Literary products constitute one of the most dynamic aspects of culture due to the fact that they attempt to capture the totality of life at the level of imagination which in no way means disconnect with prosaicness of historical experience of everyday life. In ancient cultures all over the world, oral tradition was predominant which preserved and transmitted literature orally from generation to generation. There is ample evidence to assert that despite the ravishes of time a huge amount of textual material have come down to us from the Americas, Europe, Africa and Asia due to deep roots of oral traditions spawning over millennia.

Communication through vocal utterance is in fact a primitive technique that did wonders in transmitting to posterity what was worth preserving. This technique was honed and strengthened with the help of mnemonic devices which proved incredibly effective in safeguarding for us a treasure trove of religious and secular literature. It was oral transmission which initially preserved Greek myths and Homer’s tales, Indian mythology and scriptures, Torah and ancient Jewish literature, the Holy Bible and early Christian texts, and pre-Islamic Arabic poetry and the Holy Quran. The presence of oral tradition in a society does not necessarily imply absence of writing. It may continue to be employed in parallel to a writing system.

Punjab, the heir to glorious Harappa civilisation, can rightly boast of a long literary history spanning over at least five thousand years. Punjab’s modern literary history has its origins in the eleventh century when the contemporary Punjabi language began taking shape. In the modern Punjab orality and literacy, speech and written word have coexisted. A complex process of transformation of orality into writing and writing into orality has been witnessed during the last one thousand years in Punjab. Legend of Raja Salwan of Sialkot and his sons, Puran Bhagat and Raja Risalu, for example, came from the ancient oral lore and got penned by classical poets. We first hear of it from the ruins of Raja Sirkap (1st century AD) in Taxila who played a game of chess with Risalu. Sirkap, despite all his obnoxious tactics and foul play, lost the game as well as his life due to the rules of the game he himself had set. The legend grew speech turned into written word.

On the contrary, classical tales such as Heer Ranjha, Sohni Mahinwal, Sassi Punnu and Sahiban Mirza etc despite their nebulous origins got life and fame as texts, and versions derived from these texts morphed into oral lore. All the texts, literary and non-literary, before the availability of modern printing facilities in the early 19th century, were handwritten and thus limited in number apart from being expensive. It wasn’t arduous task to preserve and transmit the poetic texts because the rhythms and metric arrangement employed in their composition made it easier for the people and tradition bearers to sing them, commit them to memory and make them part of the discourse of everyday life. One can still find people though in dwindling number who can recite Waris Shah’s Heer in its entirety from memory. But such an act involved an imperceptible process of addition and deletion notwithstanding the highly reliable computer-like memory of the tradition bearers and their mastery over communication skills.

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During the Raj period when scholars and publishers began collecting classical literary material from the minstrels, bards, singers and storytellers, they found out from the internal evidence that tales, which were in fact texts memorised, were generally incomplete or in fragments showing that they had been tampered with.

The phenomenon became visible to the discerning eye of scholars such as R.C. Temple and Mohan Singh and Sheikh Abdul Aziz Bar at Law. So the oral tradition preserved the classical texts but also made them fragmented and loaded with interpolations. Again the scholars made efforts to tally the collected material from oral sources with written texts, original or copied when and where available. Consequently, the problem of preserving the classical texts became complex. It required and still requires search for the original or reliable copied texts, editing, annotating and preparing the glossaries.