Beneath a group of beautiful palm-trees, a half-witted young _Fakīr_,
adorned with peacocks’ feathers, is sitting and talking to the men
around him, who regard as prophetic whatever his wandering and unsettled
mind induces him to utter, and look upon him as the favourite of
heaven—the natives treat persons thus afflicted with the greatest
kindness, and supply them with food. A leaf of the fan palm, here
represented, may be seen in the Museum. The whole group, as well as the
trees, are portraits.
On the sands below and close to the edge of the river, is an Hindū in
the last stage of illness. His friends have carried him down to the
sacred stream on a _charpāī_, (a rude native bed,) and are in the act of
making him drink the Ganges water, ere they half immerse his body in the
sacred stream. His wife, on the edge of the bed, is weeping, and her
_dopatta_ (or veil), is drawn over her face; the Brahman is offering the
prayers usual on this occasion.
The Hindūs are extremely anxious to die in sight of the Ganges, that
their sins may be washed away in their last moments. A person in his
last agonies is frequently carried on his bed, by his friends or
relatives, in the coldest or in the hottest weather, from whatever
distance, to the river-side, where he lies, if a poor man, without a
covering day and night, until he expires. With the pains of death upon
him, he is placed up to the middle in water and drenched with it; leaves
of the shrub goddess, the sacred _tulsī_ plant, are also put into his
mouth, the marks on the pebble god, the _Salagram_ are shown to him, and
his relations call upon him to repeat, and repeat for him, the names of
Rām, Hurī, Ganga, &c. In some cases the family priest repeats some
prayers, and makes an offering to Voitŭrŭnēē, the river over which, they
say, the soul is ferried, after leaving the body. The relations of the
dying man spread the sediment of the river on his forehead and breast,
and afterwards with the finger write on this sediment the name of some
deity. If a person should die in his house, and not by the river-side,
it is considered as a great misfortune, as he thereby loses the help of
the goddess in his last moments. If a person choose to die at home, his
memory becomes infamous.
If these unfortunate people recover, after having been exposed by their
relatives to die on the banks of the river, they take refuge in the
village of Chagdah on the left bank of the Matabangah, forty-six miles
from Calcutta, of which people who ought to be _corpses_, are the sole
inhabitants. They are considered to prefer a debased existence to a
righteous end, agreeing therein with the highest authorities. Pope’s
Homer makes Achilles in the Elysian fields say:—
“Rather I’d choose laboriously to bear
A weight of woes, and breathe the vital air,
A slave to some poor hind that toils for bread,
Than reign the scepter’d monarch of the dead.”
Solomon deems it better to be a live dog than a dead lion; and Job,
called by Byron “the Respectable,” says, “Why should a living man
complain?” to which Byron adds, “For no other reason that I can see,
except that a dead man cannot.” In the face of these grave authorities
the Hindostanī proverb is of a different opinion, which asserts “it is
better to die with honour, than live with infamy.”
The passage in the Psalms, “They shall be a portion for foxes,” appears
obscure; but give it the probable rendering, “they shall be a portion
for jackals;” and then the anathema becomes plain and striking to an
Hindū, in whose country the disgusting sight of jackals, devouring human
bodies, may be seen every day. The dying who are left by the side of the
Ganges, are sometimes devoured alive by these animals in the night.
_Lugāo’d_, or moored off a sand-bank, is a budjerow, her baggage, and
her cook-boat. The crews are cooking and eating their dinners on the
sand-bank, and will not recommence their voyage until daybreak, the
river being too dangerous to allow of their proceeding further during
the hours of darkness. On a clean dry bank in the centre of the Ganges,
covered with the finest and most sparkling sand, it is far more
agreeable to _lugāo_ your vessel for the night, than on the banks of the
river: it is cooler, and you are better defended against thieves;
nevertheless a look-out must be kept during the night.
“Shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the
sand,” &c., (Matt. vii. 26.) The fishermen in Bengal build their huts in
the dry season on the beds of sand, from which the river has retired.
When the rains set in, which they often do very suddenly, accompanied
with violent north-west winds, and the waters pour down in torrents from
the mountains, a fine illustration is given of our Lord’s parable: “the
rains descended, the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that
house, and it fell.” In one night multitudes of these huts are
frequently swept away, and the place where they stood is, the next
morning, undiscoverable. On one of these occasions a Hindū child was
carried down the stream, seated on a part of the roof of a hut, and
rescued from destruction at Allahabad. The child could not tell whence
she had been carried away by the force of the torrent, nor could the
little creature remember the names of her parents.
In some parts of Bengal, whole villages are every now and then swept
away by the Ganges when it changes its course. This river frequently
runs over districts, from which, a few years before, it was several
miles distant. “A nation whose land the rivers have spoiled.” (Isa.
xvii. 2.)
The rocky islands of Colgong in the distance are singular and beautiful,
there are four of them, of unequal size. Rocks on rocks, covered with
fine foliage, they rise in the centre of the river which runs like a
mill-sluice, and is extremely broad. They say that no one lives upon
these rocks; that a _Fakīr_ formerly took up his abode there, but having
been eaten by a snake (an _ajgar_), one of enormous size, and an eater
of human flesh, the people became alarmed; and no holy or unholy person
has since taken up their residence on these rocky islands. Small boats
fish under the rocks, and snakes, they say, abound upon them: when a gun
is fired the echoes awaken and startle the myriads of birds that inhabit
them. The proverb says, “The hypocrites of Bhagulpur, the _Thags_ of
Kuhulgaon (Colgong), and the bankrupts of Patna are famous.”