Kankan was the name of a Bengali poet: this name is assumed for the nonce by the poetaster.
Prahlad is ever a favourite with Hindoos: his story is told in the Vishnu Purana: there is a capital ballad on him in Miss Toru Dutt’s ‘Ballads of Hindustan.’ The story of Prahlad has been supposed to point to the gradual absorption into the Hindu system of the aboriginal tribes. The resistance long offered to that absorption, is supposed to be hinted at in the treatment of Prahlad by his Daitya parents.
Repetitions of the name of Hari, or Vishnu, made with the beads of the Tulsi plant: the rosaries are of different lengths: the common one consists of 108 beads: a pandit once told me he had seen one of 100,000 beads.
Literally— “They see all round them only the yellow flower of the mustard plant” — a man at the point of death being supposed to see everything with a yellow tinge upon it.
Literally— “To lose his drinking pot, and all for a cowrie”— the pot being either of block-tin, or of silver for holding drinking water, and carried by every Mussulman, and largely by Hindoos when moving about.