Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 25, 1914.djvu/76

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64 The Holi : a Vcinial Festival of the Hindus.

another, and throw them in the air, repeating their favourite extemporary stanzas, full of the grossest indelicacy, into which they freely introduce the names of their superiors, coupled with the most abominable allusions." ^^

The most interesting observance on the day when the fire is lighted is that of leaping through the flames, or walking on hot embers, usually collected in a pit dug for that purpose. At the village of Phalen in the Mathura District Mr. F. S. Growse observed that, though the heat was intense, "the lads of the village kept on running close round it, jumping and dancing and brandishing their lathis [bludgeons], while the Panda [village priest] went down and dipped in the pond and then, with his dripping pagri [turban] and dhoti [loin-cloth] on, ran back and made a feint of passing through the fire. In reality he only jumped over the outermost verge of the smouldering ashes and then darted into his cell again, much to the dissatisfaction of the spectators, who say that the former incumbent used to do it much more thoroughly. If on the next recurrence of the festival the Panda shows himself equally timid, the village proprietors threaten to eject him, as an impostor, from the land which he holds rent-free simply on the score of his being fire-proof." ^*^

Since Mr. Growse witnessed the performance at Phalen, Captain G. R. Hearn has supplied further particulars. For some eight days before the Holi the Panda stayed in a mud hut near the village tank, spending his time in prayer and fasting, his only food being milk. A bonfire was made of wild caper branches with a substratum of cow-dung cakes. Before the pile was set alight women walked round it, and wound skeins of cotton round it. Some men postured in the village square dressed in long white garments, half stupefied with drink, and with their faces painted red. The

^* T. D. Broughton, Letters written in a Mahratta Camp during the year iSog, ed. 1892, pp. 69, 71.

3*F. S. Growse, Mathura: a District Memoir, 3rd ed. (1883), p. 93.