to make inferences about how the collectors’ ideologies, 

historical moments and intended audiences account for variations in their collections.  



20 

 

Folk tales of the Punjab  

Pakistan has rich reserves of folklore in each part of the country. However, my 

research is confined to the study of folk tales of the Punjab. Why did I choose to work on folk 

tales and particularly folk tales from the Punjab? As folk tales, in origin, are specific to 

particular areas, it would not be possible to do justice to folk tales from the whole of what is 

now Pakistan without extensively discussing the different histories and cultures of individual 

regions. I have, therefore, limited my study to one province, Punjab, in part because that is 

where I am from. I belong to a middleclass, Siraiki-speaking,7 Muslim, rural family, and 

working on tales collected from the Punjab was the obvious choice. But there were other 

reasons, too. The Punjab offers a particularly striking opportunity to discuss religious and 

cultural differences evident in the tales because it was at the centre of British partition in 

1947. As a result, this region was divided into two in the worst possible manner.8 

Consequently, a part of Punjab is now in (Hindu-majority) India and a part is in (Muslim-

majority) Pakistan.  

In my childhood in (Pakistani) Punjab, the tales most often taught and read to children 

were either religious, or translated versions of western fairy tales (like those of the Grimm 

brothers) or English translations of ostensibly local South Asian tales. The majority of the 

latter were translated and collated in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, and are 

notable for their reflection of colonial attitudes and assumptions. Many tales are specific to a 

particular religion: Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or Sikh. In a Muslim household, for example, 

there is a huge body of Quranic tales and incidents related to the lives of different prophets, 

                                                           

 

7 Siraiki is a language (often called a dialect of Punjabi) spoken in southeastern Pakistan mostly in southern 

Punjab. See María Isabel Maldonado García’s “Saraiki: language or dialect?” See also Nukhbah Langah’s 

monograph Poetry as Resistance: Islam and Ethnicity in Postcolonial Pakistan (2011).  
8 This is not to dismiss the significant religious tensions in the area, magnified and manipulated by the exiting 

British, between Muslims and Hindus.  Rather, I want to stress the cultural and linguistic commonalities of all 

people who inhabited the Punjabi region. 



21 

 

from Adam, Noah, Moses (Musa), Joseph (Yusuf), to Christ (Isa), which form the repertoire 

of storytelling sessions along with censored versions of the tales from the One Thousand and 

One Nights and The Tales of the Four Dervishes. There is, however, also a significant body 

of South Asian folklore that remains largely uninfluenced by colonial interpretation and 

translation, passed on orally. Given the entwined history of Pakistan and India prior to 

partition, and the long oral history of many of the tales, there are links and shared influences 

between the folk tales of both countries (and those of Bangladesh, formerly a part of Pakistan 

before it gained independence as a sovereign nation in 1971).  

In her preface to Tales of the Punjab Steel draws a vivid picture of one of the 

storytelling sessions in which she gathered raw materials for her collection. Although this is 

more than a century old, it has striking similarities to the summer-night story times I 

remember as a child: 

[A]s the short-lived Indian twilight dies into darkness, the voices one by one are 

hushed, and as the stars come out the children disappear. But not to sleep: it is too 

hot, for the sun… has left a legacy of warmth behind it… [and] the hours, though 

dark, are not dreary, for this in an Indian village, is storytelling time. … [Children] 

drag their wooden-legged, string-woven bedsteads into the open, and settle 

themselves down like young birds in a nest, three or four to a bed, while others coil 

up on mats upon the ground, and some… beg a place here or there. (6) 

While the similarities with my childhood experiences are clear, there is a stark 

difference. The taletellers in my childhood were usually adults, but in Steel’s case, as she 

mentions, they were “generally boy[s]” (vii). More importantly, they spoke to members of 

their “folk”—who, especially as they grew older, were able to set each telling of a tale told 

within a history of iterations of that tale, and link them to other tales. Moreover, the “folk” to 



22 

 

whom they were addressed had intimate knowledge of the cultural traditions embedded in the 

tales. All this is lost in Steel’s edition, in which there is no indication of who told the tale(s) 

or why. It appears they were told for the Memsahib or at least with knowledge of her 

recording presence, and this is likely to have influenced not only what was told, but how. 

Even if multiple variants of a tale were heard by Steel, she has clearly reduced these to one 

(ostensibly representative) version, with the only consideration, apparently, given to what she 

calls their “greater literary sequence”—presumably in anticipation of a British reading 

audience primed for such “sequencing.” Of course the same applies for Aqeel’s collection of 

ostensibly representative Punjabi tales, although the two editions clearly appeal to vastly 

different audiences: the first published in Urdu, the official language of the newly-created 

Pakistan, soon after Partition; the second published in English in a post-9/11 climate. 

My research explores the ideological assumptions affirmed or challenged in these two 

collections of tales and, in particular, seeks to assess the differences between Steel’s late 

nineteenth-century, female-edited, Western/colonial Indian edition, translated from Punjabi 

oral originals, and Aqeel’s post-partition, ‘native,’ male-edited, Islam-inflected Pakistani 

edition, translated from Punjabi oral originals. The latter is further complicated by the 

mediation of his translator, Bashir, from Urdu into English, as I will discuss. My comparative 

analysis of the collections, keeping the historical, cultural, and socio-political backgrounds in 

mind, and the several editions/translations, includes an analysis of the way gender roles are 

portrayed and endorsed or challenged in these (Punjabi) tales. It explores how they represent 

the culture, class division, and locus of power in Punjabi society, keeping the intended 

audience in mind.  

Discussing the audiences for which each collection was intended has enabled me to 

focus on the different ideological work each collection appears to be doing. I argue that these 

variant narratives, in each collection, though apparently naïve, endorse certain gender, class, 



23 

 

and religious roles that can be seen to conform with and sometimes challenge assumptions 

regarding cultural values of and about the Punjab that were dominant at the times in which 

they were collated. 

As discussed, most folk tales are believed to have their origin in oral tales passed 

down through centuries and later collected, written down and disseminated by collectors, 

translators, and publishers; they journey from oral illiterate society to the written literate part 

of the same or different societies, from the margins to the centre. With the spread of 

colonialism, these oral tales were disseminated across continents, and told to new audiences 

who did not know the society from which they came. According to Iona Opie and Peter Opie, 

part of the attraction of folk tales is that they “describe events that took place when a different 

range of possibilities operated in the unidentified long ago” (15); the tales themselves are 

attractively free from the confines of time and space. This freedom of time and space also 

makes them susceptible to any sociopolitical change, depending on the narrator (and their 

audience) when in oral form, and on the collector and translator (and their intended audience) 

when in written form. As long as they were oral in form, the tales were unfixed, although 

central aspects of the main plot and characters were continuously remembered until they were 

finally written down. They are malleable, organic entities, as Stith Thompson observes, that 

might have grown or shrunk with time. They are likely to gain fresh significance or lose it 

over the course of decades or centuries, and as a tale “goes through the hands of skilled and 

bungling narrators, [it] improves or deteriorates at nearly every retelling” (4-5). 

Tales inevitably change when told orally or when written down, but it is not possible 

to record the changes to oral versions as easily as it is for the written variants of the tales. 

Therefore, much depends on the collectors of formerly oral tales and on how they shape the 

stories, in writing, to make them suitable for their intended audience. The oral tales from the 



24 

 

Punjab reached new ears when Steel, in 1894, transcribed, translated and “doctored” these 

tales to make them fit for the “ears polite” (1) of her “un-travelled English reader” (1). In 

doing so, I argue, although she claims to have “preserve[d] the aroma” (2) of the tales, she 

has actually “robbed the tales of all human value” (2) by making subtle changes in the service 

of a British imperial ideology. Aqeel’s edition is no less ideologically complicit, I argue. In 

his editions, the tales become a tool to help the newly formed nation become one nation and 

build provincial and national solidarity among the people who had been through the trauma 

of the grand divide. His version of the tales has been sanitised (Islamised) in its own way, yet 

it attempts to retain the original Punjabi elements of the tales, especially in the 1963 Urdu 

edition. 

My comparative analysis of similar tales between Steel’s and Aqeel’s original 

published collection, in Chapter Four, seeks to prove this point. This also confirms Ben 

Amos’s argument that when translated in different cultures and among new people, tales 

reflect different meanings and nuances depending on the intended audience (4). As Aqeel was 

a native Punjabi collector, writing for the new nation of Pakistan, in its official language 

(Urdu), his versions of the stories tend to endorse the cultural and (Muslim) religious values 

of this new nation, in stark contrast to Steel’s complicatedly feminist, outsider, and largely 

Hindu perspective. 

In order to better understand Aqeel’s collection, I have translated his Urdu edition 

Punjabi Lok Kahaniyan into English (a translation of selected tales is in an appendix), with 

the aim of comparing my translations and those of Bashir in the 2008 published English 

edition. The findings of this comparison are revealing, and reinforce my claim that the 

translator and collector inevitably leave their own (ideological) marks on a work. I argue that 

just as Steel was doing Empire-building work through her translation and collection of 



25 

 

Punjabi folk tales, so too the Urdu edition of the Punjabi tales by Aqeel and the later 

translated edition in English by Bashir reveal their own motivations of nation-building and 

strengthening the national language. I argue that Aqeel’s first edition, written merely a 

decade after partition, can be read as actively contributing to the building of the new 

Pakistani, Muslim nation, seeking to bring people to one united cultural-religious platform, 

through the endorsement of cultural, religious and traditional elements more suitable for 

Muslim readers. The translated English edition, when compared with Aqeel’s original Urdu 

edition, suggests yet another layer of mediation to the tales. This edition, published for a post-

Zia era Pakistani audience, portrays Punjabi (Muslim, Pakistani) people as far more 

conservative—in terms of religion and gender assumptions, say—than is suggested by 

Aqeel’s Urdu version. This edition of the collection adds sexist elements to the tales, and 

overtly Muslim religious asides that are highlighted by their comparison with the original 

Urdu edition. The 2008 collection, ostensibly, highlights the changes that the Pakistani 

Punjabi society had gone through by depicting the changes in the tales. Another remarkable 

political change was the 9/11 incident that caused increased interest in literature from 

Pakistan. The extent to which Bashir, translating the original for a post-9/11 audience of 

English readers, might subtly reconfirm Western stereotypes about Muslim culture is not 

really possible to prove, but this is worth some consideration nonetheless. 

Although a rich collection of oral and literary folk literature exists in Punjab—from 

folk romances to folk tales and tales of magic—there are few English translations available. 

If folk tales are a depiction of a “folk” and their culture, then they are also archives, 

storehouses of history and culture. In focusing on the folk tales of the Punjab and analysing 

the normative assumptions encoded in them—especially through the depiction of their female 

characters—my study will be a useful addition to the sparse literary database of Punjabi tales. 

Sandra Smidt (2012) suggests that “[w]here there is no print, storytelling is the way in which 



26 

 

the values and ideas and history and practices and rituals of a community are passed on from 

generation to generation” (31). As I have noted, in recent decades Punjabi family gatherings 

are becoming rare, and storytelling is not as common as it once was. As a result, we can 

observe a gradual decline in the telling of tales, which were once not only a form of 

recreation and entertainment but also a way of passing on traditional beliefs, codes of 

behaviour and assumptions of value. My research works on the premise that these cultural 

tools change the way we think; they act as ideological apparatus to convey and imprint 

certain norms and traditions; they are chosen carefully so that they convey the appropriate 

message to the intended audience. When these folk narratives are compiled for a foreign 

audience who have no real knowledge about the land the tales come from, the tales become 

problematically representative. Readers and listeners, often children to whom these tales are 

being read, form an image of the people and culture they ostensibly represent. For the 

researcher who is analysing these texts, it is a challenging, sometimes impossible, task to 

discern what was there originally in the tales and what has been added or removed from 

them, requiring in-depth reading as well as background, contextual and historical reading 

around the texts. 

My research explores the background forces at work when these editions of the tales 

were collected and published, and how each differs in its portrayal of Punjabi society. The 

comparative analyses also examine the changes that each collector, either intentionally or 

unintentionally, added to the tales to better suit their intended audience and to satisfy their 

own motivations. The historical, socio-political, and religious aspects of the times when the 

collections were published will also be considered. Both in the thesis as a whole, and within 

individual chapters, I work from the biographical and contextual toward historically informed 

close readings of folk tales, developed further through comparative analysis. 



27 

 

Chapter Breakdown 

I have divided my study into the following parts: an introduction, four main chapters, 

a conclusion, and an appendix consisting of my own translations of Urdu edition of Aqeel’s 

tales and a note of the translation principle that I followed while translating the Urdu tales. In 

Chapter One, I discuss the history of and motivations for folklore collection in nineteenth-

century British India and those colonial folklorists who were actively involved in this 

activity, especially in Punjab. The chapter discusses the orientalist views which underpinned 

the work of colonial folklorists and the ways in which they used their collecting and 

classifying for the imperialist purpose of Empire-building. This chapter develops the 

theoretical approach for the thesis as a whole.  

Chapter Two is a discussion of novelist and folklorist Flora Annie Steel, the collector 

of the first primary text, Tales of the Punjab (1894). Beginning with her biographical 

background, the chapter draws on Steel’s other works to attempt to understand what might 

have motivated her and what was at stake in her collection of Punjabi tales. The chapter also 

discusses how, at the time, female collectors needed a scholarly male stamp of approval and 

authoritativeness for their work. I thus examine the role of Richard Carnac Temple in 

endorsing and framing the tales in this edition with the scholarly apparatus of his “Notes and 

Analysis,” and a co-written preface. I discuss the preface and Temple’s “Notes and Analysis” 

to reveal how these paratextual elements frame the Punjab and its people. The second half of 

the chapter discusses Steel’s collection, offering a broad summation of its contents and the 

way in which tales are presented.  

Chapter Three turns to Shafi Aqeel’s much later collection, Popular Folk Tales of the 

Punjab. Like the chapter on Steel, this chapter also begins with a biographical and contextual 

discussion. The research in this chapter provides a much-needed and long overdue first study 



28 

 

of Aqeel’s life and works. As mentioned earlier, regarding Aqeel’s collection, I argue that by 

adding certain elements to his tales, he offers an Islamic and decidedly Pakistani slant to the 

tales. The last part of the chapter offers a comparative analysis of Aqeel’s Urdu edition and 

the later English edition of the tales. My own translation of the text, from the 1963 Urdu 

version, illuminates the extent to which the translator of Popular Folk Tales of the Punjab, 

Bashir, has added yet another level of appropriation to the text. 

Chapter Four is a comparative analysis of selected tales from each collection focusing 

on the changes in tales and the effects of these changes. This chapter draws on some aspects 

of translation theory and suggests what may be the different motivations behind the 

translations of these two collections. Through the comparison of similar tales in the 

collections, I am able to make claims about what is distinctive about each version of the 

translation of the tale and collection, and to offer possible reasons for their differences. The 

different ways the collectors treat their male and female protagonists, their old and young 

characters, and Punjabi society in general—issues of marriage, for instance, and poverty and 

hunger—are revealing. Following the Conclusion, I have included my own translations of 

selected tales from Aqeel’s Urdu edition as an Appendix, along with a note detailing the 

principles followed in the preparation of these translations.    



29 

 

Chapter One: The role of the Indian Antiquary and the Folklore Society in the 

collection and dissemination of folk tales in colonial India 

“Cultures are formed, reformed, and destroyed in the process of storytelling” (Sadhana 

Naithani The Story-Time ix). 

The epigraph to this chapter makes a huge yet important claim. Through the course of my 

study I will discuss different collections of Punjabi folk tales and the functions they 

performed—of forming, reforming, destroying—culture. In this chapter I focus, in particular, 

on the interest of the British colonisers in the collection of folklore from their colonies and 

the implications of this fascination. The quest for antiquities of all kinds intrigued 

Englishmen (and women) throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth and the first quarter of the 

twentieth centuries. The field of their research expanded to people and stories from all over 

the world, especially British colonies such as Africa and India. In the process, oral narratives 

of people from different countries and continents were collected and disseminated. There 

were different motivations and methods involved in collecting these folk narratives. One such 

colony, with a huge storehouse of folklore, was India. This chapter will explore the efforts 

and role of those associated in collecting the folklore of pre-partition India, under the British 

Raj. The chapter will examine the motivational forces behind the collection of historical 

artefacts from various cultures, and how this activity fostered interest in Indian folklore and 

folk tales. 

A timeline of events that led to organised research, a discipline, and a science 

provides a historical context for this discussion. In 1572, a group of Englishmen formed a 

society for the promotion of historical study and research of what were then known as 

“popular antiquities,” under the patronage of Archbishop Matthew Parker (Robert 

Livingstone Schuyler 91). However, the society was dissolved by James I who, as Schuyler 

summarises, appears to “have been suspicious of the tendency of the antiquarian research into 



30 

 

matters of state and church” which he felt was a “menace to Divine Right monarchy” (92). 

From the very start the field had political undertones. A new English Society of Antiquaries 

was formed in the early eighteenth century and was awarded a royal charter in 1751 

(Schuyler 92). The existence of the Society demonstrates the interest of the British in English 

history, but as the horizon of the British Empire widened, its interest in the antiquities of 

other countries expanded the Society’s mission. The 1751 charter stated the Society’s aims as 

“the encouragement, advancement and furtherance of the study and knowledge of the 

antiquities and history of this and other countries” (Society of Antiquaries of London website, 

n.p.). This British interest in the antiquities of other countries and colonies increased 

gradually, perhaps as the significance of the information gathered became better understood. 

The folkloristics of what are now known as Pakistan and India in general, and of Punjab in 

particular, is the central subject of this chapter. 

Beginning with a discussion of popular antiquities, later known as folklore, I then 

focus on Indian folklore, the history of folklore collection, and an examination of those 

involved in the collection and dissemination of collections of Indian folklore. I examine 

whether the British interest in the folklore of their Indian colony was for its own sake, or 

whether it had an ulterior motive—that of gaining knowledge and furthering the imperial 

power. This discussion will contribute to my hypothesis that these folk narratives serve a 

larger imperial purpose in the colonial enterprise. 

 1.1 Folklore as a New Science 

Interest in the collection of folklore begins with the development in the field of 

natural sciences in 1735 when Carl Linne or, in Latin, Linnaeus, a Swedish naturalist, 

published The System of the Nature. His book was an “extraordinary creation that would have 

deep and lasting impact not just on travel and travel writing but on the overall ways European 



31 

 

citizenries made, and made sense of, their place on the planet” (Mary Louise Pratt 24). His 

work on plant species and taxonomy revolutionized European thinking, and many of his 

students explored the flora of different countries in order to place the plants in the 

classification system introduced by Linnaeus. As a result travel-writing, and keeping records 

of everything related to a journey in a journal while travelling, became very popular. 

Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection (1859) also had a major impact on 

the advancement of European scientific understanding. Darwin’s theory revolutionised 

knowledge about human origin, and his ideas helped develop scholars’ interest in evolution 

of not only the human species, but also of human culture. Herbert Spencer coined the phrase, 

“survival of the fittest” after reading Darwin’s evolutionary theory and applied the concept of 

natural selection to human society and culture. His ideas were later called by Richard 

Hofstader Social Darwinism in his work Social Darwinism in American Thought (1844). H. 

L. Wesseling notes that “Social Darwinism exerted a great influence on the politicians of the 

imperialist era” and that “the Theory of Evolution was a powerful weapon in the debate on 

the differences between races and peoples” (126).  

Edward Tylor (1832-1917), an English anthropologist and founder of cultural 

anthropology inspired by Darwin’s theory of evolution, presented the idea of cultural 

evolutionism and believed that research into history and prehistory of man ... could be used as 

the basis for the reform of British society (Tylor qtd. Herbert S. Lewis, 25). Tylor applied 

Darwin’s Theory of Evolution to culture, and proposed it be used to “reform British society.” 

He presented the idea of “a universally shared mental development,” and formed “a uni-linear 

evolutionary model” (Tylor 58). He postulated the concept of three developmental stages, 

savagery, barbarism and civilisation, on a cultural ladder that all societies climb on their own 

pace. 



32 

 

Following the concept of evolutionary stages, Tylor’s theory of Cultural Evolution 

originated as a comparative method for the study of different peoples and customs and rituals 

of the past, and to observe how things have changed and improved over time. The graph of 

the progress and improvement was supposed to help calculate the future pace of human 

cultural progress. But the British, during the study of evolution of their own culture and 

history, had come to the conclusion that they were on a higher level in the evolutionary 

journey than other nations in the context of what Mary Louise Pratt calls a “Eurocentered 

form of global or ‘planetary’ consciousness” (4). Simon J. Bronner maintains that “Evolution 

intrigued Victorian thinkers, for it established their civilization at the height of a cultural 

progression. A basic presupposition was the ultimate superiority of modern European 

civilization” (57). 

This in turn, “whetted their appetites for insights into exotic customs, stories, and 

peoples” (Bronner 57). This theory gave the folklorists an opportunity to present their 

ordinary work of folklore collection as a scientific one. Their main purpose was collecting 

tales, translating them into English and spreading the information and knowledge thus 

collected (Gillian Bennet 29). Rana Kabbani in Imperial Fictions: Europe’s Myth of Orient 

maintains that the West has a misconception about being 

superior to other cultures; that it is somehow more humane, civilized or tolerant, less 

violent and less misogynistic. Such assumptions formed the bedrock of nineteenth 

century imperialist thought, and provided the intellectual justification for colonizing 

other peoples’ societies. But imperial ideas did not perish with empire. They serve as 

much of a manipulative function as they did a hundred years ago. (viii)  

Such ideas not only created a myth about the colonies, but promoted a myth about innate 

British superiority as well. The more the British gained knowledge about the colonies and 

other cultures, the more they concluded their own superiority in the natural order. These 



33 

 

collections not only created a database of the colonised people, they also helped aggrandise 

the British image for the people in the metropole. In other words, the study of folklore was 

working in two ways, proving colonies to be inferior and proving the West, especially the 

British, to be superior, on a higher rung of the evolutionary ladder. Creation of this 

knowledge and database was a one-sided activity where the Empire raised questions and then 

found answers that proved its own superiority. The ‘Other’ was not given a chance to explain 

or express its own point of view or if there were any local voices, they were over-written by 

the Centre.  

As Naithani contends, “Knowledge about natives constituted a subject which was of 

general and scholarly interest” (5). Andrew Lang, a member of the “Great Team” of British 

folklorists, employed Tylor’s work in folklore studies and developed the concept of 

survivals.9 Lang compared traditions of people who were at the ‘highest’ level of the 

evolutionary ladder with those at the ‘lower’ level, in order to find a connection (Bronner 58). 

Writing in 1953, William Bascom proposed in similar terms to Tylor that “Folklore forms a 

bridge between literate and non-literate societies and any ethnographic study without the 

study of folklore would be incomplete because folklore is clearly part of a culture” (27). 

Bascom further concludes that “Folklore is thus studied in anthropology” (28).  

In The History of Folklore in Europe Giuseppe Cocchiara and John N. McDaniel 

maintain that the growth of folklore studies was a result of interest in developing an 

overarching history and philosophy of man. Naithani notes that the global history of folklore 

collection is Eurocentric in its approach (The Story-Time 1). An interest in “primitivity” 

stimulated these studies, which developed from attempts to analyse the origin of the arts and 

sciences, society and customs.  

                                                           

 

9 Survival is defined as those customs that had lost their original meanings but still continued to be practised 

(Bronner 58). 



34 

 

The Eurocentric scientific approach to folklore studies provides a means of asserting 

Britain’s greater “civilization” in evolutionary terms. But these studies became functional to 

help maintain a theoretical justification for British rule over the colonies. The discipline that 

had originated as a means of studying human cultural evolution scientifically later became a 

way of comparing different societies, cultures, and races, focussing mostly on the differences, 

for political and financial gains. This knowledge acted as a tool for Britain to maintain her 

hold over foreign lands and colonise people all over the world, including those of the 

Subcontinent. Naithani rightly points out that “the whole Empire could be made into a 

comprehensible entity for the common people only by sketching out its various parts” (The 

Story-Time 5), part of which was achieved by the collection of folklore.  

Naithani maintains that an important aspect of colonial folklore theory was sketching 

out the cultural life of the colonised subject for the knowledge and information of middle-

class readers back at home (Story-Time 79). The study of human culture that originated as an 

evolutionary science, and which intended to study the evolution of people’s rituals, customs, 

beliefs, and lifestyles, thus became a political tool as nineteenth century imperialism took 

hold. Richard Carnac Temple, an early twentieth century antiquarian and folklorist, while 

emphasizing the significance of the knowledge about the colonial “natives,” made the link 

between anthropological endeavour and imperial politics clear in Anthropology as Practical 

Science:  

If [British] relations with the foreign peoples with whom they come in contact are to 

be successful, they must acquire a working knowledge of the habits, customs and 

ideas that govern the conduct of those peoples, and of the conditions in which they 

pass their lives. (39) 

Of course much depends on what he means by “successful.” Temple says, “Youth must 

imbibe the anthropological habit” (26) and “success is dependent on the knowledge [the 



35 

 

British] may attain of those with whom they have to deal” (39). He seems to have derived this 

“practical science” of handling and colonising ‘foreign peoples’ from spending most of his 

life in India. His words are comparable with those of Flora Steel in The Complete Indian 

Housekeeper and Cook (1898) where she, with her friend Grace Gardiner, guides her British 

readers to the similarities between running a home in India and an empire: “We do not wish 

to advocate an unholy haughtiness; but an Indian household can no more be governed 

peacefully, without dignity and prestige, than an Indian Empire” (9). Through her work, she 

implies, she is adding necessary cultural knowledge of “foreign peoples” to the Empire and 

for those who are planning to take administrative roles in India. This way, as Pia Pal-Lapinski 

says, “She [Steel] is as much a tool of imperialism as any memsahib” (Lapinski 73). 

Similarly, Temple’s comments, which apparently promote the science of anthropology, in 

fact promote imperial control and domination. Anthropological information serves to 

strengthen the empire and imperial rule over the colonies. By understanding the material, 

social, and cultural world of the indigenous people, the anthropologist could gain insight into 

the “large-scale moulding matrix,” the “gigantic conditioning apparatus,” which Bronislaw 

Malinowsky called culture (qtd. Bronner 66). This knowledge of the indigenous culture was 

considered useful information to the colonisers in maintaining Britain’s dominance over non-

British others. 

In his introduction to Anthropology and Colonial Encounter, Talal Asad emphasises 

the relationship between the growth of anthropology as a discipline and the rise of 

British/European imperialism. He maintains that anthropology is “rooted in an unequal power 

encounter between the West and Third World, which goes back to the emergence of 

bourgeois Europe, an encounter in which colonialism is merely one historical moment” (16). 

Anthropology became an applied discipline which worked in two ways, as described earlier: 

it helped maintain British superiority, and it proved the ‘natives’ to be primitive, lagging 



36 

 

behind, lacking in intellect and manners, in constant need of being ruled. But creating this 

understanding of natives, under colonial rule, was a complicated process, as it entailed 

generating a specific mythical and exotic image of the colonised.  

One source of such exotic stereotypes of the ‘natives’ was the collection and 

dissemination of folklore. In the nineteenth century, European interest in the folklore and folk 

tales from around the world increased. Such cultural artefacts as tales, riddles, jokes, songs, 

and anecdotes came under the umbrella term of ‘popular antiquities’ until 1846, when 

William John Thoms (1803-1885), a pioneering antiquarian, under the pseudonym of 

Ambrose Merton, suggested in a letter to The Athenaeum that “what we in England designate 

as Popular Antiquities ... would be most aptly described by a good Saxon compound, Folk-

Lore ... ”10 Thoms’ real purpose of writing to C. W. Dilke, the editor of The Athenaeum, was 

to gain some space in the journal for the notes about the customs and beliefs still existing in 

the country. A few years later, in 1849, Thoms started his own journal Notes and Queries, 

which opened the columns of the new journal, “to the reception of articles and notes on our 

fast-fading folk lore” (223). To his audience in the editorial he said, “Any contributions 

illustrative of [British] folk lore will always find a welcome admission to our pages” (223). 

His invitation seems to have received a welcome response as there were contributions from 

all over the country on a weekly basis (Gomme 2). According to Richard M. Dorson there 

was much work being done on folklore collection in England from 1870 to 1910 and it was 

within this period that 

the first folklore society in the world was formed [1878]; the first folklore journal 

was issued, and filled with brilliant articles; collectors’ handbooks were compiled, 

and systematic county collections were undertaken; folk materials hidden in 

                                                           

 

10 The Athenaeum, August 22, 1846, reprinted in the first Report of the Folklore Society, May 1879. The 

Athenaeum was a literary magazine in London (1828-1921). 



37 

 

magazine files, chapbooks, and similar antiquarian sources were located and 

reprinted; an International Folklore Congress was held at London in 1891, 

dominated by English scholars; and a steady outpour of theoretical and controversial 

treatises wrestled with the problems of the new science. (1)  

 

But who organised this Folklore Congress, who founded this Society, who played 

what role, and what were the ‘problems’ of this new science? While the distinguished 

members and collectors were mostly men, it was a woman, Eliza Gutch, under the 

pseudonym of St. Swithin, an avid contributor to Notes and Queries, whose suggestion 

prompted the formation of the Folklore Society. The recommendation was published in the 

February 1874 volume of the journal: 

A Folklore Society—I am not alone in thinking it high time that steps should be 

taken to form a society for collecting, arranging, and printing all the scattered bits of 

folk-lore which we read of in books and hear of in the flesh. Such a society should 

not confine its labours to the folk-lore of our own land, but should have members 

and workers everywhere. (Gutch 124) 

It is interesting to note that along with proposing the formation of a folklore society, she 

points to the importance of obtaining collections from everywhere. Though St. Swithin or 

Gutch was not present in person when the Society was officially formed in 1878, her 

suggestions and notes were the background impetus for the formation of the Society, and the 

Society’s reports and other writings acknowledge that “the origin of the Society was really 

due to the suggestion of a lady correspondent of Notes and Queries ... she wrote under the 

signature of St. Swithin” (“The Folk-lore Society First Annual Report” 13).  

In December 1877 William Thoms, in Notes and Queries and The Athenaeum, 

announced the formation of the Society in these words: “the Folk-Lore Society will be a 



38 

 

society to collect and store a vast amount of curious, out-of-the-way, old-wives’ lore” (421), 

and  

any lady or gentleman (for the Folk-Lore Society is one which may be greatly 

promoted by ladies) who may be disposed to join it, is requested to communicate 

such intention to that gentleman [J. L. Gomme, Honorary Secretary] ... If this 

invitation be freely responded to, the Folk-Lore Society may be established and at 

work early in the ensuing year. (422) 

 

 The Society was thus founded following the suggestion of a woman who had to use a 

male pseudonym, and who remained hidden from the Society’s members and readers 

throughout her writing career until after her death in 1931. It was a Society that “may be 

greatly promoted by ladies,” yet it had no female members. A woman had to write as a man 

for her work to be accepted and have the reception that it deserved, and for her voice to be 

heard. If she wrote under her own name, a male sanction was needed to lend the writing a 

necessary authority. This sexism was embedded in the very roots of the field. The same 

materials when told by women were labelled “old-wives’ lore,” but when collected, they 

transformed into science and became a discipline.  

 On 19 December 1877, according to the Honorary Secretary, Laurence Gomme, 

“four men met together and formally resolved to form The Folk-lore Society” (Gomme 5). 

These four men were Laurence Gomme himself, W. J. Thoms, Edward Solly and W. R. S. 

Ralston.11 The first to join these four, according to Allan Gomme (1952), was Henry Charles 

Coote, and he was quickly joined by others. Although these men had other writing 

                                                           

 

11 Dorson, on the other hand, contends that “at the core of the English folklore boom lies the work of six men”: 

Andrew Lang, George Laurence Gomme, Edwin Sidney Hartland, Alfred Nutt, Edward Clodd and W. A. 

Clouston. It was the efforts of these members, he contends, that laid the basis of the Folklore Society in 1878, 

and for a number of years “Gomme was the Society’s Director, Clodd its Treasurer, Nutt its publisher, and Lang 

and Hartland members of its executive council” (3).  



39 

 

commitments to fulfil, they “regarded themselves primarily as folklorists, and crusaded 

energetically for the new discipline” (Dorson 3). 

While the men mentioned above were the main body of the British Folklore Society, 

there were many others who performed important work during the same period. A complete 

survey of the movement, which included women, would need to include Temple, a major 

figure in Indian folklore dissemination, Joseph Jacobs, Charlotte Burne, F. Hindes Groome, 

Marian Cox, J. A. MacCulloch, T. F. Thiselton Dyer, S. Baring-Gould, Sir John Rhys, W. R. 

S. Ralston, and Sir William Craigie who assembled Indian, Russian and Scandinavian tales 

(Dorson 3). These people began the consideration of folklore as a significant area of study, 

and it was Gomme who proposed that the study of folklore should be treated as an 

independent discipline in these words: “I strongly urge that Folk-lore is a science by itself, 

with distinct work of its own to accomplish, but I must protest against its being only another 

name for anthropology. The sanction at the back of folk-lore is tradition” (Gomme, qtd. 

Dorson 7). 

It appears that the problem of this new “science” was defining its scope and function, 

and deciding to which area of study it belonged. From the definitions given in the seventh 

Annual Report of the council, the members of the Society appear divided on whether to call it 

an independent science or a sub-discipline of anthropology. Gomme defined it as “a science 

which treats the survivals of archaic beliefs and cultures in modern ages” (Gomme 388); 

Sydney Hartland proposed that “[f]olk-lore is anthropology dealing with the psychological 

phenomena of uncivilized man” (7th Annual Report of FLS 386). 

Folkloristics became ethnography, the study of human traditions, customs, and 

behaviours, and it is crucial to anthropologists, because it reflects culture (Bronner 61). 

Folkloristic studies flourished and played a very significant role in the collection of 

information about indigenes and their ways of life. Naithani argues in The Story-Time, 



40 

 

regarding India and the study of its folklore, but applicable to other colonies as well, that 

there was a “veil” “lying heavily over India’s past” which had to be “lifted” by the collection 

and publication of her folklore (qtd. Naithani 99). She maintains that the folklore was 

collected from the colonies published in Britain and then “travelled in many directions” 

(Naithani 7). Thus orality became one of the sources of different kinds of writings and 

information on the colonised. What is omitted from this collection of data about the natives is 

the point of view of the natives; materials were going from the colonies to the centre, not the 

other way round. Native voices had been silenced, overwritten, or neglected. Much of the 

knowledge that the Empire was collecting through the folklore of other countries (with the 

help of “overseas folklorists,” (332) as Dorson called them), was increasingly used for 

utilitarian purposes, to ‘exemplify’ imperial supremacy by demonstrating the lesser civility of 

imperial subjects. For these collectors ‘real India’ “was rich in folklore and narrators, but 

backward, poor, rude, and unlearned in every other respect” (Naithani 99). 

The interest in these folk materials was new for Britain but dates back to the onset of 

the nineteenth century, when the Grimm brothers’ pioneering work, Children’s and 

Household Tales (1812), inspired the interest in local tales, which had always been 

considered a woman’s domain. According to Ben Amos, the biographies of the Grimm 

brothers and the history of British folklore appear to show that folkloristics is “intellectual 

slumming”; it was assumed that middle and upper class people study those whom they regard 

as socially inferior via the collection of folklore (119). These studies not only take advantage 

of the cultural knowledge of the natives, they presuppose European superiority over the 

natives. And when someone is superior, s/he considers it her/his duty to help enlighten the 

inferior nations, a duty Rudyard Kipling designated as the “White Man’s Bu