ALTHOUGH Poonah is the ancient Maratta capital, and a thoroughly Hindoo city, it is famed throughout India for the splendor with which its people celebrate the Mohammedan Mohurrum, so I timed my visit in such a way as to reach the town upon the day of the “taboot procession.”
The ascent from the Konkan, or flat country of Bombay, by the Western Ghauts to the table-land of the Deccan, known as the Bhore Ghaut incline, in which the railway rises from the plain 2000 feet into the Deccan, by a series of steps sixteen miles in length, is far more striking as an engineering work than the passage of the Alleghanies on the Baltimore and Ohio track, and as much inferior to the Sierra Nevada railway works. The views from the carriage windows are singularly like those in the Kaduganava Pass between Columbo and Kandy; in fact, the Western Ghauts are of the same character as the mountains of Ceylon, the hills being almost invariably either flat-topped or else rent by volcanic action into great pinnacles and needle-peaks.
The rainy season had not commenced, and the vegetation that gives the Ghauts their charm was wanting, although the “mango showers” were beginning, and spiders and other insects, unseen during the hot weather, were creeping into the houses to seek shelter from the rains. One of the early travelers to the Deccan told the good folks at home that after the rains the spiders’ webs were so thickly laced across the jungle that the natives of the country were in the habit of hiring elephants to walk before them and force a passage! At the time of my visit, neither webs nor jungle were to be seen, and the spiders were very harmless-looking fellows. One effect of the approaching monsoon was visible from the summit of the Ghaut, for the bases of the mountains were hid by the low clouds that foretell the coming rains. The inclines are held to be unsafe during the monsoon, but they are not so bad as the Kotree and Kurrachee line, which runs only “weather permitting,” and is rendered useless by two hours’ rain—a fall which, luckily for the shareholders, occurs only about once in every seven years. On the Bhore Ghaut, on the contrary, 220 inches in four months is not unusual, and “the rains” here take the place of the avalanche of colder ranges, and carry away bridges, lines, and trains themselves; but in the dry season there is a want of the visible presence of difficulties overcome, which detracts from the interest of the line.
At daybreak at Poonah, the tomtom-ing, which had lasted without intermission through the ten days’ fast, came to a sudden end, and the police and European magistrates began to marshal the procession of the taboots, or shrines, in the bazaar.
A proclamation in English and Maratta was posted on the walls, announcing the order of the procession and the rules to be enforced. The orders were that the procession to the river was to commence at 7 A.M. and to end at 11 A.M., and that tomtom-ing, except during those hours, would not be allowed. The taboots of the light cavalry, of three regiments of native infantry, and of the followers of three English regiments of the line, and of the Sappers and Miners, were, however, to start at six o‘clock; the order of precedence among the cantonment or regimental taboots was carefully laid down, and the carrying of arms forbidden.
When I reached the bazaar, I found the native police were working in vain in trying to force into line a vast throng of bannermen, drummers, and saints, who surrounded the various taboots or models of the house of Ali and Fatima where their sons Hassan and Hoosein were born. Some of the shrines were of the size and make of the dolls’-houses of our English children, others in their height and gorgeousness resembled the most successful of our burlesques upon Guy Fawkes: some were borne on litters by four men; others mounted on light carts and drawn by bullocks, while the gigantic taboot of the Third Cavalry required six buffaloes for its transport to the river. Many privates of our native infantry regiments had joined the procession in uniform, and it was as strange to me to see privates in our service engaged in howling round a sort of Maypole, and accompanying their yells with the tomtom, as it must have been to the English in Lucknow in 1857 to hear the bands of the rebel regiments playing “Cheer, boys, cheer.”
Some of the troops in Poonah were kept within their lines all day, to be ready to suppress disturbances caused by the Moslem fanatics, who, excited by the Mohurrum, often run amuck among their Hindoo neighbors. In old times, quarrels between the Sonnites and Shiites, or orthodox and dissenting Mussulmans, used to be added to those between Mohammedans and Hindoos at the season of the Mohurrum, but except upon the Afghan border these feuds have all-but died out now.
At the head of the procession marched a row of pipers, producing sounds of which no Highland regiment would have felt ashamed, followed by long-bearded, turban-wearing Marattas, on foot and horseback, surrounding an immense pagoda-shaped taboot placed on a cart, and drawn by bullocks; boys swinging incense walked before and followed, and I remarked a gigantic cross—a loan, no doubt, from the Jesuit College for this Mohammedan festivity. After each taboot there came a band of Hindoo “tigers”—men painted in thorough imitation of the jungle king, and wearing tiger ears and tails. Sometimes, instead of tigers, we had men painted in the colors worn by “sprites” in an English pantomime, and all—sprites and tigers—danced in the fashion of the medieval mummers. Behind the tigers and buffoons there followed women, walking in their richest dress. The nautch girls of Poonah are reputed the best in all the East, but the monotonous Bombay nautch is not to be compared with the Cashmere nautch of Lahore.
Some taboots were guarded on either side by sheiks on horseback, wearing turbans of the honorable green which denotes direct descent from the Prophet, though the genealogy is sometimes doubtful, as in the case of the Angel Gabriel, who, according to Mohammedan writers, wears a green turban, as being an “honorary” descendant of Mohammed.
Thousands of men and women thronged the road down which the taboots were forced to pass, or sat in the shade of the peepul trees until the taboot of their family or street came up, and then followed it, dancing and tomtom-beating like the rest.