Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/189

 Biill-baiting, Bml-7'acing\ BitU-fights. 157

The Hatkars of the Central Provinces practise a rite of the same character, the purport of which is equally obscure. On the day of the Diwali festival they worship the cow, tying a piece of wool to its forehead and putting rice on it. Then they make a mud image of Govardhan, the mountain which Krishna, the cattle-god, held over his people to protect them from the rain sent by Indra, and then they let the cattle trample the image in pieces with their hoofs.^^ We may perhaps conjecture that the object is that the cattle may acquire mana by contact with the image of their patron god.

Another remarkable form of cattle-driving appears among the Bants, a cultivating caste in Kanara, to which reference has already been made. Every man of wealth keeps racing buffaloes, which, except for an occasional turn of ploughing at the beginning of the season, are kept for racing. The competition is between pairs of these animals, which drag a plank in succession through the mud of the rice fields. The winners are selected for pace and style, and, most important of all, for the height and breadth of the splash which they make, this being sometimes measured by an instrument like a gallows erected in the field. The in- decency and devil-dancing which accompany this obser- vance show, as I have already pointed out, that the rite is intended to promote fertility and disperse evil influence. If the rite be omitted, we are told, the local field demons are displeased and injure the crops. On the day after this ceremony the rice seedlings are transplanted.'*'*

We may suspect that we have here a form of sympathetic or imitative magic. The higher the mud is splashed the better will the field be soaked in the rainy season, just as during the rainy season in the Central Provinces, boys walk through the fields on stilts : the higher they can walk

•*■* Russell, op. cit. iii. 206.

•^^E. Thurston, Castes and Tribes of Southern India, i. 157 et seqq. (with photographs).