Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/196

 170 Hook-Swinging in India,

practice of hook-swinging in a certain village of the Madura district. He represented, with all earnestness, that, since this ceremony had been stopped, the rainfall had been deficient and the crops scanty ; cholera had been prevalent ; and in families where there were five or six children ten years ago, there were now only two or three." ^^

Turning now to the Bombay Presidency, it is recorded that at Yellama, a hill of pilgrimage, in the Belgaum district, "hook-swinging was commonly practised at the shrine of the goddess Yellama, and that 175 persons were swung so recently as 1834. The shrine from which the hill is named is situated in the bed of the Saraswati stream, and is locally said to be two thousand years old, but the present one was not built till the seventeenth or eighteenth century. In the early days of British rule women resorted thither naked to pray for children or for the cure of skin diseases."^^

There is ample evidence for the more or less widespread performance of the rite in the Bengal Presidency. Sir W. W. Hunter, referring to it as the potd festival, states that it was still being practised in 1865 among the Northern Santalis in April-May, that the festival lasted about a month, and that young men used to swing with hooks in their backs as in the charak-puja of the Hindus.^^

Ball, writing of the Santals in 1869, says that

" Among other requests, they asked me to give them permission to perform the Cliuruk puja, better known to English readers as the swinging festival, which has been forbidden in British India. They said that in consequence of the Bhut, or evil spirit, not being appeased, their women and children were dying from sickness, and their cattle were being killed by wild beasts. When I replied that I had no authority to give them such permission, they then became most urgent that I should send a petition to the Government,

^^ E.Thurscon, op. cit., p. 498.

1^ The Imperial Gazetteer of India, vol. xxii., p. 148.

''SirW. W. Hunter, The Anuah of Rural Betigal, vol. i., p. 463.