Beast and man in India : a popular sketch of Indian animals in their relations with the people / by John Lockwood Kipling.

  • John Lockwood Kipling
Date:
1891
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Beast and man in India : a popular sketch of Indian animals in their relations with the people / by John Lockwood Kipling. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    confined to women and children, who Hock to her shrines in thousands and sometimes throw a few grains of pulse to the assd But the poor creature draws no real profit from his appointment to be her vdJian—vehicle or steed. The bull, on the other hand, as the vdhan of Mahadeo or Shiva, often enjoys a full-fed freedom, and those led about by Hindu beggars are known as naiidi, “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. In the days of rough-and-ready Oazi 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 ^ 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 small-pox 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.”