Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Volume 4.djvu/452

MALASAR necessary for the full grasping of the meaning of a Greek tragedy, so it is necessary to portray the legend which is the basis of this mystery, all the more as the characters are Hindu gods. Kāma, then, is the Hindu Cupid, not a tiny little child like the Roman god of love, but more like Eros. He has beautiful attributes. His bowls of the sugar-cane; his arrows are tipped with flowers; and his bow-string is a chain of bees — a pretty touch that recalls the swallow song of the Homeric bowstring. For all that, the genius of the country has modified the local idea of Eros. He has long ago found his Psyche: in point of fact, this Hindu Eros is a married man. His wife, Rathi, is the other speaking character, and she certainly displays a beautiful eloquence not unfitting her position. Moreover, like every married man, Kāma has a father-in-law, and here the tragedy begins to loom out of the playful surroundings of a god of love of whatever nation or clime. Siva, the destroyer, he of the bright blue neck, the dweller, as Kāma tauntingly says, among graves and dead men's ashes; Siva, mighty in penance, is father of Rathi. In the play itself, he is not even a muta persona; he does not appear at all. What he does is only adumbrated by the action or song of the other characters. The legend strikingly illustrates the Hindu view of penance. Briefly stated, it is that anyone who performs any penance for a sufficiently long time acquires such a store of power and virtue, that the very gods themselves cannot stand against it. Hindu mythology affords many examples of this belief. Siva himself, in one of his incarnations, saved the whole Indian Olympus and the universe at large from a demi-god, who, by years of penance, had become charged, as it were, with power, like a religious electric 'accumulator.' The early sages and heroes of