Page:The Imperial Gazetteer of India - Volume 10 (2nd edition).pdf/463



ORISS.1. 451 of a hundred are on foot. Mixed with the throng are devotees of various sorts,--some covered with ashes; some almost naked; some with matted, yellow-stained hair; and almost all with their foreheads streaked with red or white, a string of beads round their necks, and a stout staff in their hands. Every now and then, corered waggons drawn by the high-humped bullocks of Upper India, or by the smaller breed of Bengal, according to the nationality of the owner, creak past on their wooden wheels. Those from the Northern Provinces still bear traces of the licentious Musalıán rule, by being jealously shut up. The Bengalí husband, on the other hand, keeps his women goodtempered, and renders pilgrimage pleasant, by piercing holes in the waggon-hood, through which dark female eyes constantly peep out. Then a lady in coloured trousers, from some village near Delhi, ambles past on a tiny pony, her husband submissively walking by her side, and a female domestic, with a hamper of Ganges water and a bundle of dirty cloth, bringing up the rear. Next a great train of palanquins, carrying a Calcutta banker and his ladies, sweeps past. But the greatest spectacle is a north-country Ráji, with his caravan of elephants, camels, led horses, and swordsmen, looking resigned and very helpless in his sedan of state, followed by all the indescribable confusion, dirt, and noises of Indian royalty. The great spiritual army that thus marches its hundreds, and sometimes its thousands, of miles, along burning roads, across unbridged rivers, and through pestilent regions of jungle and swamp, is annually recruited with as much tact and regularity as is bestowed on any military force. Attached to the temple is a body of emissaries, called pilgrim guides, numbering about three thousand men, who visit every Province and District of India in search of devotees. Each of the leading priests keeps up a separate set of these men, sending them to the part of the country of which he enjoys the spiritual cliarge, and claiming the profits of the disciples they bring in. They wander about from village to village within their allotted beats, preaching pilgrimage as the liberation from sin. The arrival of a pilgrim-guide is a memorable event in the still life of an Indian village. He seldom shines in public exhortation, but waits till the men have gone out to the fields, and then makes a round of visits to the wonen. Skilled in every artifice of persuasion, he works upon the religious fears and the worldly hopes of the female mind; and by the tinie the unsuspecting husbands come home from their work, every house has its fair apostle of pilgrimage. The elder women, and some of the aged fathers of the hamlet, long to see the face of the merciful god who will remit the sins of a life, an] are content to lay their bones within his precincts. Religious motives of a less emphatic sort influence the majority. The hopes of worldly reward for a good deed swell the number. The fashionableness of