THE FESTIVAL OF JUGGERNATH.
MHE power of genius to see with the imagination things 1 actually existing but not present to the bodily sight has received this week a curious illustration. The able correspondent of the Times sends from Calcutta an account of a shocking scene which he himself had just witnessed at the festival of Juggernath, some sixteen miles from the Indian metropolis, the self-immolation of three victims beneath the wheels of a large car, larger than most London houses, a vast house in fact of wood seventy feet high and twenty square, rising tier above tier to the idol's throne, and loaded at every stage with colossal figures, and Brahmins who look from below scarcely larger than children.
"Far as the eye could reach the throng extended, and when a thou- sand gongs were set beating and the Brahmins called upon the people a thrill of wild excitement ran through this enormous living mass. The ropes were fixed, and multitudes rushed to them, eager for the honour of pulling their deity along. On the car itself there could scarcely have been less than 200 men. Perhaps there wore 1,000 pulling at the ropes, but they pulled for a long time in vain. The car had been in one place for a whole year, and bad made a deep hole for itself by its great weight. Again and again the Brahmins shouted and gesticulated, laugh- ing among themselves. At last the mob happened to pull together instead of one after the other, and the huge mass moved forward a few yards, groaning as if it had been a living creature. It stopped, and for a few minutes the crowd stood in almost perfect silence. Then the Brahmins again gave the signal, and this time it crushed out a life with every revolution of its hideous wheels, covered as they were with human flesh and gore. The vast multitude seemed suddenly possessed with a fit of delirium. They fought and struggled with each other to get near the car, which had stopped as if by magic. They stooped down, and peered beneath its wheels, and rose with scared faces to tell their friends of the sight. I made my way to the back of the car, and there saw upon the ground a very old woman, all wrinkled and puckered up, with scarcely a lineament of her face recognizable for blood and dust. Ber right foot was hanging by a thread, the wheels had passed over the centre of her nearly naked body, and a faint quiver of anguish ran through her frame as she seemed to struggle to rise. Not one in the crowd offered to move her, or raise her miserable grey head from the ground, but they stood looking on with vacant stares, while the Brahmins from the car gazed down with as much unconcern as could well be written upon a human countenance. The mob cried that there were more under the car, and when I looked beneath it seemed as if the wheels were choked with dusky bodies. Two or three chokeydars here made their appearance, and compelled the crowd to move back. Upon getting closer to the wheels I saw that one of them was half over the body of a man, and that it had crushed out his bowels, and fastened itself like some insatiable monster in his blood. Close by him there lay another man crushed to death—he was but a heap of mangled flesh. The Brahmins still looked down from the car upon these poor wretches with perfect unconcern, and were even signalling for the crowd to pull
againSo writes the man of the world, intent on writing colloquially and strictly suppressing excitement and indignation lest he should be suspected of over-colouring a horror too real and too deep for sensational description. We can vouch, knowing the scene pain- fully well, that it is on the whole undertoned, that the writer has deliberately reported the occurrence as he might any tragedy per- formed in Europe, has softened a hundred tints which would have increased the luridness of his picture at the expense to English eyes of his apparent fairness. Now compare that account with another of precisely the same scene. Sixty-three years ago Southey, who had never been in India, who had probably never seen a Hindoo, -certainly had never seen any ceremonial in any way approaching, or resembling, or even suggesting the festival of Juggernath, inserted in the " Curse of liehama " these remarkable lines :—
" A thousand pilgrims strain Arm, shoulder, breast, and thigh, with might and main, To drag that sacred wain, And scarce can draw along the enormous load. Prone fall the frantic votaries in its road, And calling on the God, Their self-devoted bodies there they lay To pave his chariot-way. On Jaga-Nant they call, The ponderous Car rolls on, and crushes all. Through flesh and bones it ploughs its dreadful path. Groans rise unheard: the dying cry, And death and agony Are trodden under foot by you mad throng, Who follow close, and thrust the deadly wheels along.
"Downward they dare not look, for there Is death, and horror, and despair; Nor can her patient looks to Heaven repair, For the huge Idol over her, in air, Spreads his seven hideous heads, and wide Extends their snaky necks on every side ; And all around, behind, before The Bridal Car, is the raging rout, With frantic shout, and deafening roar, Tossing the torches' flames about. And the double doable peals of the dram are there, And the startling burst of the trumpet's blare ; And the gong, that seems with its thunders dread To astound the living, and waken the dead. The ear-strings throb as if they were rent, And the eyelids drop as stunned and spent. Fain would the Maid have kept them fast, But open they start at the crack of the blast."
Which is the more accurate, taken merely as a bit of reporting, the minute, carefully toned account of the keen-eyed correspondent, whose special business it is to be at once accurate and pictorial,
and who succeeds so well in that business, or the verse of the seclu- ded poet writing by the light of imagination only of the same scene sixteen thousand miles away, in a land where everything from the sky to the vegetation is alien to the scenery of the East, him- self one of a race to whom of all men the life of Asia is incompre- hensible? We do not know in the whole range of literature a stranger instance of literary insight as applied to facts, of that power which seems given to some men of calling up by the aid of a few dry words of description the living reality which they have never seen. Southey had read much, but let the average student toil through his materials—they are collected in the large edition of his works—and build the scene those dry words suggest to him,
and then apply the test we have applied, place the picture by the photograph, and see how he will fail. Southey has not succeeded always, there are details even here unwarranted, but if an English- man wishes to understand the spirit rather than the details of Hindooism, to know why a faith utterly base as well as evil still sways the imaginations of a hundred millions of men, he will find no guide, not even the three forgotten volumes of Ward's wonder- ful book " On the Hindoos," quite equal to the dreamy epic which, in impatience of a couleur locale they do not perceive, men are ceasing to read.
Southey wrote of course of the night scene before the great temple in Orissa, the Calcutta correspondent of the second greatest festival, the one held near Serampore by daylight. The worship of Juggernath was once probably conterminous with Hindooism, but Hindoos like the Southern Italians give their gods local im- portance, and in most parts of India the worship is a mere farce, the car a toy drawn by village children, the festival a mere excuse for a village fair. There are we think out of Orissa but three places where it is conducted with its old pomp, and of these the most important is Serampore, where the efforts of the Baptist Mis- sionaries for half a century have shaken the faith of half the popu- lation, and of course intensified the fanaticism and the energy of the Brahmins and peril pretre, a party which in India as every- where else draws its resources from the devotion of rich widows and the fears of men who, only half believing, still hope that they may find in conciliating the Church some means of expiation for evil lives. The local importance of the festival is increased by the fact that some twelve years ago the gods quarrelled, the sister Radha refusing to let her brother visit her,—at all events until his priests could come to some arrangement about the division of the offerings. It seemed as if the festival with its iniquities might cease, when a great landowner, since condemned to transportation for forgery, stepped forward, built a second car, ran himself naked in front of it, and more than revived the worship. It is characteristic of Hindooism that this man while spending thousands to secure himself expiation had the car painted so obscenely that the magistrate peremptorily interfered, and it is characteristic of the British Government that he could not now interfere, a special act drawn up to put down Holywell Street specially legalizing in so many words obscenity within and without temples, holy places, and sacred representations. The festival is now attended by about a hundred and twenty thousand persons, who in the intervals of adoration and excitement throng about a rude fair, chiefly of children's toys. " It was a barbarous copy of a country fair. There were whistles and tom-toms, shell-fish smell- ing horribly in the sun, huge ' jack' fruit, some damaged pine- apples, and here and there a rudely contrived merry-go-round,' with stout baboos enjoying the sport which that machine is capable of furnishing. There were match girls, hideously ugly, chanting their drawling, monotonous strains to the music of an old fiddle and a tom-tom. Then there were little acrobats, who made Catherine wheels' like the boys who ran, or used to run, by the
side of omnibuses in London streets. There was also a stereoscope, with views of the last Great Exhibition on show at one pice each person. The confusion was indescribable." The writer should have added that the entire scene, the car towering up into the sky, the crowd, the priests, and the fair, the shrieking bellowing devotees, (no small proportion of them mad drunk with hemp), the thousands of women in transparent muslin—the higher the rank the bolder the nudity—the whole picture, which would have given the German
artist hints for his " Dance of Death," is shut in in a frame, a belt of deep green forest, closing round on all sides, and in its coolness deepening the insufferable glare. He might have added, too, that the tragedy he describes must have taken place at the very gate of the largest Christian village in the district, a great green lawn studded with cottages, where live two hundred converts, frail enough no doubt in many respects, but regarding this Pandemonium with as deep an abhorrence as Englishmen can feel.
The central features of the scene, the self-immolations, are not very frequent. They are strictly prohibited by law, but one occurred a few years since, and the priests were put under recognizances ; another was suspected shortly after but hushed up by heavy bribes to the police, as this one, but for the presence of a European, would also have been. The suggestion of the Times that these sacrifices are the tests of Hindoo vitality, that a creed cannot perish while men are found to die for it, though clever, is, we are happy to believe, inac- curate. These victims are always people tired of life, determined on getting rid of it, but choosing, like Frenchmen, the most notorious mode of death, and one which, suicide being forbiddenby Hindooism as by most other creeds, may they fancy expiate whatever of evil there is lathe act. If they did not die there they would hang them- selves in their own huts. Hindooism prompts the mode of death, but not the death itself. The crowd mad with excitement as it seems is not really moved by a religious impulse, but by the same crave which stirred the spectators in the arena, and wild as it is can be controlled with sufficient ease. In the very height and fury of its passion, while still drunk with excitement and the sight of sacrifice, it still permitted a few policemen to push the car back, —it rolls back easily enough in the ruts it has made,—and every Brahmin there might have been arrested on the spot without a rescue. No leading men take part in or approve these scenes, and though the festival must proceed there is no political danger what- ever in making murder absolutely impossible. The law is strong enough, and it is only the wretched weakness of the Government of Bengal which allows it to remain a dead letter. Let the Brahmins of the temple, who can always sway the devotees, be fined and imprisoned, and immolation would never occur again. To clear the road is impossible, for the police are natives, and would never enforce an order they consider ridiculous ; and to send soldiers would be simply to convince the people for a hundred square miles that the Viceroy bad appointed a guard of honour for the idol. The object of the tragic tomfoolery is money, and sharp fines will soon induce the priests to adopt means to prevent half-drunk suicides from driving a whole population mad with reverence and the lust of blood. They can do it effectually in half an hour at a cost of less than a couple of sovereigns. The first platform projects some feet over the wheels, and the priests have only to stretch a strong wire net from thence to within three inches of the ground to make it im- possible even for a maniac to reach the wheels, or do any- thing except suffer himself to be pushed along in the dust. Till that is done the procession should be simply stopped, an order which would be carried out without a riot or a remonstrance. The Government of India is bound to be tolerant of many things forbidden by English feeling, and compelled to tolerate many more forbidden by English morals, but human sacrifices to idol deities cannot be permitted within the limits of a British dependency. It is bad enough that since the mutinies the practice of Suttee should be so frequent in the corners of the semi-dependent States, but a scene like that reported from Serampore, a revival of atrocities suppressed by law forty years ago, is a disgrace to the Government which, to acquire a little popularity among natives, tries to excuse away a series of suicides as mournful accidents incident to a crowd
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