Few, even of those who have lived many years in India and made some inquiry regarding the external religion of its inhabitants, are aware how little the popular belief of the lower classes has in common with the Hindooism of the Brahmins, and how much it differs in different provinces, and in different races and classes in the same province.
In the immediate vicinity of Poona, where Brahminism seems so orthodox and powerful, a very little observation will satisfy the inquirer that the favorite objects of popular worship do not always belong to the regular Hindoo Pantheon. No orthodox Hindoo deity is so popular in the Poona Deccan as the deified sage Vithoba and his earlier expounders, both sage and followers being purely local divinities. Wherever a few of the pastoral tribes are settled, there Byroba, the god of the herdsmen, or Kundoba, the deified hero of the shepherds, supersedes all other popular idols. Byroba the Terrible, and other remnants of Fetish or of Snake-worship, everywhere divide the homage of the lower castes with the recognized Hindoo divinities, while outside almost every village the circle of large stones sacred to Vetal, the demon-god of the outcast helot races, which reminds the traveler of the Druid circles of the northern nations, has for ages held, and still holds, its ground against all Brahminical innovations.
Some of these local or tribal divinities, when their worshipers are very numerous or powerful, have been adopted into the Hindoo Olympus as incarnations or manifestations of this or that orthodox divinity, and one or two have been provided with elaborate written legends connecting them with some known Puranic character or event; but, in general, the true history of the local deity, if it survives at all, is to be found only in popular tradition; and it thus becomes a matter of some ethnological and historical importance to secure all such fleeting remnants of ancient superstition before they are forgotten as civilization advances.
Some information of this kind is to be gleaned even from the present series of legends, though the object of the collector being simply amusement, and not antiquarian research, any light which is thrown on the popular superstitions of the country is only incidental.
Of the superhuman personages who appear in them, the “Rakshas” is the most prominent. This being has many features in common with the demoniacal Ogre of other lands. The giant bulk and terrible teeth of his usual form are the universal attributes of his congener. His habit of feasting on dead bodies will remind the reader of the Arabian Ghoul, while the simplicity and stupidity which qualify the supernatural powers of the Rakshas, and usually enable the quick-witted mortal to gain the victory over him, will recall many humorous passages in which giants figure in our own Norse and Teutonic legends.
The English reader must bear in mind that in India beings of this or of very similar nature are not mere traditions of the past, but that they form an important part of the existing practical belief of the lower orders. Grown men will sometimes refuse every inducement to pass at night near the supposed haunt of a Rakshas, and I have heard the cries of a belated traveler calling for help attributed to a Rakshas luring his prey.
Nor is darkness always an element in this superstition: I have known a bold and experienced tracker of game gravely assert that some figures which he had been for some time keenly scanning on the bare summit of a distant hill were beings of this order, and he was very indignant at the laugh which his observation provoked from his less-experienced European disciple. “If your telescope could see as far as my old eyes,” the veteran said, “or if you knew the movements of all the animals of this hunting-ground as well as I do, you would see that those must be demons and nothing else. No men nor animals at this time of day would collect on an open space and move about in that way. Besides, that large rock close by them is a noted place for demons; every child in the village knows that.”
I have heard another man of the same class, when asked why he looked so intently at a human footstep in the forest pathway, gravely observed that the footmark looked as if the foot which made it had been walking heel-foremost, and must therefore have been made by a Rakshas, “for they always walked so when in human form.”
Another expressed particular dread of a human face, the eyes of which were placed at an exaggerated angle to each other, like those of a Chinese or Malay, “because that position of the eyes was the only way in which you could recognize a Rakshas in human shape.”
In the more advanced and populous parts of the country the Rakshas seems giving way to the “Bhoot,” which more nearly resembles the mere ghost of modern European superstition; but even in this diluted form such beings have an influence over Indian imaginations to which it is difficult in these days to find any parallel in Europe.