Layard’s “Nineveh and Babylon,” p. 663.
CHAPTER XII
Three Bengalis and the Papers
All know the crowded Kalighat on the muddy little branch of the Ganges south of Calcutta. The little temple of the mother Kali stands close by, where Hindus keep up an animal sacrifice something similar to the classic and ancient Jewish rites. Many Europeans enjoy seeing the heads of the wretched little goats sliced off by a priest’s sword while the animals are still dripping from a plunge in the sacred tanks. Many, like myself, have gone with the crowding pilgrims on festival Sundays or weekday evenings and watched the people bathing in the turbid water, and the Brahmans seated in the open portico reading aloud the wanderings of Rama and breaking into song at the impassioned parts. Or we have stood at the narrow entrance till the door of the inmost shrine should open, allowing a glimpse of the goddess herself, the Bengal Mother, symbolic of the strange Force in nature, always moving irresistibly on its way with life and death, blessing and damnation in its hands. Blue-black she is, with three staring, scarlet eyes, one of them in her forehead. In her four arms she holds the signs of happiness and of destruction. One foot is planted on the body of a man, and from her mouth a golden tongue protrudes. Her worshippers tell that in her career of destruction through the universe, she was only stayed by the intervention of her husband Shiva, who in the semblance of a dead man flung himself before her feet to be trampled on. She is represented pausing in horror at the discovery. To put out the tongue is the common gesture of shame or horror among the Indian women, and if it seems a peculiar expression of those emotions, watch an English country servant whenever she drops a trayful of your best china on a stony floor, and she will almost invariably do the same.
The Kalighat.
Pilgrims To Kali.
[Face p. 206.
How far this hideous collection of symbols is itself worshipped is the problem of all imagery and symbolic art. A priest of Kali, who had himself received a religious education in one of our missionary colleges, told me that in the hour of prayer he found that the image helped him to concentrate his thoughts upon that idea of universal force. He admitted that some unlearned worshippers obscurely connect a supernatural power with the actual image as it stands; and the great desire of many to draw near, and even to touch the representation of the god, seems to prove it, as one may see in all temples and churches where symbolism prevails. It is rather strange that Indians, with their beautiful sense of colour and design, should content themselves with unusually hideous gods; for, grand as the figure of Buddha in contemplation is, it stands alone in its beauty, and now no longer appears in Hindu forms of worship. Yet the adoration of the Mother Kali, even at the bloodstained Kalighat, does not appear to be more horrible or debasing than the service of other gods. In divine worship, devotion has never corresponded to external beauty; and as to the blood sacrifice, that custom has been too universal, and is still too recent even in the highest forms of religion, to excite horror or disgust, except in the tourists who go to enjoy the spectacle. It seemed to me that the Kali worship did not suggest the violence of bloodshed, still less the common lust that visitors are told to associate with it, but rather a certain heat or fervency that pervades and sometimes obscures the Bengali mind, taking the form in some of exaltation, in others of oratory, and now and then of fluid speech.
All know this crowded Kalighat. But turn northward again; pass the Lieutenant-Governor’s beautiful Residency at Belvedere; pass the racecourse and polo-grounds, the old Fort where the Commander-in-Chief has his headquarters, and the Strand where steamers smoke on the river and the English drive slowly up and down in the evening; pass the white Government House where the Viceroy lives in winter, and the dull streets of English shops where they sell things that are not quite good enough for England or quite bad enough for the Colonies; enter the squalid chaos of the Indian city, so ordinary and colourless compared to Bombay or Madras; pass through mile after mile of crowded bazaars, and teeming slums, and factories jumbled up with temples;—till at last the buildings begin, as it were, to shake themselves loose, green reappears, and when you come upon the river on your left, it looks almost clean and holy; palms and other trees grow on the banks, and there is a sense of escape in the air. There you will find another temple of Kali, spacious, silent, and a home of peace.