Punjabi folklore

[3] Richard Carnac Temple argued in his 1884 work, The Legends of the Punjab, that the plot structure of Punjabi folktales and bardic poetry was indistinguishable from one another, albeit with the bardic poems being more textually conservative (as they had been governed by metre and rhyme due to being in verse form).

(Temple, v-vi)Punjabi folktales commonly incorporate stories involving animals which teach a moral lesson.

[5] Other prevalent themes found within Punjabi folklore is a suspcision of those in positions of power, and folly & pretense used for derision.

[5] The heroine in Punjabi folktales (a pari/fairy or a princess) can be found inside a fruit or vegetable, which they are named after, or in the form of an animal, such as a mammal (monkey or goat) or a bird (swan or peacock/peahen).

[6][7] Academic folkloristic research into and the collecting of the large corpus of Punjabi folktales began during the colonial-era by Britishers, such as Flora Annie Steel's three papers on her studies of local Punjabi folktales (1880), with a translation of three fables into English,[2] Richard Carnac Temple's The Legends of the Punjab (1884), Flora Annie Steel's Tales of the Punjab (1894), and Charles Frederick Usborne's Panjabi Lyrics and Proverbs (1905).