OF ASSES
"'Twas when the rain fell steady and the ark was pitched and ready,
And Noah got his orders for to take the bastes below:
He haled them all together by the hide and horn and feather,
And all except the donkey were agreeable to go.
"Then Noah spoke him fairly, then rated him sevarely,
And then he cursed him squarely to the glory of the Lord,
'Divil take the ass that bred you and the triple ass that fed you,
Divil go with you, you spalpeen;'--and the donkey went aboard.
"But the wind was always failin' and 'twas most onaisy sailin',
And the ladies in the cabins couldn't stand the stable air,
And the bastes betwixt the hatches, they tuk and died in batches,
And Noah said 'There's one of us that hasn't paid his fare.'
"For he heard a flusteration with the bastes of all creation,
The trumpeting of elephants and the bellowing of whales.
And he saw forninst the windy, when he went to stop the shindy,
The Devil with a pitchfork, bedevilling their tails.
"The Devil cursed outrageous, but Noah said umbrageous,--
'To what am I indebted for this tenant-right invasion?'
And the Devil gave for answer,--'Evict me if you can, sir,
For I came in with the donkey at your honour's invitation.'"
R. K.
[Illustration]
Passing from the free to the fettered, we come to a beast which in India
serves at once as an expression of wild liberty, more complete than that of
the monkey, and of utter and abject slavery. There is no freedom more
unrestrained than that of the wild ass and no bondage more bitter than that
of his brother in servitude. For a wholly unmerited obloquy, relic of a
dark aboriginal superstition, is added to the burden of toil and hard
living. Yet there was once a time when in the nearer East, or ever the
horse was known, he was held in high honour, carved in Assyrian sculptures,
and reckoned a suitable steed for prophets and kings. Even now in Cairo,
Damascus, and Bagdad, although the Bedawi Arab pretends to despise him, he
is regularly ridden by respectable people.
The _Arabian Nights_ story of a conversation overheard between the ox and
the ass shows the estimation in which he was held; and it is written that
Muhammad himself had two asses, one of which was called Yafūr, nor did that
great man disdain to ride double. But here in India, by formal
prescription, only the gypsy, the potter, the washerman, and such like
folk, out-caste or of low caste, will mount or own the ass. This
prescription, and the ridiculous Hindu association of the donkey with the
goddess of smallpox, account for the universal dislike and disdain in which
this most useful, sagacious, and estimable animal is held. He is never fed
by his owners, and his chronic hunger is mocked by a popular saying that to
feed a donkey is neither sin nor sacrifice:--"_na pâp na pŭn_." A dozen
popular Indian versions of "casting pearls before swine" derisively offer
cakes, sweetmeats, bread, sugar, saffron, ghi, and curry-combs to the ass,
and it has entered into no one's mind to conceive the simple truth that he
has deserved them all. Also, with bitter irony, he is said to be always in
good case whatever the season--because in the hot, dry weather, when he
looks about on the burnt-up plain, he brays with glee--saying:--"This is
vastly well! I must be fat since I have eaten up all the grass." While in
the rains he brays and says:--"I shall never get through all this fodder."
As a joke this popular gibe is beneath contempt, while as an imputation on
the donkey's sense it is wholly unwarranted. A purely idiotic and
unaccountable fancy is that if one walks over the place where a donkey has
rolled he will have pains in his feet or be smitten with paralysis. The
Arab superstition recorded by Al Masudi, that ghouls have asses' feet, may
have some share in the notion, for in the East ghouls are still alive and
have a natural history of their own.
* * * * *
It may not be very painful, but the slitting of the poor creature's
nostrils, almost universal in India, and meant to soften the clangour of
his voice, has always seemed to me a monstrous affectation of delicacy of
ear on the part of people who delight in the tom-tom and the pipe, while
it gives a tattered and woe-begone air to a countenance already
sufficiently marked with dejection. Nor is it of the least use, for that
stormy music, "loud and clear," rings with unabated force in spite of the
hideous mutilation. Mr. Villiers Stuart of Dromana mentions an ancient
Egyptian wall-picture of a driver trying to stop his donkey when in full
bray. The Speaker of the House of Commons in wig and robe may at times
succeed in staunching the human,--but nothing short of decapitation would
avail to silence the equine ass until that final sound, most like the spasm
of a church organ when the wind fails, is reached. And when they slit the
nostrils, they proceed in mere wantonness of brutality to split the ears
also. For this there can be no reason. It is impossible to write in
measured phrase of these cruel tricks, but those who dream of Oriental
loving-kindness should be told that they have been practised for centuries,
and are still unnoticed and unrebuked.
* * * * *
His very name, _Gădha_--the roarer,--is a reproach. Some Muhammadans have
an idea that the donkey sees the devil when he brays, possibly because of
the belief that it was he who introduced the Father of Evil into the Ark.
When Hăzrăt Nuh (the worshipful Noah) was marshalling the animals into the
Ark, the donkey, as is his modest wont, held back. "Nay then, go along!"
said Noah; but the ass did not move. Then the Patriarch lost his temper,
for the time was short and the clouds were gathering, and he cried, "Go on
and may the Devil go with thee!" When the door was shut Noah met the Evil
One inside and asked how he came there. "Surely then," replied that Wicked
One, "I came by your honour's invitation." If there is a moral in this
absurdity, it is that when holy men lose their tempers they open the door
to sin; but in some topsy-turvy way, possible only to Oriental thought, the
obloquy of the anecdote falls on the innocent ass. If injurious reflections
and vile phrases were all he had to bear, there would not be much cause for
complaint, but it is hard to write with patience of the constant and cruel
beating the poor creature receives.
The race, through centuries of ill-usage, is stunted and weak; and the
brutal rule seems to be that to the smallest ass shall go the biggest
stick. It is just possible by taking the cudgel from the ass-driver's hand
and applying it lustily to his back to convey to his mind some glimmering
of an idea that the blows he finds hard to bear may perhaps be painful to
the ass. No mere words avail to suggest this new and strange notion. The
evangel of kindness to God's creatures can scarcely, however, be spread by
missionaries with thick sticks; and for many a year to come the portion of
the ass must be starvation and ill-usage. A folk-tale which accounts for
the popular saying "As brave as the potter's wife" bears unintentional
testimony to the way in which the ass is beaten. One cold dark night a
potter and his wife were roused from sleep by sounds in the yard outside
and the fall of pipkins. "Get up, man!" said the wife, "and drive the
donkey away." But being warm, snug, and sleepy, he replied, "Bother the
donkey!" and pulled the blanket over his shoulders. Thereupon, uttering
some truisms of world-wide acceptation on the selfishness of husbands, the
good wife arose, and seizing the potter's staff sallied out to bestow on
the intruder's back all the resentment caused by her husband's laziness.
She laid on with a will and the beast was still. So she went to bed again,
muttering more truths. But in the morning when they opened the door they
found no donkey, but a tiger, which the good woman had unwittingly beaten
to death in the dark. The potter and his donkey have originated one of the
many ironical gibes of the country. A traveller met two horsemen richly
attired, and, a little farther on, a potter jogging along on his ass. He
asked the latter who the cavaliers might be. "We three gentlemen are going
to Delhi," said the potter, and this speech is murmured when a man brags
of the fine company he keeps.
[Illustration: THE POTTER AND HIS DONKEY]
The black mark set against the ass by Hindu superstition from his
association with Sitala, the goddess of smallpox, has already been noticed.
This awful divinity is one of the ten manifestations of Durga or Kali the
Destroyer, and is suspected of having entered the Hindu pantheon from the
lower levels of aboriginal superstition. She is dreaded by all, but her
worship, which is never performed during an epidemic of smallpox, seems to
be confined to women and children, who flock to her shrines in thousands
and sometimes throw a few grains of pulse to the ass.[1] But the poor
creature draws no real profit from his appointment to be her
_vâhan_--vehicle or steed. The bull, on the other hand, as the _vâhan_ of
Mahadeo or Shiva, often enjoys a full-fed freedom, and those led about by
Hindu beggars are known as _nandi_, "the happy one," the name given to the
carven stone bull in front of Hindu temples and to the small brass bull
which supports the canopy over a domestic _shiv_.
[Footnote 1: Mr. Ibbetson writes, in his _Outlines of Punjab Ethnography_,
"These deities (of disease) are never worshipped by men, but only by women
and children, enormous numbers of whom attend the shrines of renown on
Sitala's seventh. Every village has its local shrine too, at which the
offerings are all impure. Sitala rides on a donkey, and grain is given to
the donkey and to his master the potter, after being waved over the head of
the child. Fowls, pigs, goats are offered, black dogs are fed, and white
cocks are waved and let loose. An adult who has recovered from smallpox
should let a pig loose to Sitala or he will be again attacked. During an
attack no offerings are made, and if the epidemic has once seized on a
village all worship is discontinued till the disease has disappeared; but
so long as she keeps her hands off nothing is too good for the goddess, for
she is the one great dread of Indian mothers."]
In the days of rough-and-ready Qâzi justice, criminals were frequently
sentenced to be shaven and blackened and to be paraded, with their clothes
rent, through the city, mounted on asses, with their faces tailwards, and
a garland of old shoes round their necks. An old Sikh of my acquaintance
has seen this punishment inflicted, with the addition, in the case of
thieves, of the loss of hands, ears, or noses. In Mussulman countries
farther west the penalty is still applied. Even now, in remote Indian
villages, a noxious person is occasionally treated to a donkey ride of this
kind, with a noisy accompaniment of beaten pans. In the similar "skimmity
ride" of the south of England, described in Mr. Thomas Hardy's _Mayor of
Casterbridge_, effigies of the offending persons are paraded on the backs
of asses. As an example of utter shamelessness they tell of offenders who,
after the performance, calmly demand the donkey as their perquisite. In
folk-tales unfaithful wives have their noses cut off and are paraded on
donkey-back. Nose-cutting, by the way, as in the days of the Hitopadesa, is
the punishment still awarded by popular sentiment in India to conjugal
infidelity, and not a week passes without a case of this horror, in our
police courts; but it is only the woman's nose which suffers, and the
greater part of these barbarities never comes to light.
There are evidences of a quaint ritual of obloquy in which the honest
donkey was made to take part. When it was decided that a site was infamous
for some sacro-sanct Hindu reason, it was formally ploughed up and asses
were yoked to the plough. But a re-consecration was possible, and then the
lordly elephant dragged the plough. "May your homestead be ploughed by
asses" is still a common Hindu curse.
The ass has been made to serve in the conflicts of race and creed which
still divide India. Before the establishment of British rule the Hindus on
the North-West frontier, where Muhammadan authority was paramount, were
not allowed to wear full-size turbans, and might ride asses only. In the
independent state of Cutch Bhūj, on the other hand, where the rulers are
Hindus, the Muhammadan Borahs were forbidden to ride on horseback, a
disability which has only just been removed (1890). The Borahs, on whom
this indignity has for so long been laid, are not, as might be imagined,
low-caste folk of no consideration, but include among them some of the most
intelligent, public-spirited, and wealthy men in the Bombay Presidency. The
Muhammadan is perhaps, in matters of this kind, more tyrannical and
intolerant than the Hindu. At this moment the Jews in some parts of Morocco
may only ride on asses, with their faces tailwards, and they may not wear
shoes.
That caste pride is as strong among people of low estate as in the upper
ranks is a commonplace everywhere. Indian grooms of the leather-dresser
tribes are supposed to be of low degree; but when a lady of my acquaintance
proposed to get a donkey for her little son she learned a lesson in this
subject from one of her horse-keepers: "No, madam, my son shall never wait
on an ass. You must get a potter's brat for him, and he must not come near
our stable."
India follows, or perhaps the East has led, other countries in the use of
the donkey's name as a term of reproach. "Ass" is a common word in all
contemptuous mouths, and "tailless ass" is an occasional enhancement of
scorn. When a fool is praised by a fool they say, "Ass scratches ass," and
a similar saying expresses the arts of log-rolling intrigues with homely
force. For the sake of ricochet shots at fools the poor beast is insulted
by comparisons which would never occur to his humble mind, as "Wash an ass
as much as you like, you will never make a calf of him," or "Bray him in a
mortar, but he will never be a horse." Muhammadans say, "If even the ass of
Jesus went to Mecca he would still come back an ass." The obstinacy born of
ill-usage, which is his only fault, points many a gibe. As an illustration
of Afghān character a folk-tale tells that at a Punjab river ferry a crowd
of passengers and animals were assembled. When the boat came, all went
aboard without hesitation, excepting an ass, which refused to move. His
driver pushed and the boatmen hauled without effect, until at last an
Afghān among the waiting passengers drew his _churra_, the long and heavy
Khyber knife, and smote the poor beast's head off at a blow, crying,
"Obstinacy like this may be permitted to an Afghān, but to a donkey,
never."
Among the Biloch, neighbours of the Afghān, this same obstinacy is
honoured. Mr. Ibbetson writes in his _Punjab Ethnography_, "When a male
child is born, asses' dung in water, symbolical of pertinacity, is dropped
into his mouth from the point of a sword before he is given the breast."
Antipathies of race and region, calmly ignored by those who write of "the
people of India" as one and indivisible, find expression in sayings wherein
the donkey takes part. A Hindustani will say of a Punjabi, "A country
donkey with a Punjab bray"; and the Punjabi retaliates with, "A country
donkey with an Eastern limp"; while of the Bengali Baboo, who affects
English speech and manners, they say, "A hill jackass with an English
bray."
Yet while the animal is despised the nutritive value of its milk is
recognised. The potter and his family grow strong at the expense of the ass
foal, and the high-caste Hindu pretends to be horrified by such an
abomination. Vemana, a sage whose sayings take a high rank in Telugu
literature, says, "A single spoonful of milk from a good cow is enough--of
what use is a pailful of asses' milk?" Most Hindus would say that the use
of this fluid is impossible under any circumstances. None the less is it
accounted a valuable medicine by Hindu doctors, who on occasion put caste
laws aside and compound mixtures, compared with which the most loathsome
messes set forth in "Saxon leechdoms" are what our English druggists would
call elegant prescriptions. Asses' milk is prescribed for a tendency to
phthisis and other diseases, but usually at too late a stage to be of any
use.
In some regions the donkey enjoys a moment's honour as the steed of Sitala;
for a bridegroom about to start in the marriage procession will mount an
ass for an instant, as a propitiation to the dread goddess. In customary
talk, however, there are but few sayings which treat him with any touch of
consideration. The "donkey's beauty" of Italian and French proverb has an
equivalent in "Even a she-ass is pretty when she is young." The creature's
sureness of foot is admitted in "A donkey will tumble down hill when you
can split a fowl's ear." The poor wretch is turned loose when his work is
done to that forlorn freedom of neglect which is the only privilege of the
outcast. So they say in varying forms of phrase, "The donkey may be sore
with beating, despised of all men and accursed as the _vâhan_ of Sitala,
but at least he is never plagued with tether or heel-rope." Some
alleviation is granted even to the most abject misery.
There is a more complete harmony with the topsy-turvy scheme of Oriental
appreciations than can be imagined by untravelled folk in the fact that
while the ass is the most despised of creatures he is one of the most
useful. There are regions where he is yoked to the plough, but his
principal occupation is carrying clothes for the washerman, and earth,
burnt and unburnt lime, and stone for the potter, the builder, and the
railway contractor. Your great works in the West are built by strong-armed
men, but in India railway bank, water-works dam, and Queen's highway are
raised by the slender cooly woman and the little donkey. His step is first
in the peaceful halls which mark the new civilisation, but his loads are
too heavy for his weak limbs, his rude harness seems to be expressly
contrived to gall and wound him, his life is one long martyrdom to the
stick, and he is shamefully abandoned to starve and die when his strength
fails. According to a country tale, similar to one told by Longfellow in
his _Tales of a Wayside Inn_, there was once an Indian ruler who took
compassion on a donkey. The Emperor Jehanghir caused a bell to be slung
over his couch which might be rung by any petitioner with a wrong to
redress. One day it was found that a castaway ass, rubbing his sore hide
against the bell-rope, had rung a peal. The creature was haled before the
throne, and search was made for its master, a washerman, who confessed that
he had abandoned it to starve and die. The Emperor gave him a lecture on
his cruelty, and ordered him to take back his faithful servant to be fed
and cherished and to appear again before him after a season. That one
donkey was groomed and fed as never ass before or since and brought sleek
and fat into the august presence; but the example has borne no fruit, and
the grim "burial of an ass" described by the prophet Jeremiah succeeds a
lingering death by starvation.