Tigers, Propitiation of.
Some tigers are supposed to be amenable to courtesy. In one of the Kashmîr tales, the hero in search of tiger’s milk shoots an arrow and pierces one of the teats of the tigress, to whom he explains that he hoped she would thus be able to suckle her cubs with less trouble. In other tales we find the tiger pacified if he is addressed as “Uncle.”[35] So, Colonel Tod describes how a tiger attacked a boy near his camp, and was supposed to have, like the fierce Râkshasa of the Nepâl legend, released the child when he was addressed as “Uncle.”[36] “This Lord of the Black Rock, for such is the designation of the tiger, is one of the most ancient bourgeois of Morwan; his stronghold is Kâla Pahâr, between this and Magawâr; and his reign during a long series of years has been unmolested, notwithstanding numerous acts of aggression on his bovine subjects. Indeed, only two nights before he was disturbed gorging on a buffalo belonging to a poor oilman of Morwan. Whether the tiger was an incarnation of one of the Mori lords of Morwan, tradition does not say; but neither gun, bow, nor spear has ever been raised against him. In return for this forbearance, it is said, he never preyed on man; or if he seized one, would, on being entreated with the endearing epithet of ‘Uncle,’ let go his hold.”[37]
Tiger-worship among the Gonds.
Among the Gonds tiger-worship assumes a particularly disgusting form. At marriages among them, a terrible apparition appears of two demoniacs possessed by Bâgheswar, the tiger god. They fall ravenously on a bleating kid, and gnaw it with their teeth till it expires. “The manner,” says Captain Samuells, who witnessed the performance, “in which the two men seized the kid with their teeth and killed it was a sight which could only be equalled on a feeding day in the Zoological Gardens or a menagerie.”[38]
Men Metamorphosed into Tigers.
The only visible difference between the ordinary animal and a man metamorphosed into a tiger was explained to Colonel Sleeman to consist in the fact that the latter had no tail. In the jungles about Deori there is said to be a root, which if a man eats, he is converted into a tiger on the spot; and if, when in this state, he eats another species of root, he is turned back into a man again.
“A melancholy instance of this,” said Colonel Sleeman’s informant, “occurred in my own father’s family when I was an infant. His washerman Raghu was, like all washermen, a great drunkard. Being seized with a violent desire to ascertain what a man felt like in the state of a tiger, he went one day to the jungle and brought back two of these roots, and desired his wife to stand by with one of them, and the instant she saw him assume the tiger’s shape to thrust the root she held into his mouth. She consented, and the washerman ate his root and instantly became a tiger, whereupon she was so terrified that she ran off with the antidote in her hand. Poor old Raghu took to the woods, and there ate a good many of his friends from the neighbouring villages; but he was at last shot, and recognized from his having no tail. You may be quite sure when you hear of a tiger having no tail that it is some unfortunate man who has eaten of that root, and of all the tigers he will be found the most mischievous.”[39]
This is a curious reversal of the ordinary theory regarding the tail of the tiger, to which a murderous strength is attributed. A Hindu proverb says that the hair of a tiger’s tail may be the means of losing one’s life. This has been compared by Professor De Gubernatis with the tiger Mantikora spoken of by Ktesias, which has on its tail hairs which are darts thrown by it for the purpose of defence.[40]