Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/69

The Holi : a Vernal Festival of the Hindus. 57 longer: some twenty days in Bombay, fifteen at Poona, and a week or more among the Bhils of Western India.*

In Northern India the pile is usually erected on a site east of the village, and consists of a layer of dried cow-dung cakes, the fuel commonly used by the peasantry, on which are placed logs, brushwood, and rubbish. The lighter fuel bursts into a sudden blaze through which men and animals pass or are driven. In places where the rite of fire-walking in its special form is observed, a pit is dug in which quantities of firewood are burned, and the performers walk through the blazing embers. The materials are provided by levies on the residents of the village or quarter in which the fire is lighted, or are collected from the jungle by the people who, as we have seen, are at leisure during this season. There is also a rule that the builders of the fire are entitled to plunder any fuel which they may require. In Chanda, in the Central Provinces, where, as we shall see, two fires are lighted, it is said that the materials must be stolen.^ In Poona cow-dung cakes are stolen for the fire wherever they may be found.® In Lower Bengal "the head men of the villages, or the chiefs of the trades, first contribute their quotas; the rest collect whatever they can lay hands on—fences, doorposts, and even furniture, if not vigilantly protected. If these things be once added to the pile, the owner cannot reclaim them, and it is a point of honour to acquiesce; any measures, however, are allowable to prevent their being carried off."

^ Gazetteer Bombay City and Island {\(^), vol. i., pp. l"}^ et seq. ; Gazetteer Bombay Presidency, vol. xviii. (1885), Part i., pp. 254 et seq. ; vol. vi. (1880), p. 29. For the rites in Marwar see J. Tod, Annals of Rajas than (1884), vol. i., pp. 595 et seq.

^Chanda Gazetteer (igog), vol. i., p. 91. Compare the looting of fuel for bonfires in England, Folk- Lore, vol. xxiii. (191 2), pp. 421 et seq. ; vol. xxiv. (1913), p. 85 ; vol. xxi. (1910), p. 38. Miss C. S. Burne has kindly supplied these references.

^ Bofnbay Gazetteer, vol. xviii. (1885), Part i., p. 292.

' H. H. Wilson, Essays and Lectures, chiefly on the Religion of the Hindus (1862), vol. ii., p. 227.