THE FOOLISH FAKĪR.
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.”