Preface
This is the
thirty-seventh book, in serial order, compiled
under the Sindhi Adabi Board’s Folklore and
Literature Project, approved in 1956 for the
collection, compilation and publication of
Sindhi Folk Lore.
The work on this
project was started in January1957, and the
first two years were devoted mainly to the
collection of the oral tradition and the written
record. The oral tradition was reduced to
writing through a net-work of field workers, one
stationed in each taluka area. The compilation
and publication work commenced from 1959. So
far, 31 volumes have been published and this is
the thirty-second of the forty volumes proposed
to be published under this project.
This book belongs
to the series of volumes pertaining to the most
popular and time-honoured folk stories which
have captured the imagination of the people of
the Lower Indus Valley of Sind for the last one
thousand years. Of the ten volumes in this
series, seven (Books 29 to 35) are devoted to
the stories of love and romance: one (Book 36)
recounts the story of personal valour and the
inventive technique bywhich the hero killed a
sea monster by diving deep in a specially built
“Glass-Capsule Machine”; while this volume
pertains to the story of a village girl who
resists the overtures of a king and the
temptation to live in the palace as a queen, and
prefers to be in the simple rural environment
with her own village folk.
Marui, a beautiful
village maid of Khaur (situated in the Desert
Division of the present Tharparkar district of
Sind) was betrothed to Khet whose rival Phoag
went to the court of King Umar Soomaro at
Umarkote, and spoke of the beauty of Marui in
such glowing terms that the king himself rode
out to the village and brought Marui to Umarkote
where he persuaded her to give her consent to
marry him. Marui refused.
The king tried his
best to make her understand that she would be
the queen living in the palace, and that she
could have golden ornaments, silken apparel,
tasteful dishes, fruits of all kind, maid
servants and everything else she wanted. To
these offers, Marui would always reply that she
preferred the hamlet of the poor with sand dunes
around to the palace and the gardens; coarse
clothes and the loee headwear (made of the
coarse woolen thread); the loaf of bread made
out of the grass seed to the rich dishes;
chibhar, golara and other wild fruit to the
mangoes and pomegranates. So far as the golden
ornaments were concerned:
It’s not the
custom of my maru folk
To exchange kith
and kin for gold.
Now Umar was a
just king and he did not want to force his will
on Marui. In the mean while, witness affirmed
that Marui was, infact, related to Umar as a
sister. Umar believed this, bestowed all the
favours on Marui, and sent her ack honourably to
her village folk, where she joined Khet and
lived happily in the rural environment of her
village home.
A number of
accounts of the story were collected through
oral tradition, besides the two versions of it
recorded in the two historical works, viz.
Tarikh-i-Tahiri (compiled in 1030 H/1621) and
Tuhfat al-Kiram (1180-81 H/1766-67). The story
originated probably during the Soomara period
(1050-1350 A.D) of Sind history and was already
well-known in the 16th century when
in 1590 it was artistically narrated and sung by
a group of the Sindhian bards before the Mughal
Emperor Akbar, who having himself been born in
Umarkote, had inquired about it from Mirza Jani
Beg, the then vanquished ruler of Sindh.
The points of
impact of the story in the local cultural
context are:
__ Strong
patriotic love for one’s own homeland.
__ Resistance of
all temptations for luxuries and preference to
live a simple life in natural rural environment.
__ Exemplary
behaviour of a just king who did not force his
will on an unwilling maid.
N.A. Baloch
Director
University of
Sindh,
Hyderabad.
February 19,1963.
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