Betel Planting.
When cultivators in the North-Western Provinces sow betel, they cook rice-milk near the plants and offer it to the local godling. They divide the offering, and a little coarse sugar is dedicated to Mahâbîr, the monkey god, which is taken home and distributed among the children. This is known as Jeonâr Pûjâ or “the banquet rite.” The Barais, who make a speciality of cultivating the plant, have two godlings of their own, Sokha Bâba, the ghost of some famous magician, and Nâgbeli, the “creeper Nâga,” or snake, who is connected with the sinuous growth of the tendrils.
In Bengal, the Baruis, a similar caste, worship their patron goddess on the fourth day of the month Baisâkh with offerings of flowers, rice, sweetmeats, and sandal-wood paste. Some do the Navamî Pûjâ in honour of Ushas, or the Aurora, on the sixth day of the waning moon in Asin. Plantains, rice, sugar, and sweetmeats are placed in the centre of the garden, from which the worshippers retire, but after a little time return, and carrying out the offerings, distribute them among the village children. In Bikrampur, Sunjâî, a form of Bhâgawatî, is worshipped.
They do not employ Brâhmans in the worship, because, they say, a Brâhman was the first cultivator of betel. Through his neglect the plant grew so high that he used his sacred thread to fasten up the tendrils, but as it still shot up faster than he could supply thread, its charge was given to a Kâyasth or writer. Hence it is that a Brâhman cannot enter a betel garden without defilement.[39] In another form of the story, the thread of the Brâhman grew up to the sky and became a betel tendril. So, in a Tartar story, the hop plant originates from the bow-string of a man that had been turned into a bear.[40]
All over India, the betel plant, perhaps on account of the delicacy of its growth, is considered as being very susceptible to demoniacal influence, and a woman or a person in a state of ceremonial pollution is excluded from the nursery. We meet with an instance of the same idea among the Ainos. “They prepare for the fishing by observing rules of ceremonial purity, and when they have gone out to fish the women at home must keep strict silence, or the fish would hear them and disappear. When the first fish is caught he is brought home and passed through a small opening at the end of the hut, but not through the door; for if he were passed through the door, the other fish would certainly see him and disappear.”[41]
All these protective measures intended to guard the crop from defilement and demoniacal influence are rather like the old English rule of the young men and girls walking round the corn to bless it on Palm Sunday, an observance which Audley drily remarks in his time “gave many a conception.”[42]