THE POPULAR RELIGION OF INDIA.* Tins is a book of
exceeding interest to many besides the mere students of mythology or folk-lore. It is a picture, for at least a large portion of its field, of what may be called the last living Paganism of the world. That which is dying out in Australasia, in the Pacific Islands, in the American con- tinents ; that which, reduced for the most part to the lowest fetishism, is receding day by day in Africa before the Euro- pean or the Arab, is still in India alive, growing, self-multi- tiplying. Mr. Crooke begins by warning us that with "the great gods of Hindooism, the supreme triad, Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, and other deities of the higher class which collectively constitute the Hindoo official Pantheon," he has " little concern. They are the deities of the richer or higher classes, and to the ordinary peasant of Northern India are little more than a name." What the peasant worships are,—first the devatas, which Mr. Crooke translates "godlings" as distinguished from the devas or gods, those of nature—some pure, some impure—the sun, the moon, the eclipse, the earth, rivers, and streams, whether of good or ill-omen, water-gods (the special god of water being a Hindooised Mussulman saint), water-demons, flood-demons, wells, waterfalls, lakes, tanks, mountains, hills, rocks, air-spirits, demons of the hail and whirlwind ; then heroic and village godlings, the number of whom " is immense, and their functions. and attributes so varied, that it is extremely difficult to classify them." With these Mr. Crooke classes the "mothers," of whom eight are usually counted as great, others being so numerous that about one hundred and forty have been reckoned in Gujarat alone, the class including the jungle-mothers, the mother of births, the mother of hunger, and, greatest of all for the Rajputs, the mother of the gods ; then come the godlings of disease, the most familiar of whom is Sitala (" she who loves the cool ") ; the small-pox goddess, eldest of a group of sisters presiding over pustular diseases, whose antagonist in Bengal is Shasthi, special guardian of children; with the minor godlings of malaria, of fever, of the itch, &c.; Harda, the great god of cholera, and several other cholera godlings ; the cattle-plague godling, &c.; connected with these is the godling of the cremation-ground. Then we have two great tribes of local objects of worship,—the sainted dead on the one hand, the malevolent dead on the other. Among the former are many Mahommedan " Pirs " or " Sayyads," who. are equally worshipped by Mussulmans and low -class Hindoos. (One of these, Baba Paid, for the last thirty years of his life "supported himself by holding to his stomach wooden cakes and fruits whenever he felt hungry."). Of minor saints the number is legion, and the worship. of the saint shades off easily into that of his shrine and tomb. The malevolent dead, generally termed Bhut, pass up by rising malignity into Rakshasas, ogres, and into. demons, " known as Deo, Dano, or Bir." Then cornea the worship of trees, serpents, animals, or even their trappings, e.g., the horse or its bridle, the ass, the lion, the tiger—which rises into a godling—the dog, the cow, the bull, the elephant, the alligator, to say nothing of certain obscene worships largely practised, which Mr. Crooke pretermits. And this vast jungle, so to speak, of cults must be viewed as in, a state of perpetual flux of growth and decay ; old worships withering, dying down, new ones rising up, spreading, en... oroaching. The sun and moon, great gods of the Vedic age, An Introduction to the Popular Religion and Folklore of Northern India. By Crooke, 13,A., Bengal OlVil SOrYi00. Allnhabad: The Government Prom 1886. have sunk to be mere godlings. Indra, the old Vedic weather- god, has been completely elbowed out as an object of worship by special rain-gods. On the other hand, mere heroes of the Mali6l3harat, posterior by centuries to the 'Vedas, have risen to be divinities widely worshipped. Mere village god- lings preside now over one, now over several villages, in at least a couple of instances over provinces. The great god of cholera in Northern India, Harda or Hardaur, has grown out of an actual historical personage of the reign of Akbar, and is. " worshipped in nearly every village in Upper India," though in Hoshungabad his worship " has fallen into great neglect of late, the repeated recurrence of cholera having shaken the belief in the potency of his influence." In his "native land of Bundelkhand" indeed, he is a "wedding god- ling." It is sufficient for deification not only that a man should have been "eminent or notorious," but that he should have " died in some extraordinary or tragical way." Ganga Nath, a rajah's son, who had quarrelled with his father and become a religious mendicant, intrigued with the wife of an astrologer, who murdered them both. Numerous temples have been erected to both of them. Besides this example, the " quite recent" canonisation at Meerut of " one Gauhar Shah because he made a prophecy that a windmill belonging to a certain Mr. Smith would soon cease to work," which took place accordingly, becomes comparatively reasonable. A variously composed group of " Five Saints," Mahommedans, are "largely" worshipped among the lower Hindoo castes, and the same title is applied to five Raj put heroes. On the other hand, a noted local Hindoo saint of the twelfth century, Guga Bir, is worshipped also by Mahommedans, and his cult runs into snake-worship. But in the " struggle for existence" cults often die away, as Mr. Crooke says :— " The competition is in fact so keen, and the pecuniary value of a successful institution of the kind so considerable, that the saint has to give unequivocal proof of his presence and influence in order to secure that continuous respect which is readily accorded to respectable ancient saints and local godlings who have in an extended course of usefulness established their claim to recogni- tion by a series of exhibitions of their thaumaturgic virtues."
Thus, "discredited saints and shrines are always passing into contempt and oblivion,—new worthies are being con- stantly canonised." And meanwhile every object of worship which rises into special prominence is adopted into the Brahmanic system. A deified ghost of the aboriginal races becomes a new manifestation of Siva. Two malignant goddesses come to be recognised among the numerous forms of Devi. Bhumiya, godling of the soil, has in Patna begun to be identified with Vishnu. Bhairon, another godling of the land, has become " Bhairava, the terrible one, one of the most awful forms of Siva." Sitalfi, the small-pox goddess, is "promoted into some form of Kali or Devi." A cholera goddess, known as Mari or Mari Mai, becomes Mari Bhavani when promoted to Brahmanism. And this, whilst Christian missionaries are counting the heads of their converts, is assimilating whole races. The feeling against the killing of cows is, for instance, spreading " rapidly " among " the Dravidian races of Central India, as they are gradually being converted to Brahmanism." Nay, we are ourselves adding to the Indian pantheon :— " The tomb of an English lady is worshipped at Bhandfira, in the Central Provinces; the tomb of an English officer near the fort of Bijaygher, in the Aligher district, was, when I visited it some years ago, revered as the shrine of the local village god; there is a similar case at Rawulpindi."
Is it any consolation to be told that " the ghosts of the European dead, who are constantly deified," are "nearly always" comparatively harmless and even benevolent P Even the " always," it will be observed, is qualified, and the writer of this notice has heard that in at least one Madras collectorate the spirit of a harsh settlement officer of the first half of the century is worshipped as a powerful and malignant demon. Again, in quite another field of thought, the Times told us the other day that the Queen's statue at Madras had become an object of worship. There was a time when we Feringhis not only officially recognised but enforced Indian polytheism. In 1828, when we first took possession of Hoshungabad, the dis- trict officers were directed to force the village headmen to set up altars to Harda (the cholera god), in every village," as it was found that the cultivators " ran away if their fears of epidemics were not calmed by the respect paid to their local gods." And to this day native worships will be found blending with the machinery of our Administration. Thus " Government vaccinators earn a considerable sum yearly by executing the Sitalti, worship" (SHEIK it will be recollected, is the small-pox goddess), "and when a child is vaccinated, a portion of the service is performed." A curious point in medical casuistry, it will be seen, is raised by such a practice, supposing the operators not to believe in the efficacy of the service ; whilst it is obvious that vaccination itself must thereby tend to become, in the eyes of Sitahi's devotees, merely a new act of worship.
Mr. Crooke's book may be said indeed to be "dark with ex- cess of light." It is so crowded with curious and interesting detail that it becomes a strain on the mind to follow it. Yet after reading it comes the crashing thought that it deals only with Northern India, and that Southern India, never fully conquered by Brahmanism, must contain material for an equally instructive and a larger volume.
In the meanwhile, the work should be made a text-book at every missionary college which trains men for India. You can never really convert people till you understand them. A polytheism so receptive as that of India is supremely delusive to ardent ignorance. You think to grasp it, and lo I your arms have embraced nothing but Milyg, the eternal illusion. Did not a missionary only the other day tell his colleagues that caste reigns yet supreme over the ordinary life of their converts, through the device of excepting education, religious worship, the very sacraments, from the sources of caste- pollution P
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