A few days ago, when I was sitting on the Versova sands, musing on life’s uncertainties and the vanity of human wishes, recalling Tennyson’s words “so many worlds, so much to do, so little done, such things to be,” methought I heard a water-nymph questioning me from under the pale-green sea-groves: “How many years wilt thou dream away before thou completest that work? Why not immediately convey to thy readers our invitation to the concerts of the nymphs?” At once I recalled that eight years had rolled by since I had resolved to complete another series of anthropological papers, viz., Naming Customs and Name Superstitions, just as I had thought of elaborating the water-worship series, but that I had not been able to take the work in hand in the midst of rapidly increasing daily duties. What chance was there of better success in regard to this new work? I, therefore, thought it advisable to publish the papers as read before the Society without further delay. Their publication in book-form has, however, necessitated a somewhat unsatisfactory arrangement of chapters, and for this and other demerits I owe an apology to the reader.
It might perhaps be said that such a gallimaufry of divers tales and traditions, beliefs and superstitions long current among different people in different countries treats the reader to nothing new. It might also be urged that these traditions and customs are mere survivals of a particular phase of animism with which we are all familiar, that we all know that from remote ages our ancestors have peopled trees and plants, stocks and stones, dales and hills, and seas and springs with all sorts of spirits, visible and invisible, and that it is upon this spirit-world of prehistoric man that the primeval nature-worship of our Aryan ancestors was based, upon which again rest the religions and philosophies of the civilised world. This is all very true. Veneration of water is undoubtedly a phase of nature-worship. The student of history knows why from the remotest ages Egypt, Babylon, India and China became centres of population in the East and why the plains of Lombardy and Netherlands attracted waves of humanity in the West. Naturally, man gravitated towards districts where food was easily obtainable. Valleys and plains fertilized by springs became his home. Water to him was not only the prime necessity of life, but the birth-place, so to say, of life. Moreover, the primitive mind associated life with motion. It saw spirits in rolling stones and swinging boughs. How could it remain unconscious of the spirits controlling the many-sounding seas and bubbling rivers and tumbling waterfalls? This is the raison d’être of the universality of water-worship. No new work on the folklore of wells is needed to tell us that, but, as I have just stated, such folklore contains valuable details of social conditions and the early history of races and if it puts in the hands of the student of antiquities a key to the sealed book of some unexplored stages of the cultural history, howsoever fragmentary, of forgotten races, its publication would not be wholly in vain.
Races flourish and vanish, but their concepts and customs live in their successors. These successors are not necessarily their descendants. Often they are invaders and conquerors, sometimes refugees, professing altogether different creeds, but with the estates and objects which they inherit from their predecessors they also inherit their mental strivings and traditions and customs and hand these down from generation to generation. These in their turn influence others, wherever they go. Thus it is that we see ancient customs and ceremonies observed, even to this day, with very little variation, by different communities, even though separated by oceans.
Numerous illustrations may be given of this parallelism of beliefs prevailing in different places and their persistence in different culture eras. One remarkable instance is the preservation of the bridge-sacrifice traditions. It is referred to by Sir Laurence Gomme in Folklore as an Historical Science in the course of his analysis of the legend of the Pedlar of Lambeth and the treasure stories centering round London Bridge. The bridge was the work of the Romans of Lundinium—a marvellous enterprise in the eyes of the Celtic tribesmen who believed that the building of the bridge was accompanied by human sacrifice. This is confirmed by the preservation in Wales of another tradition relating to the “Devil’s Bridge” near Beddgelert. “Many of the ignorant people of the neighbourhood believe that this structure was formed by supernatural agency. The devil proposed to the neighbouring inhabitants that he would build them a bridge across the pass on condition that he should have the first who went over it for his trouble. The bargain was made, and the bridge appeared in its place, but the people cheated the devil by dragging a dog to the spot and whipping him over the bridge.” When the Calcutta authorities proposed to build a bridge over the Hoogly River, the ignorant masses apprehended that the first requirement would be a human sacrifice for the foundation. The news went to England from the London and China Telegraph from which the Newcastle Chronicle of 9th February 1889 copied the following statement:—
“The boatmen on the Ganges, near Rajmenal, somehow came to believe that the Government required a hundred thousand human heads as the foundation for a great bridge, and that the Government officers were going about the river in search of heads. A hunting party, consisting of four Europeans, happening to pass in a boat, were set upon by the one hundred and twenty boatmen, with the cry Gulla Katta or cut-throats, and only escaped with their lives after the greatest difficulty.”
Thirteen years ago, when the Sandhurst bridge was under construction, a poor old man suspected of taking a child for being interred in the foundations of the bridge was mercilessly belaboured in the streets of Bombay. The boy was inclined to play truant and did not wish to go home with the old man. Some one started the canard that he had sold the head of the child for bridge-sacrifice, the mob took it up and only after great difficulty the unfortunate man was rescued by the Police. Curiously enough, only a few days ago I gathered from the story of a Mahomedan lad, who was brought to me for admission to the home of the Society for the Protection of Children, that another bridge-sacrifice panic had recently seized the good people of Bankipur. The boy, named Abdulla Bakar, aged 11, being an orphan, was working as a cooly in Bankipur. He told the Society’s agent, and also repeated to me, that he had been greatly alarmed by the report he had heard in the streets of that city that children were buried alive in the foundations of a bridge that was being built somewhere near.
No less persistent is the traditional dread of spirits haunting pools and rapids. Until recently we used to hear in Bombay that the spirits residing in the wells near the Bombay Gymkhana waylaid and drowned people who disturbed them in the evening. Similar beliefs are still current in England. In the Transactions of the Folklore Society has been recorded the following example of persistence of the superstitious dread of water: A man was drowned in the Derwent in January 1904. “He didna know Darrant,” commented an old neighbour, with a triumphant tone in her voice, “he said it were nought but a brook. But Darrant got him! They never saw his head, he threw his arms up, but Darrant wouldna let him go. Aye, it’s a sad pity—seven children! But he shouldna ha’ made so light of Darrant. He knows now! Nought but a brook! He knows now!” “She talked of the river as if it were a living personage or deity,” wrote the narrator, “I could almost imagine the next step would be to take it offerings.” Jenny Greenteeth still lurks under the weeds of stagnant pools in Shropshire and Lancashire and in the following pages will be found examples of numerous water-spirits residing in or hovering round Indian wells and tanks.
Folklore tells us that mermaids threatened floods if offended by drainage schemes. Would that some fair denizens of the waters of Araby had raised up their heads from the pātāls when the schemes for the drainage of Bombay were under consideration and when Worli point was selected for the outfall! On that occasion even God Varuna, the lord of all waters, and the Nagas and Nagins, the semi-divine sovereigns of the watery regions, half men and half serpents, and the whole band of sea-spirits were mysteriously silent and forbearing, but the well-spirits are not so tame. They will not allow another municipal atrocity lying down. Some have exacted the toll of human life, others have evinced their wrath by breaking open the coverings enforced by the Municipality, while some weak spirits, for whom the concrete covers have proved too strong, have been haunting the neighbourhood and inducing the owners of wells and, failing them, responsive neighbours, to re-open the wells. Only a few weeks ago, a Hindu member of the Bombay Municipal Corporation told me that a Parsi residing in a house adjoining his property in Dhus Wadi assured him that a sayyid residing in the well of his house, which had been closed in compliance with a municipal requisition, had been visiting the Parsi in dreams and imploring him to get the well opened, promising him saintly favours. He could not understand why the cabined spirit should not seek the assistance of the Hindu inmates or of the Hindu owner of the very house in which the well was situated, but go instead to the Parsi neighbour. The reason, however, is not far to seek.