This was all! Sita the patient, faithful, loving wife was never brought forward. The woman’s part was a quite subordinate one and was left to the imagination of the spectators. The conquering Rama was everything; the long-suffering Sita was forgotten on this occasion. However, the gentle wife of Rama has a place of her own in the affectionate regard of the people of her native land and her history is well remembered. I have seen a picture of the car in which Sita was abducted tattooed on the arm of an ignorant woman of the lower classes, and found on inquiry that she knew the old old story well.
The Ram Lila I have just described was a particularly good example of the annual celebration. Ordinarily, huge figures, stuffed with straw, represent the demons. Rama and Lakshmana, seated on a stage, are carried about on the shoulders of men and, after traversing the ground, hither and thither, without any apparent object, at length set fire to the effigies, whose combustion concludes the play, if such it can be called; whereupon the crowds assembled to see the sport depart in clouds of dust and smoke. Often several sets of demons and Ramas may be seen on the same field, got up by rival parties, by different sections of a city, or by separate villages.
It appears that there is some difficulty in getting boys to personate Rama and his brother on the occasion of the Ram Lila festival, as it is the popular belief that they never live to attain manhood.[48] There is also another, if less superstitious reason for the difficulty in question, and it is this: At the close of the festival Rama and Lakshmana have to feast the Brahmans, and that involves no inconsiderable outlay of money. Hence, in the somewhat lawless border districts on the Indus, it is the usual thing for the sons of well-to-do persons to be actually kidnapped and carried off to play Rama and Lakshmana at the annual festival.
For ten days during the feast they are believed to be literally possessed by the god and are worshipped as Vishnu. But the worship of these boys creates, I was told, a curious and interesting difficulty about the selection of Rama and Lakshmana. The two heroes were men of the warrior caste, and so should their modern representatives be, but, as they have divine honours paid to them during the festival, it would not suit the Brahmans to bow down to and touch the feet of youths of inferior caste, while even personating demigods, and so, in defiance of history, Brahman youths are generally selected to represent the Kshatriya heroes in the Ram Lila.
What the Indian artist’s conception of the form and appearance of Rama is, may be partially understood from the statuettes in stone made at the present day and frequently to be met with, at least in Northern India. They are usually sculptured in white marble, but painted (I may say enamelled) jet black, the only unblackened portion being the whites of the eyes. The eyebrows are gilded and so is the loin-cloth or dhoty, which is the only piece of clothing on the person of the god-man. Two big ornaments, shaped like stumpy reels, fill big holes in the lobes of the ears, and make them stick out on either side. On the forehead is the Vishnu caste-mark, the central line in red, and the two side lines, diverging from the top of the nose, in gold. These figures chiselled by the Indian sculptor are always stiff and somewhat conventional.
The Dasahra festival of Northern India is replaced in Bengal by the Durga Puja, and consequently the Bengalees do not perform the Ram Lila; but I remember to have seen, years ago, in Bengal, a large collection of colossal groups of figures representing favourite incidents in the “Mahabharata” and “Ramayana,” prepared at the expense of the Maharajah of Burdwan, to which show, an annual one, I believe, the public were freely admitted. The grotesque forms of the monsters of the Indian epics were reproduced in huge clay statues, variously coloured and clothed. Some, armed with the strange weapons which the poets had imagined, were engaged in deadly combat. Gigantic arrows were conspicuous, and some of them, with the aid of thread supports, were shown in the air on their way to some ill-fated warrior or other. More peaceful scenes were also represented, as where Ravana, in the disguise of a Brahman, visits Sita in the forest. Various holy hermits were also there in all the repulsiveness of dirt and emaciation. The figures were coloured yellow, blue, green, brown, or black, according to the text of the poet, the conventional notions of the people, or the taste and fancy of the artists. Some of these clay statues were decidedly well modelled. They had real hair on their heads, faces and breasts; they were clothed in cotton fabrics, according to the not very elaborate fashions of the country, and, in some cases, were by no means unartistic representations of the men, demons and demigods of the sacred epics of India.
APPENDIX
The Story of the Descent of Ganga (the Ganges), as related in the “Ramayana”
In ancient times lived Sangara, a virtuous king of Ayodhya. He had two wives but no children. As he and his consorts longed for offspring, the three of them went to the Himalayas and practised austerities there. When they had been thus engaged for a hundred years, a Brahman ascetic of great power granted this boon to Sangara; that one of his wives should give birth to a son who should perpetuate his race and the other should be the mother of sixty thousand manly and high-spirited sons. In due time the elder wife bore the promised son, who was named Asamanja, and the younger wife a gourd. From this gourd, when it burst open, came forth sixty thousand tiny sons, who were fostered, during their helpless infancy, by keeping them in jars filled with clarified butter. When his numerous sons had grown to man’s estate the king, their father, determined to offer a horse-sacrifice. In accordance with this resolution a horse was, in the usual way, set free to wander where it listed, attended, for its protection, by mighty warriors of Sangara’s army.
Now it came to pass that one day Vasava, assuming the form of a Rakshasa, stole the horse away. The sixty thousand sons of the King of Ayodhya thereupon commenced, at their father’s command, a diligent search for the missing animal. They scoured the world in vain for the stolen horse and then set about making a rigorous search in the bowels of the earth, digging downwards some sixty thousand yojanas. In these subterranean explorations they committed great havoc amongst the dwellers in the under-world; but they persevered in their quest and presently, in the Southern Quarter, came upon a huge elephant resembling a hill. This colossal elephant, named Verupaksha, supported the entire earth upon his head and caused earthquakes whenever he happened to move his head from fatigue. Going round this mighty beast, the sons of Sangara continued their search in the interior of the earth. They at last found the stolen horse and observed, quite close to it, “the eternal Vasudeva in the guise of Kapila,” upon whom they rushed with blind but impotent fury; for he, uttering a tremendous roar, instantly reduced them all to ashes.