It seems possible then that the Hindus reverenced the wild boar in
the past as one of the strongest and fiercest animals of the forest
and also as a destroyer of the crops. And they still make sacrifices
of the pig to guard their fields from his ravages. These sacrifices,
however, are not offered to any deity who can represent a deified
pig but to Bhainsasur, the deified buffalo. The explanation seems
to be that in former times, when forests extended over most of
the country, the cultivator had in the wild buffalo a direr foe
than the wild pig. And one can well understand how the peasant,
winning a scanty subsistence from his poor fields near the forest,
and seeing his harvest destroyed in a night by the trampling of a herd
of these great brutes against whom his puny weapons were powerless,
looked on them as terrible and malignant deities. The sacrifice of a
buffalo would be beyond the means of a single man, and the animal is
now more or less sacred as one of the cow tribe. But the annual joint
sacrifice of one or more buffaloes is a regular feature of the Dasahra
festival and extends over a great part of India. In Betul and other
districts the procedure is that on the Dasahra day, or a day before,
the Mang and Kotwar, two of the lowest village menials, take a buffalo
bull and bring it to the village proprietor, who makes a cut on its
nose and draws blood. Then it is taken all round the village and
to the shrines of the gods, and in the evening it is killed and the
Mang and Kotwar eat the flesh. It is now believed that if the blood
of a buffalo does not fall at Dasahra some epidemic will attack the
village, but as there are no longer any wild buffaloes except in the
denser forests of one or two Districts, the original meaning of the
rite might naturally have been forgotten. [10]