Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/306

 284 The Veneration of the Cow in India.

dispose of dead cattle ; from the herd a king bull is selected by a magical rite, and he is treated with the highest rever- ence,-^- Siva, as a god of fertility, was originally a bull, which by the usual course of religious evolution has now been converted into his attendant or " ydhiclo.'' {vdhana). Hence, when a sacred bull dies, the Devangas of southern India, who worship Siva and the bull, bury him with elaborate funeral rites ; and among the Dhangars, who follow similar beliefs, a grown-up, unmarried girl, who is regarded as under taboo, is not allowed to ride on an ox, lest she pollute Basava, the sacred bull.^^ Among several Hindu tribes, if a cow dies on the spot where she has been tethered, or with a rope round her neck, the whole family of the owner is taboo until they remove the pollution by bathing in a holy river ; in the Punjab such an owner is sent, as a form of penance, to convey the tail of the dead cow to the Ganges, and is there beaten with a shoe by a Chuhra sweeper, a combination of indignities most grievous to a pious Hindu ; among the Maratha Kunbis the mere presence of a bone of a cow or ox in the house causes -its master to be temporarily excluded from caste privileges.^* The Mikirs, one of the wilder tribes of Assam, are only now under Brahman guidance beginning to give up their prejudice against keeping cows.^^

Among other tribes a similar taboo attaches to the buffalo, which also possesses inherent " sanctity," probably because it has been only in comparatively recent times

^ E. Thurston, Castes and Tribes of Southern India, vol. iii., pp. 219 et seq. ; W. Francis, Gazetteer of the Madtira District, vol. i., pp. 20 et seq.

"^Thurston, op. cit., vol. ii., pp. 161 -2 ; Gazetteer of the Bombay Presi- dency, vol. xxi., p. 153. Manu (iv. 142) directs that a Brahman in a state of taboo shall not touch a cow, fire, or another Brahman.

3^ R. V. Russell, Central Provinces District Gazetteers : IVardha District, vol. A, p. 60 ; Id., Bhandara District, vol. A, p. 60; Id., Sambalpur Dis- trict, vol. A, p. 68; Rose, op. cit., vol. ii., p. 209.

35 E. Stack, The Mikirs, p. 12 ; T. C. Hodson, The Naga Tribes of Man i- pur, p. 118.