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ڪتاب: عمر - مارئي

باب: -

صفحو :37

 

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.1

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.


1 In some versions of the story, Khet would not believe that she remained faithful to him during her stay with the king, where upon the heart broken Marui died on the spot.

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