The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India, Volume 1

by R. V. Russell

63. Controlling the future.

But primitive man was not actuated by any abstract love of knowledge, and when he had observed what appeared to him to be a law of nature, he proceeded to turn it to advantage in his efforts for the preservation of his life. Since events had the characteristic of recurrence, all he had to do in order to produce the recurrence of any particular event which he desired, was to cause it to happen in the first instance; and since he did not distinguish between imitation and reality, he thought that if he simply enacted the event he would thus ensure its being brought to pass. And so he assiduously set himself to influence the course of nature to his own advantage. When the Australian aborigines are performing ceremonies for the increase of witchetty grubs, a long narrow structure of boughs is made which represents the chrysalis of the grub. The men of the witchetty grub totem enter the structure and sing songs about the production and growth of the witchetty grub. Then one after another they shuffle out of the chrysalis, and glide slowly along for a distance of some yards, imitating the emergence and movements of the witchetty grubs. By thus enacting the production of the grubs they think to cause and multiply the real production.[135] When the men of the emu totem wish to multiply the number of emus, they allow blood from their arms, that is emu blood, to fall on the ground until a certain space is covered. Then on this space a picture is drawn representing the emu; two large patches of yellow indicate lumps of its fat, of which the natives are very fond, but the greater part shows, by means of circles and circular patches, the eggs in various stages of development, some before and some after laying. Then the men of the totem, placing on their heads a stick with a tuft of feathers to represent the long neck and small head of the bird, stand gazing about aimlessly after the manner of the emu. Here the picture itself is held to be a living emu, perhaps the source or centre from which all emus will originate, and the men, pretending to be emus, will cause numbers of actual emus to be produced.[136] Before sowing the crops, a common practice is to sow small quantities of grain in baskets or pots in rich soil, so that it will sprout and grow up quickly, the idea being to ensure that the real crop will have a similarly successful growth. These baskets are the well-known Gardens of Adonis fully described in The Golden Bough. They are grown for nine days, and on the tenth day are taken in procession by the women and deposited in a river. The women may be seen carrying the baskets of wheat to the river after the nine days’ fasts of Chait and Kunwār (March and September) in many towns of the Central Provinces, as the Athenian women carried the Gardens of Adonis to the sea on the day that the expedition under Nicias set sail for Syracuse.[137] The fire kindled at the Holi festival in spring is meant, as explained by Sir J.G. Frazer, to increase the power of the sun for the growth of vegetation. By the production of fire the quantity and strength of the heavenly fire is increased. He remarks:[138]—“The custom of throwing blazing discs, shaped like suns, into the air, is probably also a piece of imitative magic. In these, as in so many cases, the magic force is supposed to take effect through mimicry or sympathy; by imitating the desired result you actually produce it; by counterfeiting the sun’s progress through the heavens you really help the luminary to pursue his celestial journey with punctuality and despatch. The name ‘fire of heaven,’ by which the midsummer fire is sometimes popularly known, clearly indicates a consciousness of the connection between the earthly and the heavenly flame.” The obscene songs of the Holi appear to be the relic of a former period of promiscuous sexual debauchery, which, through the multiplied act of reproduction, was intended to ensure that nature should also reproduce on a generous scale. The red powder thrown over everybody at the Holi is said to represent the seed of life. The gifts of Easter eggs seem to be the vestige of a rite having the same object. At a wedding in the Lodhi caste the bride is seated before the family god while an old woman brings a stone rolling-pin wrapped up in a piece of cloth, which is supposed to be a baby, and the old woman imitates a baby crying. She puts the roller in the bride’s lap, saying, “Take this and give it milk.” The bride is abashed and throws it aside. The old woman picks it up and shows it to the assembled women, saying, “The bride has just had a baby,” amid loud laughter. Then she gives the stone to the bridegroom, who also throws it aside. This ceremony is meant to induce fertility, and it is supposed that by making believe that the bride has had a baby she will quickly have one. Similar rites are performed in several other castes, and when a girl becomes adult her lap is filled with fruits with the idea that this will cause it subsequently to be filled with the fruit of her womb. The whole custom of giving dolls to girls to play with, perhaps originated in the belief that by doing so they would afterwards come to play with children.

The dances of the Kol tribe consist partly of symbolical enactments of events which they desired to be successfully accomplished. Some variations of the dance, Colonel Dalton states, represent the different seasons and the necessary acts of cultivation that each brings with it. In one the dancers, bending down, make a motion with their hands, as though they were sowing the grain, keeping step with their feet all the time. Then comes the reaping of the crop and the binding of the sheaves, all done in perfect time and rhythm, and making, with the continuous droning of the voices, a quaint and picturesque performance.[139] The Karma dance of the Gonds and Oraons is also connected with the crops, and probably was once an enactment of the work of cultivation.[140] The Bhīls danced at their festivals and before battles. The men danced in a ring, holding sticks and striking them against one another. Before a battle they had a war-dance in which the performers were armed and imitated a combat. To be carried on the shoulders of one of the combatants was a great honour, perhaps because it symbolised being on horseback. The object was to obtain success in battle by going through an imitation of a successful battle beforehand. This was also the common custom of the Red Indians, whose war-dances are well known; they brandished their weapons and killed their foe in mimicry in order that they might soon do so in reality. The Sela dance of the Gonds and Baigas, in which they perform the figure of the grand chain of the lancers, only that they strike their sticks together instead of clasping hands as they pass, was probably once an imitation of a combat. It is still sometimes danced before their communal hunting and fishing parties. In these mimetic rehearsals of events with the object of causing them to occur we may perhaps discern the origin of the arts both of acting and dancing. Another, and perhaps later form, was the reproduction of important events, or those which had influenced history. For to the primitive mind, as already seen, the results were not conceived of as instrumentally caused by the event, but as part of the event itself and of its life and personality. Hence by the re-enactment of the event the beneficial results would be again obtained or at least preserved in undiminished potency and vigour. This was perhaps the root idea of the drama and the representation of sacred or heroic episodes on the stage.