The reader who has glanced through even the brief epitome of Valmiki’s poem now presented will not have omitted to note the wealth of imagination displayed by the author or authors, nor will he have failed to be charmed by many a beautiful picture and many an interesting situation.
CHAPTER III
THE RAM LILA OR PLAY OF RAMA
Let us now see how the stirring events of this Indian epic are brought dramatically before nineteenth century spectators.
Days before the time fixed for the Dasahra festival, men, done up like monkeys and attended by drummers, may be seen in the bazaars collecting money for the fair, at which the more striking leading incidents of the epic are annually performed, part by part, in a rude pantomimic fashion. Sometimes the opening scene is a great marriage procession. One such, on an unusually large scale, was got up in Lahore in 1884, at the expense of certain rich bankers. This motley and gigantic procession was made up of very heterogeneous elements. Several camels led the way; some bulky elephants put in an appearance, and a great number of mounted men, on good cavalry horses, gave dignity to the procession. Three or four well-filled carriages, gaily decorated with tinsel, flowers and coloured cloths, had the honour of accommodating the friends of Rama. A few huge litters, each borne aloft on the shoulders of sixteen or twenty bearers, were conspicuous objects in the throng. On some of these sat men personating the gods and goddesses of India in all their grotesqueness; on others squatted favourite female singers with their attendant minstrels, who delighted the audience with their grace and vocal performances. Imitation artillery armed with explosive bombs, dancers, mountebanks, musicians, and an innumerable crowd of ordinary citizens on foot, raised noise and dust enough to gratify the most pleasure-seeking Indian mob. The hero, Rama, and his inseparable brother, were dragged along on wooden horses, placed on a wheeled platform. There they sat, side by side, holding tiny bows and arrows in their hands, in a most ridiculous way, while the less important mythological personages, divine or other, came along in carriages or litters. There was a painful want of organization about the procession, and the usual mixture of the sumptuous and tawdry, the rich and squalid, to which one is accustomed in India.
A feature of the Dasahra festival is the number of men, disfigured with paint and ashes, who go about with iron skewers or pieces of cane passed through the skin of their arms, legs, sides, and throat, or even through the tongue. I once called up a party of these men and examined them. In answer to my remark, thrown out as a feeler, that the skewers had been passed through old perforations, the leader of the party indignantly pulled a young man before me, pinched up a good bit of the skin of his forearm, and there and then passed a blunt iron needle through it, which could not have been much thinner than an ordinary lead pencil. No blood flowed, and certainly the man operated upon did not wince in the slightest degree. After this the leader of the party, having satisfied me that the skin of his own neck below the chin was perfectly sound, passed a skewer through it with his own hand. In both cases a tolerable amount of force was necessary to pass the iron through the skin, but no blood flowed. These men, who are looked upon with a sort of awe by the vulgar, assured me that they were protected from pain or injury by a secret mantra of Guru Gorucknath’s known only to themselves.
They have probably learned, by the experience of many generations, safe places for the insertion of their skewers; but I was told by a native medical man that serious consequences sometimes follow their senseless ill-treatment of their own persons. The present of a rupee sent these absurd fellows away apparently well satisfied.
MEN WITH KNIVES AND SKEWERS PASSED THROUGH THEIR FLESH.
(From a photograph by W. C. Oman.)