Gûga Pîr.
Another noted local saint is Gûga Pîr, also known as Zâhir Pîr, “the saint apparent,” or Zâhir Dîwân, “the minister apparent,” or in the Panjâb as Bâgarwâla, as his grave is near Dadrewa in Bikâner, and he is said to have reigned over the Bâgar or great prairies of Northern Râjputâna. Nothing is known for certain about him, and the tales told of him are merely a mass of wild legends. According to some he flourished somewhere about the middle of the twelfth century, when Indian hagiolatry was at its zenith. Others say that he was a Chauhân Râjput, a contemporary of Prithivî Râja of Delhi, while by another story he died with his forty-five sons and sixty nephews opposing Mahmûd of Ghazni. He is said to have been a Hindu with the title of Gûga Bîr, or “the hero”; and one account represents him to have become a convert to Islâm. “He is said to have killed his two nephews and to have been condemned by their mother to follow them below. He attempted to do so, but the earth objected that he being a Hindu, she was quite unable to receive him till he should be properly burnt. As he was anxious to revisit his wife nightly, this did not suit him, and so he became a Musalmân, and her scruples being thus removed, the earth swallowed him and his horse alive.”[61] In another and more degraded form of the legend current in Muzaffarnagar, he is said to have jumped into a pile of cow-dung, where he disappeared, a series of stories which remind us of the Curtius myth.[62]
Another elaborate legend represents Gûga to be the son of the Rânî Bâchhal, and fixes his birthplace at Sirsâwa in the Sahâranpur District. About the time of the invasion of Mahmûd of Ghazni, she married Vatsa, the Râja of Bâgardesa, or the Râjputâna desert. By the influence of that ubiquitous saint, Gorakhnâth, she conceived in spite of the intrigues of her sister, and her child was called Gûga, because the saint gave to his mother, as a preservative, a piece of gum resin known as Gûgal. His cousins attacked him and tried to rob him of his kingdom, but Gûga defeated them and cut off their heads, which he presented to his mother. She, in her anger, ordered him to go to the place where he had sent her nephews; so he requested the earth to receive him into her bosom, which she refused to do until he became a convert to Islâm. He then went to Mecca, and became a disciple of one Ratan Hâji, and on his return the earth opened and received him, with his famous black mare Javâdiyâ.[63]
The mare has, of course, a story of her own. Gûga had no children, and lamenting this to his guardian deity, he received from him two barley-corns, one of which he gave to his wife and the other to his famous mare, which gave birth to his charger, hence called Javâdiyâ or “barley-born.” We find this wonderful mare through the whole range of folk-lore, but the best parallel to her is the famous mare of Gwri of the golden hair, and Setanta in the Celtic tale.[64]
From Scotland, too, we get a parallel to the magic birth: “Here are three grains for thee that thou shalt give thy wife this very night, and three others to the dog, and these three to the mare; and these three thou shalt plant behind thy house; and in their own time thy wife will have three sons, the mare three foals, and the dog three puppies, and there will grow three trees behind thy house; and the trees will be a sign, when one of thy sons dies one of the trees will wither.”[65] It is needless to say that this is a stock incident in folk-lore.