 webinar. It's my honor and my privilege today to welcome Professor Neelam Hussein who has joined the SOAS in South Asia Institute as Professor of Practice. She will be doing a series of webinars with us, a series of three and today is the first webinar and I hope you will return to hear her for the second and third webinars. The second webinar will take place during our Festival of Ideas which is happening in the third week of October and the details are available on the South Asia Institute website and will be sent out in the newsletter as well. So my job right now is to give an introduction to Professor Neelam Hussein and to set up the session that she will speak for 40 minutes and after that we will take questions and I'm very much looking forward to this session. I know Neelam from a very long time ago and having been a former student so this is always a terrifying moment where you have to introduce a former teacher and and do a decent job so I hope I'll do justice. Professor Neelam Hussein read BA Honours in English Literature from Kenned College and for the MA degree she did at Government College, Lahore, followed by a Masters at Leeds and Postgraduate Research at Sussex. She was a lecturer at Kenned in 1974 and longer and was a faculty member there till 1995 with a break in between when you were at Sussex and after Kenned Neelam left to work at Seymour, Women's Resource and Publication Centre in 1995. For those of you who don't know about Seymour, Seymour is a secular feminist not-for-profit organisation and where Neelam is the executive coordinator, her work entails direct involvement in both academic and field research and she is involved in projects and a large number of things and including the editing and publication of a social legal journal called Bayan. Neelam does a lot of other things and if I started to go into details of everything I'll be here for a long time so I'm just going to mention a few. Her work has included the production and publication of an annotated selection of Punjabi folktales documented by British folklorists during the Raj and I do have a prop with me. I have one of those books here right the romance of Raja if you can see it and other tales which is an absolutely beautiful tome and I recommend that you get it if you don't have it. She's done translation from Urdu to English of two novels Inner Kotiad by Khatija Mastur and All Passion Spent by Zaheda Hena. Her research lies in exploring her gendered structures and cultural norms in Pakistan shape women's experiences and narratives. She's currently involved with research on forced marriage and women's inheritance rights. Her recent research has been on the pathways to women's empowerment programme in the changing narratives of sexuality and has highlighted various forms of sexual and gender-based violence in Pakistan and through her work Neelam has engaged a community of workers building networks with young people especially women in Pakistan. Neelam's work informs knowledge exchange research consultancy and fundraising and as an educationist her vast experience of working with students in the state sector in Pakistan has contributed to writing workshops for women at the Lahore College University. She has also written features for the Friday Times, the news on Sunday. Her co-edited book Engendering the Nation's State is an excellent resource and widely quoted. She is also now as global as a professor of practice we are enriched by Neelam's presence and look forward to working with her and to listening to her as somebody in terms of my own work I was influenced very strongly by a workshop that I by a writing exercise that I did for her very long time ago and I don't think she'll remember this which was about the media representation of women of rape victims in Pakistan and you know that was quite a seminal moment for me it led to a lot of work that I've done on representation and Muslim communities in the diaspora but I would now like to hand over to Neelam who will be talking today about the Punjabi folk or wonder tale so thank you Neelam and welcome. Thank you Amna that was a very nice introduction I wish there were more people to do that for me a professor of practice makes me feel a bit like James Bond I hope that's not your expectation from this talk today which is on the Punjabi folk tale the stories that I will be discussing are based mainly on the work done by British folklorists Flora Annie Steele the Reverend Charles Swinerton and overseas temple all of whom though assisted by the Munchi had a working knowledge of the local language of vernacular and were actively engaged in the process of listening and documenting to the tales as Swinerton I think describes rather evocatively sitting there on the veranda as the mosquito sings in the night and listening to the barred drama talking about the Salu and his adventures I will make an RC temple and I this was work done in the middle probably late 19th century and tangentially I may if there is time refer to the work the story is written by a woman writer whose boots lie in the middle class in a courtyard Muslim life of or at least in a courtyard and just to show how to emphasize or highlight the fluidity and absorptive capacity of the folk tale which picks up and drops information and events and small ancillary details that as it flows along and yet there are moments when that flow is interrupted and fixed in time as the folklorists did for the Indian folk tale and air cartoon did for it yet again in the 20th century and we still have our living storytellers and birds you have and I would love to find out where the story is folk tale is now given its termization and extremism and all that but that's another story I'll be looking at three aspects of the Punjabi folk tale one is a brief I hope comment on the folk tale as a genre as a literary genre then I want to look at the differences or the points of divergence between the European folk tale and the Punjabi folk tale which points to makes us look at the moments of when they were documented and what were the politics behind that document moment of documentation my premise and the third will be look at the characteristics of the Punjabi folk tale many of which differentiate it from or distinguish it from certainly the European folk tale and probably other folk tales also though there will be obviously a lot of commonalities between the Punjabi and folk tales from other parts of South Asia and India in Bangladesh my premise is that language and form and genre are the twin sites where meaning is made and our ways of seeing and experiencing the world are shaped that storytelling whether as folk tale fiction or any other narrative form is not only an intrinsic part of human subjectivity but also has deep psychological social and political dimensions this is borne out by the fact that there is no story and no culture without stories where people don't tell stories that by other point is that we narrativize in poet experience in order not only to make sense of it but like the fourth game of the Freudian child imposing a pattern on his mother's mysterious mysterious comings and goings it's an attempt narrativization is an attempt to gain some control over our individual and collective experience and as testified by Sherazad we spin out stories to negotiate time space and save our lives. As a genre the folk tale originated in popular culture and was passed on by word of mouth it suits go back to the time to a time when as part of the oral tradition it was common on property and express the needs and wishes of ordinary people. Predating the written word in the book the folk tale is not so much as the sum of the manners and habits of the people to which it belongs but as argued by Marina Warner in a fantastic book from the beast of the blonde it is an imaginative apprehension of the known and noble world in which the boundaries of the permissible and the impermissible are charted out. Folk tales, again I'm referring to Marina Warner, folk tales build a second life and a second world outside efficiency where established categories and norms become interchangeable and are challenged even as the element of the marvelous that characterizes the folk and fairy tale endow them with potential to open up spaces of dreaming alternatives and that's again Marina Warner the last sentence. If we look at the folk tale it is heterogeneous it is anarchic it depicts a varied and undifferentiated world where different genres the high romance mixes and lingers with the homespun wisdom of ordinary people where animals speak and princes of unparalleled valor and lineage keep company with carpenters, tailors, harms, domes, morasses, thieves, parrots, hedgehogs, dogs and horses and where saints and holy men, villains and ogres, fearless beauties and book-phones, shifters and roams, rough shoulders and the irreverent exuberance of people's laughter demolishes alike the pomp and circumstance of things and the austerity of saints and grants of equal value. However the ease with which the wonder tale appropriates and incorporates different narrative traditions should not create the impression that it is totally all over the place the folk tale has its own protocols and its own rules which may not be set aside e.g. help to a stranger is a positive quality neglect of someone indeed is a negative quality and thus we find in the Punjabi in the Risalu tales that time and again the phrase is repeated then the heart of Risalu was moved within him and it triggers off not just the I mean before he takes some action and then that action triggers off the next stage of the story the Punjabi folk tale is not an exception to the unwritten rules of the universal folk tale and it is also nomadic it travels across borders and boundaries and takes root in different soils where though the storylines are retained the it takes on local characteristics language use idioms manners etc etc to acquire a local identity and that is why the tales of Vidhbhai written in 8th century ed the Brahmin Vidhbhai of India traveled across well Persia and on into Europe and were used by Charles Perot who then took them rewrote them and they were then known as they became the apogee organic culture so that is again something which is very specific to the folk tale or maybe to other narrative forms also but definitely to the folk tale the other point I want to emphasize is the folk tale despite its fantastic terrain and use of marvels and wonders the folk tale does not exist outside history it is temporarily located and culturally contextual it is omnivorous it is eclectic it transgresses categorical boundaries and draws upon different narrative forms such as the Punjabi the epic or the Punjabi war as freely as it does the on the open-ended tropicality of jokes and riddles and the Gistar, the Ghastan, the lyricism of the love song, the Dholah, the Maya and the body irreverence of the citri and the gossip of the marketplace and the intimacies of the Zanana all are grist to its mill. A bit of an explanation about the genres the var or epic expresses the aristocratic line in literature therefore even within the magical promiscuity of the one detail it represents a predominantly masculinist strain and espouses established truths they may be the truths of the story but they are established and bound by the exigencies of time, class, gender and status circumscribed by its own particular code of honor. Counted in the language of valor and prowess and the prowess of the battlefield its heroes and heroines must ultimately submit to the genre's formal demands. Therefore the Rajas, Salvahan and Rasalu must uphold the honor of his and the Rani, Spokala and Luna walked at every step can only be driven. Now in the magical romance on the other hand unburdened by the epic dimensions of the var the same themes of love and transgression take on different meanings. If in the Rasalu legend Luna has no recourse but to succumb to the poison of unrequited love in an unequal marriage and the Vazir's daughter must suffer public humiliation for daring to laugh at the Prince Rasalu. In the magical romance the fate of the blacksmith's daughter for a similar challenge to masculine pride is very different. Prince Mool marries her so that he may punish her for her transgression but ends up providing her with the opportunity to establish her dominance over him. It would seem that the very contempt with which society views women in real life is subverted in the magical romance and opens up opportunities for them to exercise their wit and demonstrate their capabilities. Now if the epic and magical romance deploy the fantastic to build a desired and desirable world where the certitudes and the fixities of the real world become elastic the comic tale uses the fantastic in ways the terms of inside out the larger laughter as we all know is inherently anti-authority and the comic tale with its roots in the carnivalesque and also in the annual carnival or Mela of the Sufi Shrines is bound up with people's unofficial truths as opposed to the orthodox verities of the ruling classes. The larger than life heroes and heroines of the ethical strain and the self-absorbed lovers of the magical romance recede into the background in the comic tale. Instead of Rasalu on his dark grey mare, vanquishing giants and winning produts there is Isra making his way, making a way with his fraudulently acquired role as far as his ass, ass as in donkey can carry him and the image of Fuzzaloo irritably breaking the empty pot on her husband's head for demanding more food than he knows when he knows there is none replaces those of the Kokilans and Runas and other princesses dealing with the impossible demands of kings and korthy life. Heroes turn lawless clowns in the comic tale and the heroines relinquishing the luxuries of the palace maw become widely and cunning and and trappings into admitting they lie. The spotlight of the comic tale is on ordinary people on the old rife and the guard on the heart, the Mirasi, the Varan, the Jogi, the Fakir and all that ilk that RC Temple talks about. Looking down through the heights conferred by status and class, the uncompromising eye of authority may see them only as a sorry set of drunkards, but in the comic tale differences of caste, class, along with taboos and prohibitions that may entail these distinctions are erased and nobody escapes the irreverent all-inclusive spontaneity of people's laughter, including the ones who are doing the laughing. Nothing escapes it. Whereas the human is parodic and dead fan as in the tale of the sagacious Lombardar where an awestruck audience multitude watches the depredations of the Lombardar whose wisdom is in everybody's mouth or expressed in the open enjoyment of the absurd when the whole family of weavers lament the death of a child yet to be conceived by a maiden yet to be wed. There is again, so there's no room for dogma in the comic tale, but the seeming in concern with all things with serious cannot be taken at great value. It is imbued in the carnival-esque spirit, imbued in the carnival-esque spirit, the laughter of the comic tale represents what Bathane calls the gay and free- laughing aspect of the world with its unfinished open character and the joy of change and renewal. And it is precisely in this joyous open-ended view of the world that the transformative part of the comic tale and of people's laughter is to be found. Instead of affirming the truth, the triumph of truth is already established. It replaces the Lombardar uncertainty and in so doing opens up spaces where truths may not be found, but what claims to be true may be questioned and tested. Clearly, there's no room here for heroics and grand betrayals of the epic world, transferred to its terrain, relieved of their heroic stature, the heroes and heroines of the epic world lose their tragic integrity. And revealed instead is the hypocrisy and the double standards of those in power. Seen from below, Raja Selvahan emerges as a near-coupled, a ridiculous figure recalling the stereotype of an old man trying to control Luna, a young wife, young enough to be his daughter. The same action is transformed into a parodic gesture with Luna's pursuit of Puran who doesn't want her. It mirrors Selvahan's desire for a woman who is with him only because she cannot be elsewhere. The king upholding his dwindling virility is no different from the lust-praised woman chasing a reluctant lover. Faced with these images which so clearly belong to the realm of the dune, the grand patriarchal discourse of betrayal and retribution dissolves and becomes insubstantial. The stripped of their heroic dimension, Selvahan and Luna lose their destructive power and are brought down to the same plane as the young weaver who goes hungry in order to impress his indoors with the refinement of his manners or the wily Isra and his friend, the equally wily Penisra, who attempt to defraud each other with the greatest good humor and understanding. Brought face to face with the all-inclusive irreverence of laughter, official morality loses its edge as well as its punitive power. What needs to be again remembered is that this is not the simple merriment of a holiday mood, but philosophical laughter that exposes and destroys the hypocrisies and fallenness of old, official morality and clears the way for renewal and change and in the process has the potential to redefine and articulate the boundaries of the permissible and impermissible. I just want to say that this mingling of the epic and the magical there in the presence of the comic shard of people's laughter, the world seen from below is granted, gets a double vision, gives a grand double vision to these tales to today and points to the countless untold stories that lie in the heart of the stories that are being told. And I won't continue with this. I think I should stop here because we do have to finish in a given amount of time and also because you'll be bored stiff if I go on rambling forever. So, so much for the genre. Now the historical and political context of the Punjabi South Asian folk tale is your European counterpart and why there are no Cinderella's in the Punjabi folk tale. Briefly with the coming of the written word, the locus of power shifted buds, minstrels lost status and the folk tale became the repository of the unlettered mass of marginalized people and traditional storytellers and all the minstrels, the troubadours, the barns, the low caste entertainers and so on. But as stated earlier, the folk tale exists in historical time and is temporally and geographically located and the discovery and documentation of the Europeans, specifically the German folk tale and that of the Punjabi or South Asian folk tale in the 19th century spring from different aims, different contexts and motivations and follow different types of projects, despite the shared generic characteristics of the genre and even storylines. Now a brief look at the German context. The folk tale was the discovery of the folk tale and the establishment of the modern study of folk law and the development of the literary folk tale by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm initiated a process of documenting, selecting and reworking the stories narrated by ordinary people. This process was part of a nationalist quest for a folk text located in some ancient past but informed by the spirit of Calvinism, Calvinist reform. Writing about the way the Grimm brothers reworked their tales to Jack Sipes points out that what deserves to be preserved and what is left out, what is to be, whether it be high, middle or low art depends on the cultivators of culture and the cultivators of, and this has always been a class matter because the cultivators of culture have always been part of the consortium of the ruling social groups in history. So according to Sipes, the Grimm brothers eliminated the erotic and sexual elements that might have been offensive to medieval class morality. They added numerous Christian expressions and references, emphasized specific role models for male and female protagonists. According to the dominant patriarchal court of the time and endowed many of the tales with a homie flavor by the use of diminutives, quaint expressions and cute descriptions. They also added numerous Christian expressions and emphasized the role models for male and female protagonists in importance for the patriarchal court of their time and society including a cumulative morality. Sipes argument is borne out again by the research he has done. He compares two versions of Rapunzel that documented in 1812 and the next one 1857. Now just listen to the differences. In the first version when Rapunzel first saw the king at first she felt was afraid then took a liking to the king and made an agreement with him. He was to come every day and be pulled up. Thus they lived merrily and joyfully and the fairy did not discover anything. Until one day Rapunzel said, tell me mother Gautel why do you think my clothes have become too tight for me and no longer fit. The 1857 version begins with the meeting but notice the change of tone. Rapunzel was at first terribly afraid or she had never laid eyes on a man before. Then the prince began to talk to her in a friendly way. He told her how he her song had touched his heart so deeply that he had not been able to rest until he had seen her. Rapunzel then lost her fear and when he asked her whether she would have him for her husband and she saw that he was young and handsome she said yes and placed her hand in his. Meanwhile the sorceress did not notice anything until one day Rapunzel said mother Gautel how is it that you're much heavier than the prince. It's a quite a shift. The first passage is down to earth, unsent conscious. The second is longer. Belonged to a middle class drawing room courtship with its undertones of repressed sexuality. While the marriage proposal and Rapunzel placing her hand in that of the prince are resonant of the spiritual gentile propriety with the sugar icing of palatable romance. Especially interesting are the transference of agency from Rapunzel in the first version to the king in the second one and also the textual shift from Rapunzel's sexual body to mother Gautel's body that has outlived its sexual appeal in the 1857 version. It was very different with the Punjabi folk tale. The Punjabi folk tale represented the colonized other of the Raj. It was seen it has it had a practical function as a window into the native mind for administrative purposes. Therefore, it escaped the sanitizing impulse even as it was fed the punitive morality of the European folk tale and also the passive gentility of its heroines. As stated by RC temple, the Indian folk tale was the preserve of the old wife and the guard, the barn with the heart, the Mirasi, the Miran, the Yogi, the Fakir and all that in who were at best a sorry set of tongue words. Orientalist folklorists were under no compulsion to idealize or glorify the stories they heard. If anything, the tricks, receptions and uninhibited engagement with bodily functions and the irreverent often body humor that are the stocking trade of the folk tradition may well have been seen as hallmarks of an imperial culture. Where the Grimm brothers were reworking the German folk tale to fit in with the bourgeois values of their time in the Punjab and elsewhere in the colonized world, there was an attempt to deal in what was noble and worthy in the folk tale from its local moorings and place it either to a virtually dehistoricized ancient Brahminical origins or to Greek mythology. E. G. Swilerton explains the spirits of Neer Shikari in the Rasalu tales, Ranjha and the God Krishna piping down the valleys of the Punjab as echoes of the Greek office and as mimic remnants of the Alexander's foray into the Punjab. This perhaps explains the virtual absence of the passive sexuality of the Cinderella's and slowbites as well as the blurring of the male female the wooden bad binary not just among women but also among heroes and villains among others. In a sense the Punjabi folk tale is much closer to her pre-Grimsian counterpart or even to the Chaucerian goodwif of Bath in her claims to agency and the physicality of her sexualized potential body. She's feisty, she's witty, she's quick-thinking, she's quarrelsome, argumentative, irreverent, transgressive, she challenges authority, laughs at princes, husbands, gains and gins, dares all for love or whatever else she happens to have set her heart on and what is most significant repeatedly rescues the prince from the dangers and burdens of his complacence and egocentric folly. This is a recurrent theme I was quite interested in you know amused when I saw it. Time and again the prince goes off adventuring, the princess goes after him disguised as a man because she knows where his safety lies as you know and ends up rescuing him through the use of her wits and her fundamental humanity. Therefore the quick wits of the farmer's daughter expose the hypocrisy of kings and courts and enable him to marry her, enable her to marry him and rise to the status of his guide and mentor in the story called The King and the Four Girls. Rani Sundra in the Purin legend demands Purin as a gift from Guru Gauratnath when he repels her advances. Rani Sokhni rejects Rasalu Sundh because having seen the goldsmith's son, she prefers him to the prince, Rasalu. She connives and contrives to move him and win him and transgresses caste, class boundaries to marry him. Surprisingly in the face of today's honor killing ethos that is single-mindedly traced to culture and tradition, it is Rasalu who discovers Sokhni's inclinations and enables the cross-class, cross-caste marriage between the lovers. Kokila, Rasalu's child, ride taunts her husband. I know not whether I'm right for daughter but if a touch can cost you one third of your strength, how would it fare with you for sons and daughters? And she exercises agency when she gives up her life for her done to snuff for the Rajahudi and I quote, Rajah, sitting you will reproach me, standing you will abuse me, I too must die with him who is my approach. The point to be noticed is noted is she does not lose her life as punishment for infidelity. It is not taken from her. She takes it in an exercise of agency that leaves Rasalu desolate and also marks the end of his kingdom and his life. Now among the many reasons, there must be many, I mean I'm not a folklorist, for the difference between the Punjabi folk tale and especially the female protagonist and the European counterpart but perhaps one that makes most sense is the difference in value systems and therefore of perceptions of what is laudable and positive and what is worthy of condemnation in a pluralist, pre-capitalist, agrarian society that foregrounds family and kin group values. And on the other hand, the demands of a puritan capitalist ethic of a newly emerging nation state. The separate spheres, ideology of gender roles along with notions of European individualism were amalgamated into the literary folk tale to meet the demands of abutual readership. Obedience, sexual passivity and sweetness of temper were highlighted as positive characteristics for women, especially heroines. And the taming of the shoe is again a recurrent theme that runs through the folk tales also. I think it is in the story of King Thresher appeared that it happens but I don't have the book in front of me so I won't say definitely it's that one. Agency and the active pursuit of desire which were main prerogatives tended to become negative and even even when appropriated by women who then appear in the guise of crafty stepmothers, jealous queens, ugly sisters and even witches of forms. As opposed to the sin of disobedience that triggers misfortune and punishment in the European tale, other than the suppression or excision of the sexual dimension with which the element of people and with it the element of people's humour, the most noteworthy addition to the tales by Grims and Charles Perot is a calculating and punitive morality. Which is not to say that the Punjabi folk tale is free of retribution, violence and revenge. In the Punjabi folk tale where disobedience is or disobedience is a grievous sin in the European folk tale. Snow White eats the apple, Cinderella forgets the time, the sleep and beauty violates the spindle taboo. In the Punjabi folk tale and perhaps in the South Asian folk tale, fidelity in women is priced above girls across cultures and as fidelity in any case is priced above girls as patriarchal cultures depend on male control of female sexuality. And yet as exemplified by Bhagalbath, this is the one area where the mechanisms of control are to be because Bhagalbath is a giant test in the Rasalu legend. We'll come back to that. In the subcontinent where the emphasis is heavily on caste, purity and lineage, virtue in women and women virtue is almost always related to sexual behaviour takes on a special significance. It is hardly surprising that when it comes to the exercise of sexual agency and or disloyalty to the king husband, the very elastic and accommodating horizons of the wonder tale, tycoon and shrink. This is evidenced in the tragic fates of Luna, Kokila and Rali Sundara. Punishment is certainly visited on villains, but it lags in the again in the Punjabi folk tale and moving off talking of the punitive quality of the European and the lack of it in the Punjabi folk tale. Punishment is certainly visited on villains, but it lacks the quality and blood thirsty vindictiveness to be found in rims. Cinderella's ugly stepsisters have their eyes backed out by pigeons in a slow performance coming in and going out of church. In the six swans, the wicked stepmother-in-law was tied to a stake and burnt to ashes. In Snow White, the even queen is made to put on red hot iron slippers and dance until she falls down dead. And in the pink flower, the old king has the villainous coke torn in four parts. In the Punjabi tale, on the other hand, the tyrannical Raja Sirkup's punishment for his cruelty and cunning, so humiliating, does not match the degree and kind of violence with Mr. Gav. He's made to draw lines with his nose on a red hot riddle until it is badly singed. This is in the tale called Risalu and the Raja Sirkup. Then again, there are not too many instances of the villain being actually killed as punishment for his over crimes. And the two examples that come to mind, and these are significant examples, in the Swintern Temple, Flora Anise in Selection of Tales, are those of the giantess, Bhagalpat, who meets her end in a cauldron of boiling oil, and the smooth talking crow with a vagrant eye, who fraudulently claims the swan wife for his own and is shot for his pains. Now this choice of villains deserving extreme punishment is also significant, as the two pose a fundamental threat to what constitutes the cornerstone of patriarchy, namely the patrilineal, battery-local caste-based conjugal unit. Bhagalpat represents rampant female sexuality and the adulterous crow is no respecter of marital sanctity. That of the two, Bhagalpat meets the more horrific death, to be shot for the pellet from Risalu's sling is pressurable to being boiled royal, is understandable. The crow after all is caught doing only what other men do or want to do. Bhagalpat, on the other hand, covered with hair to her ankles and teeth like two iron flower shares, hints at and shows the link between female sexuality and subterranean primeval drives that are the most difficult to discipline and control and provides the glimpse of the ambiguity and disorder on which the social cultural order rests. Then again, a comparison between why Srikarp isn't punished. The crow and the Bhagalpat face summary death, they should face summary death in Srikarp who has built his gateway of skulls of the men he has killed, beheaded his own brother in a game of chopper and is willing to kill his infant daughter Kokila to save his life is merely discomforted and made to look ridiculous, again provides interesting insights into the workings of the value systems, patriarchal moors and political pragmatism that undergirds the folk tale. Srikarp's gateway of skulls so reprehensible is an indicator of the king's father's power. It is condemnable only in that it signifies excess and not because killing people isn't intrinsically wrong when it comes to rulers and monarchs, how else after all can be territorial integrity of kingdoms and the obedience of subjects being maintained. Interestingly, when I was reading it, it reminded me it recalls Mukbet's I may do all that becomes a man he who does more is none and so Srikarp's punishment is in keeping with his position and his power. Again, to refer to Marina Warner, she knows what she's talking about when she claims that the bubble of nonsense which comprises the elements of magic and fantasy in the folk tale simultaneously hide and recall harsh realities. So the other distinguishing characteristics of the Punjabi folk tale that are of particular interest and I'll name only three because you will be getting tired by now are loyalty to the family of Hindu as hallmark of positive behavior in women and men rather than unquestioning obedience to impersonal authority or given or a given belief system and that's Rosalu is prevented from wreaking vengeance on his father by the five thieves from Makkah who hold back his hand forbidding him to harm his father even though Rosalu was a Hindu and Salvahan was a Hindu and Rosalu newly converted to Islam until it comes to the past that father and son become reconciled. The other point which is characteristic which is missing or certainly characteristic of the Punjabi tale is the element of androgyny the binary oppositions of the grims and peros stories are dissolved in are replaced by a kind of androgynous blurring male female roles may be socially allocated but the ways in which sexual identity is negotiated and diverse deeply nuanced and shot through the ambiguity and I quote her whole rider of the dark grey mare did you forget to bind your hair like some girls all loosely tied it flies away about from side to side teases Rosalu's bit roast as he comes riding by conversely on encountering Rani softly in her maidens Rosalu says Rosalu is pleasantly surprised to see such a company he stops them and asks who are you and where are you going you're dressed like as men but you walk like women and in another quotation which I don't have here is when I think it is in the bull the blacksmith's daughter's story when she's dressed as a prince and the comment is and very handsome she looked and again there are undercurrents of a bisexuality above the remark so the other the other point is where I again the established binaries are blurred is in the hero villain diet and I think this is very important because it brings in an element of doubt uncertainty compassion into the situation Rosalu is chasing man eating ogres who have been devouring one by one the young men and women of a village he's there to vindicate to save the son of a poor widow whose only child is to be sacrificed and so Rosalu is the hero he's a good man and but this learning of identity between the hero villain diet enables a more compassionate understanding of the nuanced complexities of the human predicament as exemplified by Thirya's slide from man eating ogre to victim injured in bleeding witness to the destruction of his brothers and the passing away of his familiar world Thirya cries out his bewilderment and pain you have cut off my arm and killed my brothers why still pursuing and later oh god you alone are my savior he won't let me alone and it is at this moment that Thirya entirely human in his anguish ceases to be the villain just as at the same time Rosalu in a single-minded pursuit to destroy the giants relinquishes his humanity to become both implacable avenger and inextricable fate now amna you have to tell me how much time there is left is there time to say a little bit about air khatun or do we wind up here and go on to the question answers um i think you have um a bit of time do you have another five minutes okay i'll rush through air khatun now the next step of stories is by air khatun uh the comparison between the two sets of tales shows how stories are inflected by historical political context and status and class location of the narrative voice apart from the fact that she wrote immensely immensely popular romantic novels for women that were later televised by pakistan tv very little is known about air khatun at least very little written information is available and so she's well known among her own circles or was uh in fact i don't even know what her the air stands for and khatun is a generic name for woman or lady so even that is a mystery uh in her introduction the only clues we have on her are provided by her in her introduction to her novel of shah her roots and the beginnings of her life as a writer lay in the inner courtyard culture of delhi's muslim celeriac class the gentry or the ashrams that emerged under mughal colonial rule she began her life as a writer there she speaks of the disruption caused by partition in 1947 and the subsequent move to post independence lahore and describes herself as a woman with no formal schooling and no knowledge of any language or literature than her own mother tongue would do now air khatun uh collection and i get clues into air khatun's life through these stories is a motley of stories comprising improving tales reminiscent of charlotte and young's 19th century writings and the magical while the magical tales of kings princesses and evil witches and sorcerers are told by her they carry a distinct flavor of and of bourgeois aspirations of of turn of the century prepartition delhi muslim household with all its nostalgia for a pre-lapsarian courtly past probably by jubalisha's laknow as it existed in popular memory because there's a lot of history in her novels there is a huge amount of historical inaccuracy the folk tales don't require accuracy but it's the the spirit is there uh the changes and although her stories begin in the ritual uh storytelling style of our god you know a ritual sort of thing saying can now i begin to tell my tale uh that the ethos and her particular ethos is reflected in the ancillary date details of the stories in which of the stories the protagonists spend a lot of time in ritual prayers i mean there was no evidence of that in the tales documented by the british folklorists except for maybe strategic reasons i mean you could crash down in a temple or a mosque if you wanted to await a rest or or something else but not as an act of piety and there is observing the observations of paratha is strictly repeatedly almost in every story there is the line when the princess turned 12 she began to observe paratha then tents are set up marquis are set up when she walks out there are corridors created between tents so that no profane male gaze may see her and her virtue is unimpeachable despite abductions by gins which is sorcerers evil and friendly fairies and in a way when i was reading them it reminded me of the history of the alligarh branch of the andraman khawatin islam which was very much part of the the andraman khawatin maybe who belonged to an earlier time than ar khatun or maybe the or it was going to come to me previous with her but unlike the lahore branch which was politically active the alligarh and juman khawatin spent more time than on any than necessary on checking out on the paratha arrangements of their meetings and members would come if they felt that there was a chink left between the draperies where they could be seen and they and these factors became issues so it is that particular ethos that these tales are coming out of and it is reflected in them penises and palace gardens provide the setting for most tales the jungle the wilderness the with all its signification is absent in the ar khatun tales even and even when princes the prince of princesses transported to a jungle wilderness even there she's surrounded by handmaidens and slaves and the main protagonists don't have to lift a finger to meet their needs the heroines and indeed even to a great extent the heroes are more acted upon than acting crying and shedding tears is the only act of agency exercised by the heroines and this they do obviously consistently and at the drop of a hat they're all by the way very fair and pretty real agency belongs to authority figures and it makes me think again of family hierarchies where certainly in the earlier generation the elders of the family you couldn't say go against their word regardless of what the young the young people wished for or desired so real agency in these stories belongs to authority figures but particularly and particularly those with evil intent so villains agency is with the villainous because if you're barking desire then you're obviously with the villains even if you're a parent I suppose but this certainly provides insights into the workings of familial and social hierarchies and and here in her tales the elastic borders and boundaries and marvels and prodigies of the early version of folk tales are replaced by a different kind of excess I mean there is excess in the folk tale I mean the alabans cave of treasures but although that is remarkably absent in the Punjabi folk tale I suppose they reflect the spartan quality of people's lives to some extent the the wonder is in the exercise of magic and in the the cross species cross cast cast exchanges the prodigies and marvels of the earlier folk tales are replaced by a different kind of excess which is of things that are named and counted almost like a household inventory inventory and they strip the tales of their ambiguity and uncertainty and even the sense of wonder which should should accompany them because there's a blaze of color but you are counting counting counting it's almost like a housewife checking on her on her on her household goods and I mean they're tediously told tales they are boring tales but again I think they are interesting in the sense of the insights they can provide of changing times and changing model and social expectations I think I'll end here I had hoped to have the time to talk about the problems of recording living folk tales but I think that will take too long okay thank you Neelam I think nowadays you can do the kind of hand flap function can't you in the in the sort of virtual virtual signs and signals to say applause function to put to all the attendees to for a wonderfully rich narrative about the folk folk tale and I think there's quite a lot you've covered beginning with the story as it start well going into it through the British folk folklorists and their cataloging and archiving of the information and then the actual stories and what they entail within the context of the specific context of the example of Rosalu I think the genre of the folk tale you've given us quite a deep insight into it from European and non-European lenses to what are the things that we might think about and and how magic and romance come together or sometimes simultaneously how religion comes into it how heroes and heroines and and also I think that that point you made just now about Punjabi folk tales I thought was really fascinating that they're quite spartan but that the wonder lies in the exchange of crosscast exchange or those sorts of moments rather than wonder I suppose as we might be thinking about in a European context um so questions of agency and desire just to I think it was interesting to hear what you what you thought about it and how you were engaging with Marina Warner's understanding of magic and fantasy as a way to hide and record harsh realities and and I think some of the things that we think about with regards to what might be the social function of folk tales that they are very much there as part of people's everyday lives but also storytelling plays such an important role in how people imagine themselves and how people interact and also I suppose I was also thinking because you were talking about the Rosalu context of Sabira Junara's introduction to to that book in which she talks about how the act of ethnography is deeply embedded with the functioning of how the folk tale gets archived and understood in in the South Asian context so anyway I'm just doing a very quick summing up I know people will have lots of questions and I don't want to abuse my position as chair so I was going to invite um participants to put their questions in the chat box use the hand raised function and we'll uh and put your questions to Neelam directly I see there's a question from Maliha Satha or an observation uh I don't know if Maliha you would like to put this directly to Neelam if you're there still there Maliha would you like to okay unmute hello uh I hope I'm on debut yes you are okay so this is a very fascinating talk and I was earlier talking about it it's such a blessing this call it thing that now you can hear all these things which probably you will never have time to read but you can still you know learn about these interesting comparisons and I enjoyed every word of it um interestingly when I started listening to it I thought that you will be mentioning more of Parashah or you know Bhullesha but it's interesting that you have talked about Rasalu and the characters the female characters there so with these new insights I'll definitely go back to it again I remember reading it a long time ago in fact listening to these stories and I was also thinking about the Mastavakali if you know about it some more from Balochistan actually so it's interesting that how you can also see these patterns uh you know in this region which are definitely very different from those stories that you have mentioned for instance the who mentioned Cendrila right um so just want to say that I really enjoyed this talk thank you very much for this and also making it available for all of us okay thank you thank you Maliha um are there any other questions no thank you very much okay thank you Neelam did you want did you want to respond to Maliha and the observation I suggest to Maliha to read the stories she'll enjoy them and yes there are I mean obviously going stories are going to be different coming out of Balochistan or I would like to know what the similarities are there okay thank you and okay so any other questions please feel free to put them in the chat box or to raise your hand and while we're waiting for questions I can maybe engage you in further conversation Neelam about the paper so and ask you um to because you ended with the AR Khatun and I think the journey was really interesting in terms of this this was the folk tale then or this is the the way it's written and communicated orally no I said if there are no questions we could talk about the documentation of your own folk tale yeah why don't we do that while while we're waiting for people to get their questions ready you know when I was looking reading the folk tales for our own compilation there were certain interpretations by the folklorists which were not incorrect so much as based on misunderstanding of local or of situations or or perceptions even like there is one line in one of the folk stories where the heroin is described as uh shining I mean the comparison is of shining like a dark cloud now in my imagination or how it is read here it is and the writer whichever of the folklorists was says he's referring to the dusky maiden now for them we were all dusky maidens but to ourselves we are less dusky more dusky you know so on and so forth and in the local context that shining like a bursar cloud is a contrast between the lightning of the bursar cloud and the duskiness of the hair so it's a you know that kind so it I just thought okay for all their insistence on accuracy surely the transition from the Jumma the Bard for instance to the Munchi to the Sahib or Mem Sahab's locally learned language a lot must have been lost but later many years later we were sitting in Seymour actually we got found a storyteller a Baba Baba Enayat from Kasur district and two things emerged first he told a story which had been written by also is not part of Flora and he steals connect connection which is known as Boko Luchi now it sounds very Italian it and it's a sweet little tale Baba Enayat first and took me a while to make the connection told me a story about Boko Luchi now Luchi is something else it is the transgressive wayward borderline bad woman she is out of control and the story is very funny very body despite the fact that Baba Enayat and that is where the dynamics of class gender the language divide the post-colonial language divide where half of us speak English and the other and the mass doesn't and and it's a status thing also so Baba Enayat was very conscious that I was an English speaking lady from a particular class so he was he was interlocking his tale with references to like then her auntie said this so I said Baba who's auntie can you keep up he I said then please say because and then he kept on hesitating and the story would break off until I realized he was holding back on the swear words now when you speak telling a tale in Punjabi and you're a man also you can't tell the tale without interlocking it with five swear words a second and poor man he was also now conscious of my sensitivities so it was an abortive measure but the Bhopal Luchi story was extremely funny which you don't find in the in the folk tale so it will take and after that I asked Baba Enayat to tell the story to the men in the office but the men were not good listeners so the story tell it's a performance if you don't have a good listener the story teller can't tell the story so I mean it's my dream that one day I will go and collect these stories taking with me a group of listeners so that we can sit somewhere because the story tellers are still there and but that's a dying breed so that was my experience of the local recording that's a really wonderful narrative because so many things come out of that with regards to the act of ethnography that was in a sense not intentional on your part and it happens in an exchange then that context of recognition and class difference where a narrative is being altered to please the listener to say this is what you need to hear or no this is not what you need to hear this is what you like to hear so I'm going to tell you what you like to hear and in a sense it's about self-censorship right you're kind of self-censoring what your own story is in the process of well not his own story but the story that he knows or for whatever reasons found the euphemisms like when he's talking of sexual relations didn't get married they were sitting on top of a tree they couldn't have got married over there but so it was a very funny very body story he got carried away with it and then he didn't know how to pull back but he did pull back but not enough so as to lose the story entirely okay great um so we have another question from a couple of people and we have the lovely dr nadine zubair if she can make herself known and put this question to you directly nadine are you there can we see you can you yeah there you are can you hear me yes we can hear you we can't see you but we can hear you well that's probably a good thing that was a very very interesting talk perhaps too much for my brain to process so there's strands of it that I picked out um and and I'm utterly fascinated the question I have is someone who's also interested in using folk tales to understand the past is around the practice of it um and and and to think about you know when we look at folk tales I for example used rajar asalu a little bit to look at the the role of uh the carpenter and the blacksmith because I was studying material culture I was studying wood carving from the Punjab and so for me the challenge was pulling out you know the uh the carpenter uh and and and and worried that I would read too much into that you know how and so you're looking at the source you're saying okay it's it's for any steal telling me what the folk tale was and now I am trying to build what a carpenter in the 19th century may have been and I think it's that place where uh I lost it very honestly so in terms of how you work with folk tales in research to make them legitimately inform what you're doing but without reading too much or putting too much of the present into the past I think that's what I'd be interested to learn about if that makes any sense at all yeah it's tricky in the name because uh you know as I pointed out in the beginning that the folk tale is not the sum of people's manners and uh history it is not even an unofficial kind of history uh I think folk tale in the folk tale given our past class structures I mean I'm sure there's a greater significance that I'm not aware of I mean I would have I mean I'm not a folklorist or it's not not prefer and I'd have to do a lot of work on it but they represent the local the working people the lower castes as opposed to the rajas and the even the saints or whatever the brahmins uh so wouldn't I don't know how much you can find out about the historical status of the carpenter from the folk tale he's very much there as part of the social order and has his place in the hierarchy although in the folk tale that hierarchy is a bit is fairly elastic but uh I don't know I think you'd have to be very careful I actually would I'm not knowledgeable enough myself on on this to be able to say anything very useful I would just err on the side of caution because it's very tempting to get hold of an idea and let it run off with you I mean I love to do it myself but academic people perhaps may not be wise if I could follow up on on that so that was a and a footnote in swinerton where he talks about blacksmiths and carpenters having control of magic in villages so it wasn't part of the tale so this is okay okay okay okay but that gives it another dimension because in in in the stories of in english folklore as opposed to european the smith who shows the forces and has the forge he has a certain connection with the natural forces I think it's the combination of fire and heat and so perhaps the smith in the carpenter in the Punjabi folk tale have a certain significance also I mean swinerton was a folklorist so he may have I mean obviously he had more knowledge on that but it wouldn't be fun to find out I think it's very fascinating thank you yesterday as an I do intend to sort of dig more into that maybe I'll contact you for thank you okay great thank you nithine there how there are a number of questions now I can see in the chat box so what I thought neelam we could do is I if I can ask the various people to maybe if we take three or four questions and you if you like I can summarise them for you at the end or if you want to make a note yourself so I will just pick up the questions from the chat box and if you can just come forward with it please that would be great there's a question from mariam mariam would you like to make yourself known and put the question forward yes hello I just want to know if mesilam can recommend a few texts that we can start with if we have no prior familiarity with Punjabi tales your your voice is can you speak a little more clearly I just want to know if you can recommend a few texts that we can start with if we have no prior familiarity with Punjabi tales well if you're looking at Punjabi tales in English then look for are you based in England or in Pakistan Pakistan okay then sange meal has done reprints of the swinerton tales rc temples tales and for any steal you can pick them up from there if you want to spend money you can come and get the book from seamur but ours is an expensive coffee table book which may be you know not a good idea okay thank you okay thanks mariam and I'm really sorry I jumped I missed Mohan there Mohan please would you like to come forward with your question he was ahead of mariam but I hopefully he's still there yeah Mohan would you like to please put your question to to nila yeah and no no problem can you hear me yeah hi dr. nila I'm mariam's friend not a folklorist but um I I've often heard of some of these folk tales in particular the here ranger a story has been interpreted as a sort of you know symbolic uh sufi analogy as well an analogy about the different stations of the sufi wayfaring journey and you know um it's symbolic allegorical way of talking about questions involving you know ascent and descent and you know relationships to the beloved as a as as a figure of god so I'm wondering if if you might be able to comment on this form of uh understanding of interpretation that happens with these folk tales well as compared to epics like here and ranger well my access to here and ranger is in punjabi and I haven't read any translations and but uh yeah the resalu tales if this is what you if I've got your question correctly was documented by the english from the living stream but alongside that the same story the story of resalu's older brother pooran which triggers off the tail actually resalu's adventures has been written by kader yar who is a punjabi poet and it's interesting how similar the texts are of the spoken oral tale and of the written tale so somewhere there is an interaction between the two and uh one of the characteristics because Pakistan Punjab is still I mean all of Pakistan is still basically in a very oral culture there is a lot of improvisation that goes on I mean there's in for instance in the wedding songs it is expected that when the wedding songs are being played the singers will be picking up at ad-libbing improvising and changing the text to suit the situation the bride the bride room etc etc and wedding songs some of them are very charming and lovely and some are very very rude which and I address to the in-laws so there's a lot of ad-libbing there and I think that same tradition I've seen even in the kawalis when there's a kind of mixing and matching going on between say something from khusro being picked up and something else from somewhere else being picked up and those two coming together so this was happening in certainly in the pooran tale with the written text and the oral text and the kind of dialogic relationship between the two but insofar as he is concerned and its interpretations you know poetry is open to multiple interpretations and in urdu and Punjabi poetry certainly there is this ambiguity where your beloved can be your nation it can be your god it can be your physical sexual beloved or it can be anything else that you desire the beloved stands in for the inaccessible object of desire which you strive towards so I mean there are many many interpretations of here some are very orthodox and conventional some are more challenging but one thing that does strike one is that he is the one who has more agency than ranja he is the more of the feminized figure not quite but then here is who is the actor the more agentic person and but I must confess my reading of here has been purely for pleasure I've not read it academically or from the point of view of research and maybe I should and then and then we come and talk about it okay so I think we're we're all thinking ranja ranja kaldi me api here yeah thank you they are the the chat box is exploding we have lots of people which is fantastic there's a question from Serena Serena are you there yeah hi hi Serena are you hear me yes we can hear you thank you very much and professor Nina so I don't know so I don't know very much about uh Punjabi and Punjabi 40 so let's say it's the first time I I hear about this uh but um it happened that I I had the travel to Pakistan two years back so I noticed that in Punjabi culture there is a lot of like in every day Punjabi culture there's a lot of magical elements so it's well reflected in the you know so in the folk piece but I'm I'm trying to read the very sharp version in in English translation obviously so I noticed that there is a lack of these um magical elements so I would like to ask why according to you the author decided not to like reflect the aspect of Punjabi culture which is very much characteristic so I didn't get the question Amna can you help me with this a bit of some in the audience yes sure I think the question is that the the virus Shah version of here uh Raja if I've understood this correctly uh doesn't have um the same element or magical elements that it's a bit more if I if I can interpret it do you mean it's more secularized yeah that's the question you're asking that that virus's version of here Raja is more secular than um than fantastical yeah exactly exactly thank you yeah it's much more realistic than uh let's say secular than magical well Serena virus Shah's here is not a folk tale I mean the folk tale was there the story was there which virus Shah's but virus Shah's is a literary rendition I don't think virus Shah intended to put in the magical element because it would detract from the tale the tale is of the the two protagonists and of society and of social Mars and what impedes their coming together it is also about I mean there are many themes in it I don't have the text in front of me so but it is not a magical romance so to expect a magical romance from what's something that does not intend to have magic in it is uh I think well you're not going to find it there because virus Shah didn't mean it to be there the magical romance is the fairy of folks the folk tale here is a literary epic which is very multilad very open to multiple interpretations but it is a it is not a magical romance so you won't find the magic there okay thank you um and if I can maybe add to what Neelam just said with regards to he rancher coming out of the kisser tradition so the epic in that sense yes it's different the storytelling is different and it's uh and and I think what virus has a very specific virus shadows have a very specific representation of the story there's some interesting um writings on this and scholarship on this that you might be interested in looking at um jivan dual has has written on this and farina mirror is also written on on this so those might be scholars that you'd be interested in following up to to kind of look into it there is the earlier version of here also by the mother samina reman has just pointed it out which is a strongly feminist text I mean here is strong over there and here is the one who's taking on the kazi here is the one who's fighting for her rights her right to marriage of choice her right to do to her own life basically so these were strong texts and I think it would be interesting to explore the the strength of the Punjabi heroine beyond the folk tale also but in the epics also because in sony mahjwal again they're not passive the evidence of the Punjabi epic yeah definitely not and I think also another thing we can think of the sufi tradition because in the sufi tradition I mean it is writing in a different way but also the whole construction of femininity is really interesting and the fact that you have women within the sufi tradition as well who have very a very strong presence and that the gendering of of women within that is is is quite complicated as well so I think there are lots of layers to that story to unpack which which are fascinating as as nilam is pointing out um there are more questions coming up as well as suggestions that are going up in the chat box it's it's good to see the interactivity thank you everyone for being um super involved in this and engaged in a enum sorry enum nasir are you there for your question you say you're in a noisy place so do you want me to put this question across or would you enum we can try would you like to try putting your question across can't be heard okay um we can hear you okay maybe i'll i'll put adam's question i i can't hear adam sunil is it possible to unmute enum yes i've unmuted enum okay this is very noisy here please can you ask okay so i'll ask so she's wondering about the selection of folk tales discussed and if there's a particular inspiration behind the selection and she notes that she enjoyed the framing of laughter particularly people's laughter as anti authority in current times where fascism is on the rise are there any useful lessons that can be drawn from this and is there a greater urgency to start archiving these stories so i think three questions rolled into one i think there's a need to archive the living tradition and letting this this be one of those moments when we stop the flowing stream and say okay at this moment it is like here i would like to find out what if any changes have taken place in it in the folk tale from say when hathoon is not representative because she was not even not even punjabi based so she was using the generic folk tales which are common to the region but to see what changes have occurred since the time the british folklorists recorded these and to now which is the post islamization post salibanization post violent defecation of the entire world has it impacted it on the folk tale or has the folk tale flawed on minding its own business that would be it may well have happened because entertainment channels also moved to away from the folk tale to television and internet and so forth uh what made me select these stories i know that was very deliberate bias i was wanting to i mean i was reading the folk tale and i was getting sick of hearing our tradition and our culture which was being projected increasingly as misogynistic and and being valorized for its misogyny so i picked up stories in which we do have the more feisty positive heroine who saves the prince from his folly and others like and rasalu is fascinating in its own own regard except that in rasalu also rasalu does not force himself on the princess who does not want to marry him first she accosts him in the rani sock nikahani she accosts him she here because there's a prophecy that if rasalu will come and marry the princess and the day rasalu comes some omens are fulfilled so people are expected so there is a rani wanting to know what he's like goes out to the stream to fill water where he's washing his face or something and there she sort of flirts around with him and he ignores her and she speaks to him and he says look i'm a strange man in a strange land and basically he's saying i'm not going to have anything to do with you god knows what i'll trigger off and uh she continues and then he says the lines i voted also rani with your presses lose why did you come on the protest of filling water because by that time he's realized that she's not an ordinary village girl she's a woman of means so i thought let me take these stories and project them there are i feel sorry now i didn't take the stories of the so-called wicked women the witch sorceress women because they too are not evil in that sense basically they one of the things that the panjabi folk evil folk woman does is she gets on to a tree magic sit and the tree flies off with her now the symbolism of something is deeply rooted as a tree flying off with the woman who's also as deeply rooted and forbidden to leave the house and the four walls there's something very energizing about it and in one it's the mother and mother of the prince and his wife who together go visiting and the prince is horrified and basically it's not without my knowledge and permission and these are magical women and in another in which the witch woman does take action against a king and changes him into a dog because as the story unfolds we find that he has done the same to her sister so it's not the kind of unmitigated evil but i wish you know there's a lot of that but annam if your question is answered it was a single-minded agenda at that time to say look our tradition has spicy women who walk out of the house okay um thank you we've got we've got a few suggestions here from nidine about references to tales of the panjab and um there's also some from samina rahman qadir yar translated by toffi graffit and um so thank you thank you for all those suggestions i think we have a hand raised from um rahi rahi are you there yes i'm audible yes you are um thank you for letting me come on and um thank you for a very very enlightening talk and i was um i mean i am particularly interested in your work because um my own um doctor project um here at soas um you know i deal with a lot of the similar questions that you discussed but in the context of a Bengali literary genre called the root kotha which has been commonly translated to English as fairy tales and um you know under props classification would be called um so i basically wanted to focus on one of the questions you discussed which is that of the good woman and the bad woman um and in the field of the root kotha for example because you know that is the field that i'm more familiar with um so um the characters of sure any and the door any which who correspond to the bad woman and the good woman are possibly most remembered female characters um to the point that you know they live on to this day through proverbial usage um and yet you know as you have shown and as i also find um there are such diverse representations of women in the tales um there are women who are constantly transgressing various boundaries set for them and who have not been portrayed even within the tales as necessarily bad women for doing so um so rather than you know see some individual stories as representing feisty women um and this is a question that i obviously think my project can be then think of a methodology of reading these very imaginative texts that can look beyond this extremely limiting binary of the good and the bad yeah yeah yes yeah i think we should because i came picked up the good and bad because i was uh you know looking at it from the Cinderella syndrome right uh angle but the door running and the show running you mention are present in the Punjabi repertoire also right and but then and then i think i've read him in lyle behari day's collection of Bengali folk tales which is quite lovely yes and they i mean the story lines certainly travel across south asia they pick up local characteristics and uh but uh yeah we should we should actually it should it would be fun to look more deeply into into look beyond the binaries and the categories uh which is what struck me when i was reading about the ogar thirya i mean he's really the brothers are nasty pieces of work except that towards the end you feel that you know he's lost everybody he's the five brothers one after the other they've gone his world is destroyed his hunting grounds are gone and rasalu is still chasing him and according to legend he is still hiding in a cave in the uh uh area above near the in their attack in the what is it uh yeah in that area which is prone to earthquakes or seas make rumblings and even now the locals say that it is thirya getting fed up and saying let me out because rasalu put a boulder before him to keep him there so there is a compassionate human dimension and nuance in the fairy tale which we tend to maybe excise thinking that oh it's a fairy tale and these are the goodies and these are the baddies because we are so trained by the Walt Disney tradition perhaps and thinking of goodies and baddies right yes thank you so much okay um great i think that's um really important question about methodology of reading and um something that like Neelam said we can all think about collectively as how how do we uh develop that because reading is so individual to each person and to each the oral storytelling is is obviously a public experience as well as it is a personal experience whereas the modern tale is is being read more in isolation and differently so how do you how do you construct a methodology of reading around an oral um tradition i think that that's something to um yeah to to thrash out and think about and would be certainly fascinating and it seems to seems to me that in those contextualizations of ethnographies of these spoke tales that there is a particular way of reading them that is already representing them to us through um through translations in English and i think what was fascinating throughout all the conversations is is to also listen to Neelam's response as a translator and her own engagement and how that change how meaning shifts and and is constantly in flux in terms of where you are and who you are and who what you're talking to and speaking to so it seems to me that both the storyteller and the listener are both in in kind of constant um interaction with that um i think uh with that we are pretty much at the end of the only person i haven't uh samina i didn't know whether you wanted to ask a question uh you had some comments oh sorry can you can everyone hear me apparently i was okay so i was i was saying i think everyone has asked the questions that were in the chat box i don't know if there's any more questions but i was just wondering if samina wanted to put a question across to you because there was some nice comments and interventions made there in the chat box um samina are you there would you like to say something or are you happy to stay in the chat box okay samina you're showing up so that me are you happy to mohan i'm not dr. neelam i'm plain neelam okay i don't i don't know we can't hear samina so uh can you unmute samina we can't hear you so samina sunil is also saying that you just need to unmute yourself so we can hear you oh great we i think we should be able to hear you now yes i just wanted to say i want to go back to reading the tales again because this has been absolutely fascinating and one needs to go back to the tales and i would like to also go back to kadhiriya and we'll discuss with neelam what she feels about the poetic translation done by by toffee graffat thank you thank you everybody thank you samina um but you like to respond neelam no we look at kadhiriya i i mean i think i had the panjali text and uh we should read it together as far as toffee graffat's translations are concerned his own poetry is far better than his translations i think but i i haven't i can't remember his kadhiriya so maybe i'm wrong but i don't know i'll have to i mean i just can't rule him out in one sentence without going back to his translations but in his own poetry i think he's a fantastic poet great thank you um so that's um really brings us quite nicely i think to the end of the session it's been absolutely fascinating there've been some fantastic questions thank you to all the participants for being very very engaged that's been a wonderful i think part of this experience neelam thank you so much for all the effort that and time that you've spent on preparing this for us i know we've uh we've asked a lot of you for three webinars so this this is a fantastic start and we look forward to the next next two um i hope that you will join join us again and um all that remains is for me to thank neelam for a wonderful and uh thought-provoking conversation about folk tales or wonder tales today i've i've learned a lot i hope i am i think all of you have to and please um please stay tuned for the next one thank you thank you amna thank you everybody i enjoyed it thank you