Page:Adam's reports on vernacular education in Bengal and Behar, submitted to Government in 1835, 1836 and 1838.djvu/201

Rh a conjuror think that they can afford to have one, they invite a professor of the art from a neighbouring village where there happens to be one to spare, and give him a piece of land and various privileges and immunities. He possesses great influence over the inhabitants. If a quarrel takes place, his interference will quell it sooner than that of any one else; and when he requires the aid of his neighbours in cultivating his plot of ground or in reaping its produce, it is always more readily given to him than to others. The art is not hereditary in a family or peculiar to any caste. One I met with was a boatman, another a chowkidar, and a third a weaver. Whoever learns the charm may practice it, but it is believed that those practice it most successfully who are “to the manner born,” that is, who have been born under a favorable conjunction of the planets. Every conjuror seems to have a separate charm, for I have found no two the same. They do not object to repeat it merely for the gratification of curiosity, and they allow it to be taken down in writing. Neither do they appear to have any mutual jealousy, each readily allowing the virtue of other incantations than his own. Sometimes the pretended curer of snake-bites by charms professes also to possess the power of expelling demons, and in other cases the expeller of demons disclaims being a snake-conjuror. Demon-conjurors are not numerous in Nattore; and tiger-conjurors who profess to cure the bites of tigers, although scarcely heard of in that thana, are more numerous in those parts of the district where there is a considerable space covered by jungle inhabited by wild beasts. Distinct from these three kinds of conjurors and called by a different name is a class of gifted (guni) persons who are believed to possess the power of preventing the fall of hail which would destroy or injure the crops of the villages. For this purpose when there is a prospect of a hail-storm, one of them goes out into the fields belonging to the village with a trident and a buffaloe’s horn. The trident is fixed in the ground and the Gifted makes a wide circuit around it, running naked, blowing the horn, and pronouncing incantations. It is the firm belief of the villagers that their crops are by this means protected from hail-storms. Both men and women practice this business. There are about a dozen in Nattore, and they are provided for in the same way as the conjurors.

Some of these details may appear, and in themselves probably are, unimportant, but they help to afford an insight into the character of the humblest classes of native society who constitute the great mass of the people, and whose happiness and improvement are identical with the prosperity of the country; and although they exhibit the proofs of a most imbecile superstition, yet it is a superstition which does not appear to have its origin or support in vice or depravity, but in a childish ignorance of the common laws of nature which the most imperfect education