JOURNAL 
OF THE 
ASIATIC SOCIETY OF BENGAL 
Part I.—HISTORY, LITERATURE, &e. 
Nos. Ill & IV.— 1882 . 
Some Hindu Folksongs from the Punjab.—By Lieut. R. C. Temple, 
B. S. C., F. R. Gr. S., M. R. A. S., &c. 
I have a small collection of 64 songs and catches popularly sung in 
the Pan jab, especially in the Hill District of Kangra and in the neighbour¬ 
ing small Hill State of Chamba. They are, as far as I can gather, genuine 
Panjabi Folklore and have not been previously reduced to writing. As 
they contain many strange idioms and apparently hitherto unrecorded 
phrases and words they appear to be worthy of a place in the pages of this 
Journal. 
The language in some of them is Hindi, but many of them are in the 
current village Panjabi of the day. Those from Kangra and Chamba, 
though containing dialectic words and forms, do not differ in the main in 
language from those from the plains of the Panjab. 
In the “ Calcutta Review” for the present year I have treated these songs 
from a sociological point of view, giving metrical renderings of them all 
and endeavouring to show how they explain the manners, customs and 
thoughts of those who composed and sing them. I will therefore here 
confine myself to viewing them as specimens of language. 
I give them here in the Roman character, being that in which they 
were recorded. I have been moved, moreover, to this course because of 
the unsatisfactory nature of “munshis’” ideas regarding the “improve¬ 
ment” of the vulgarisms of folklore, which render it unsafe to entrust any 
of them, even natives of the neighbourhood, with the task of recording 
songs in Nagari, Gurmuklff, or Persian characters. # 
* In this paper adjunct consonants are distinguished from, conjunct consonants by- 
being divided by an apostrophe, thus mil’na = but unha n = [See 
Hoernle’s Gauclian Grammar, §§ 3-6. Ed.] 
TJ 
