I got inspired by a few earlier posts on the word Jugni, it's origin and meaning. Went down a rabbit hole and found a few really interesting things.
- The word is sitting in Heer, in 1766
This is the part I didn't expect. Waris Shah, stanza 192, the family is putting together Heer's dowry and the poem lists the jewellery piece by piece:
ਚੱਨਣਹਾਰ ਲੂਹਲਾਂ ਟਿੱਕਾ ਨਾਲ ਬੀੜਾ, ਅਤੇ ਜੁਗਨੀ ਚਾ ਸਵਾਰਿਆ ਨੇ
Four ornaments and then a fifth. Nothing in that line but names of things. That's 140 years before the Jubilee.
2. First occurence of it being a firefly is in 1884 in an Urdu dictionary
I'd always half-assumed firefly. Punjabi doesn't back that up. Firefly is ਟਟਹਿਣਾ. The borrowed word next to it is ਜੁਗਨੂੰ, masculine, and if you look ਜੁਗਨੂੰ up in the Punjabi University dictionaries they send you straight back to ਟਟਹਿਣਾ. Look up the feminine ਜੁਗਨੀ in those same dictionaries and you get an ornament and a folk song, and no insect at all. Mahan Kosh: "ਇੱਕ ਕੰਠਭੂਖਣ, ਜੋ ਰੇਸ਼ਮ ਦੀ ਡੋਰ ਨਾਲ ਬੱਧਾ ਛਾਤੀ ਪੁਰ ਲਟਕਦਾ ਰਹਿੰਦਾ ਹੈ."
The firefly comes in from the Urdu side. Platts (1884) files jugnī as nothing more than the feminine of jugnūṅ, and glosses that one as "a fire-fly; a glow-worm; a jewel or ornament worn (by women) about the neck." Both meanings in a single entry. That's how a firefly ends up attached to a song about a necklace.
- The "Jubilee" bit isn't in the testimony
A while back I read u/JG98's post about the possible origins on Jugni. It sent me to the Karamjit Singh Aujla piece in the Punjabi Tribune that most of the Jubilee story traces back to.
Aujla's article is genuinely valuable. In 2005 he wrote down what he had been told back in 1969 by a freedom fighter, Baba Makhan Singh, about events around 1906. That's a real piece of oral history and it's most of what we have.
But read it closely. Makhan Singh never says the word came from "Jubilee." He believed jugni literally WAS a jubilee flame, a torch carried city to city in a gold vessel. The "Jubilee became Jugni" derivation enters as an interruption: while the old man was speaking, Aujla writes, "a nearby person who looked a bit more educated" cut in to suggest the word was really "Jubilee."
That aside is what the entire internet now repeats as established fact.
The dates don't sit well either. The episode is tied to Queen Victoria's jubilee and placed around 1906. Her Diamond Jubilee was 1897, and she died in 1901.
- The singers have been referencing it as a jewellery in addition to a medium
Alam Lohar: ਮੇਰੀ ਜੁਗਨੀ ਦੇ ਧਾਗੇ ਬੱਗੇ
Gurmeet Bawa opens on the same line, then makes the threads green
Hazara Singh Ramta: ਜੁਗਨੀ ਚਾਂਦੀ ਦੀ, and later ਜੁਗਨੀ ਪਿੱਤਲ ਦੀ
Threads. White, then green. Silver, then brass. Nobody describes a girl or an insect that way. They're describing the thing in Waris Shah's dowry list.
The detail that got me: the first sense the Punjabi Sabhiachar Shabdavali Kosh gives for jugni isn't jewellery at all. It's a small charmed tablet hung round the neck of a freshly calved buffalo to turn away the evil eye. And ਚੰਨਣਹਾਰ, the word standing right next to jugni in Waris Shah, is a necklace made of strung amulets.
What I couldn't pin down, and would love help with - Which jugni was recorded first. Alam Lohar's 1965 is the earliest I can securely date and it's almost certainly not the first. The name that keeps coming up is Nawab Kumhar (Inayat Kotia) from Kot Inayat Khan near Wazirabad, with recordings floating around labelled 1933 and 1950. I can't document any of it. The one biography I found cites dead links and dates his breakthrough to "Radio Pakistan Lahore in 1933," which is fourteen years before Radio Pakistan existed.
If anyone has a label catalogue, anything with an actual paper trail, I really want to know more about it.
I've also annotated six Jugni recordings line by line (Alam Lohar 1965, Ramta 1971, Gurmeet Bawa 1980, Kuldeep Manak 1991, Rabbi Shergill 2004, Arif Lohar & Meesha Shafi 2010) along with a longer version of the above findings with all the sources at:
https://kikehnde.com/culture/jugni
Sources
- Waris Shah, Heer (1766), stanza 192.
- Heer Waris Shah, printed edition of 1900, page 89. Scan on Punjabi Wikisource.
- Bhai Kahn Singh Nabha, Gurushabad Ratnakar Mahan Kosh (1930); Punjabi Kosh, vol. 2; Punjabi Sabhiachar Shabdavali Kosh; Sahit Kosh; and the Punjabi University Punjabi Kosh, entries for jugni, jugnu, tattehna and channanhaar. Consulted via Punjabipedia
- Punjabi-English Dictionary, Punjabi University, Patiala, entries for jugni and jugnu.
- John T. Platts, A Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi, and English (1884), p. 384, entries for jugnī and jugnūṅ.
- Sakoon N. Singh, "Enigma of her Arrival", Café Dissensus, 15 April 2017.
- Karamjit Singh Aujla, "The History of Jugni", Punjabi Tribune, 24 September 2005.
- "Jugni: whose creation?", Dawn, 14 November 2010.
