Raja Rasalu
Puran's half-brother, the hero-king of Sialkot who fought giants, played chaupar with kings and rode his horse Fauladi across the Salt Range.
Raja Rasalu is the son born to Luna, the queen who wronged Puran Bhagat, by the blessing of Puran himself. He grows into the great hero of the northern Punjab: an archer, a gambler, a slayer of the man-eating giants who demanded a victim each day from the villages of the Salt Range, and a king whose horse Fauladi could talk.
His legends are scattered over the landscape of the Pothohar and the Margalla hills: the giants' bones, turned to stone, are shown in the hills; caves and springs carry his name; at Gandgarh and Murti the people point to the places where he fought. In one famous episode he plays chaupar against Raja Sirikap, staking his own head, and wins with the help of a magic rat; in another, his wife Kokilan's infidelity ends in tragedy.
Collected by British folklorists like Richard Temple in the 1880s and sung by bards in the north-west for centuries before that, the Rasalu cycle preserves something of the world before the Gurus, when the hills around Taxila were the frontier of epic, and kings fought monsters at the edge of the plain.
More qisse
The great tragedy of Punjab: Heer of Jhang and the flute-playing Ranjha of Takht Hazara, parted by family and poisoned at the end.
▶ Watch
The darkest of the legends: the Kharal archer Mirza rides off with Sahiban, who breaks his arrows while he sleeps.
▶ Watch
Sohni, a potter's daughter of Gujrat, swims the Chenab each night on a clay pot to meet Mahiwal, until the pot is swapped for an unbaked one.
▶ Watch
Sassi follows her kidnapped husband Punnun barefoot across the desert of Thal until the sand swallows her.
▶ Watch
Prince Puran of Sialkot, falsely accused by his stepmother, is mutilated and thrown into a well, and rises as a holy man.
▶ Watch
The Robin Hood of the bar: a Bhatti Rajput who defied Akbar, rescued kidnapped girls and is sung of at every Lohri fire.
▶ Watch
The ballad of the outlaw of Maur in the Malwa, who took to the jungle to avenge his brother and robbed the rich.
▶ Watch
The ballad of the man from Samaon who killed for his family's honour and was hunted as an outlaw.