JAGANNATH.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVI, Issue 14145, 21 August 1909, Page 1 (Supplement)

JAGANNATH.

BY FRANK MORTON.

I FIRST made what you may call a nodding acquaintance with Jagannath when I was a very small boy in Sunday-school; only they called him Juggernaut then. Literally a nodding acquaintance, you know. Consider the situation. Three hundred small boys and girls, with a scattering of hoydens and hobbledehoys, in a stuffy room. Outside, the yellow heat of a Staffordshire summer, bees strangely strayed that buzzed and bumbled, factories stark and squat, slender columns of towering chimneys that belched black smoke into the sky that still succeeded in being blue, all the dingy comfort and cramped ugliness of the Five Towns. Inside, there in the room, golden notes innumerable in the shafts of yellow sunlight, the blended odours of stained woodwork and the crowd, and (dominating all) the missionary from India. I was a very- orthodox small boy. I believed strenuously in the heaven of all converted children, the iniquity of all Jews, and the hell of all idolaters. Sleepy as I was, the missionary impressed me'horribly. He told now the poor heathen flung themselves .under the ear of Juggernaut and became shapeless corpses, wrecked homes of freed spirits to be housed eternally in the place you've heard of. Every healthy small boy takes pleasure in his conviction of the damnation of the heathen ; but I found myself a little sorry that there should be so manv. I told my teacher about it afterwards. He was a cobbler named Keats, an ex-prize-fighter, and a simple soul. He told mo it was sinful to have such thoughts; and I felt a bit rebellious about it. One can't always control one's thoughts, can one? And if one could, one wouldn't. Anyhow, that is how I first became acquainted with JagannatH.

11. And now, by this easy mode of travel, we are in Calcutta. It is hotter than it ■was in the potteries, and I am older, a trifle grimmer, already a little bruised by wayfaring. Also, I am insanely set on seeing all there is to be seen in India, and I have not yet attained to the slavery of the sub-editor's chair. In my zest of seeing things, I have formed the habit of getting into mischief. The editor is occasionally anxious about me, and when he is more anxious than usual his words are winged and barbed. I have written up the mint, and the hospital and the gaol. I have laboured absurdly to express the Hughli in a pother of words. I have been to Government House and to Collootellah. I am booked to go through later with the Opium Commission. I am, in short, beginning to take myself seriously as a journalist. It is a stage that ©very cub reaches sooner or later. Till the madness passes, he ought to be locked up in a dark cell and hosed with ice-water three times daily till the fever leaves him.' . . . But these editors are so humane. " Have you arranged for anv special foolishness this week?" asked the chief. I said I hadn't. I was not annoyed. I was prepared to" let the big man enjoy what I was pleased to consider his jest. "Ah. Then I think you may as well go down to Puri. There's a special sort of show on this year." | "Puri?" I said. "That's Orissa, isn't it? —the Juggernaut place?" " Yes; but if I were you I'd call it Jagannath. And you may as well get rid of any poppycock ideas you have about Jagannath before you go. You won't see any immolations or tragic spectacles, and there's more frenzy about a Methodist revival. Downs will drop you down to Cuttack in his launch. Hilgate's driving on from there. Meet Downs at the club at eight tomorrow morning. . And so it was that I began to know Jagannath better. .. 111. If you are out to see the beauties of India, you may as well skip Cuttack. It is, I think, the dullest and dingiest little place in the world. But Orissa generally is interesting to the observer of men and the student of religions. It is a flat land of rivers, and it is a land of multitudinous shrines. It was a stronghold of' Buddhism before the great wave of Hinduism swept over it. When the Muslim conqueror reached Orissa in 1580 he reported : " This country is no fit subject for .conquest or schemes of ambition, but belongs to the gods, and from end to end is a region of pilgrimage." It had been so for centuries before the Muslim came, and it has been so through, all the centuries since. If you lay a map of India flat before you now, in every area which you could cover on the map with the tip of your thumb there are at this moment pilgrims moving towards Puri and the shrine of Jagannath, "Lord and Preserver of the World." Every true Hindu has either been to Puri or means to go there, for Puri is esteemed the most sacred spot in India.

The road from Cuttack is good, wellshaded, rich in interest. As we drove along it we passed many pilgrims—men from Kashmir . and the Punjab, men from all over Bengal, one old man and his son who had tramped twelve hundred miles from some place whose name I have forgotten. All were footsore, but all were cheerful. I saw little or none of the loathsome diseases I had heard about, save in a, few cases of diseased men who were going to Puri in the hope of cure, as devout Catholics go to Lourdes. Lourdes reports its miracles, so does Puri; I don't know. One family we passed had tramped down from far Tirhut—an uncommon thing, for oven in my time most of the pilgrims from that region came down by rail to Calcutta. There were the father, two sons (aged five and seven), and one daughter a year old. The young mother had carried her baby all the way, and seemed glad to have done it. They were very- likeable heathen, that group. They knew us for unclean infidels, with defilement in our touch and shadow; but they were not disagreeable about it. There are many fanatics in India; but of sour intolerance the Christians seem to enjoy a monopoly. As we drove on, the road became less pleasant. We were skirting a flat coast of dingy sand, lapped by a slow and greasy sea. We passed hovels that equalled in squalor anything I ever saw in India or Melbourne. Scrubby cacti thrust their inhospitable spines at us. A lithe snake shivered across the road, and in a flash was gone. We passed a poor fellow horrible with elephantiasis, but sturdily dragging himself along. Humanity's unconquerable hope! Puri is a centre of desolation. Run over with pilgrims like ants, it lies forlorn and fever-stricken. _ Even the great temple does not lift Puri into any sort of grandeur. The water is bad, the heat sickening. Jagannath is not tender of human weakness, and his great festival is held in the hottest months. We found Puri, in plain English, humming like a hive; in plain American, humming like nothing on earth but. itself.

We noticed these things straightway. Then we had a drink, successfully dodging the water of the country, found the dakbungalow, and lunched. IV. Of Puri seen through a veil of .the ideal, you are afforded a very pleasant glimpse by M. Pierre Loti. I met him in Singapore ; a delightful fellow, French to the finger-tips, clean and keen as a rapier, laughing gaily into the eyes of Fortune as she stooped to fondle him. He went to India later, and this is what he said of Purl and the great temple there: —

"First we passed some fishermen's huts, scattered amongst the cactus hedges that grow on the dunes. Then Jagannath appears, .rising above myriads of grey palmthatched roofs. The aspect of the temple on this sea-girt shore is particularly strange, and the pyramid is so tall that all the objects lying at its feet seemed dwarfed. It has the elongated and swollen appearance of a crocodile's egg, a huge egg placed upright oh its. end. Rose-coloured veins wander over a white surface that is without ornamentation."

Get that picture of Jagannath's temple well into your mind, and you'll be thoroughly surprised if ever you see the real thing. In plain fact, it is less like a crocodile's egg than St. Paul's is. It reminds me oddly, as I look back to it, of an ac-cordion-pleated skirt, with the pleats made horizontally.

Mention of crocodiles' eggs recalls the quaint adventure of the bounder whom I shall call Ikestein. It was in a dak-bunga-low far north, and the weather was so hot that the mere act of blinking caused perspiration. Then came Ikestein, agent for phonographs and illuminated texts, paregoric and hairpins, the loudest man alive, a creature careless of climate, of manners, of elemental decency, a hater of baths, a horror grievous to be borne. Crabbe suggested that we should poison Ikestein, I was for screwing his neck and pitching him into the river, Hanmer thought it would be well to tie him down on an ant-nest; but it was a courteous country, so we let him live. If you had ever lived in a dak-bunga-low with Ikestein you would know what agony is. To start with, he had the appetite of a gorilla, and he revelled in grease. The chops we got were redolent of goat, and he preferred his fried in oil. One morning the queer tiling began. He said that he had never eaten turtle eggs, and he longed to. Hanmer said he knew where turtle eggs were to be had, and he would himself have some prepared for that day's dinner. "They are difficult to get," he said, " but I can get you one or two to try." Ikestein' gratitude exuded, while wo gasped. Turtle eggs in Behar . . . one might as well seek coffee-ice in Tophet. But at, dinner we grimly kept our countenances, while Ikestein declared the eggs a. trifle fishy, but good. " They thay they're thtrengthenin'," said Ikestein. Hanmer assured him that they were. Next morning Ikestein left; but wo had no twinge of conscience. Crocodile eggs could never hurt a man with a stomach like Ikestein's, and it was really noble of Hanmer to pay a rupee each for them.

Truth to tell, the temple of Jagannath is a rather poor example of that style, a debased specimen. There are many finer temples in India. It is as ugly as it is huge. The eye is half-blinded by the glare of its whitewashed mass. The first temple was built on the site of an ancient Buddhist shrine in the seventh century. Ever since then Puri lias been the high place of Hinduism in India. No Europeans are allowed inside the walls now. Even to stand and look at the slender column that stands in the roadway outside the Lion Gate one must take one's slices off. Jagannath is a symbol of one form of Vishnu. Tell a Hindu he -worships idols, and he will laugh at you. "It is absurd," Banerji told me one day. "I am not orthodox, you know. I have no brief for Hinduism. But these images you see aro merely symbols of the godhead, things to be compared to your crucifixes and figures of the saints. No sane man in India imagines for a moment that these blocks can think, or hear, or feel, or see." That may be so, where the intellectual classes are concerned. But the average man ] everywhere is keen to worship idols, and India furnishes no exception to the rule. The pilgrims at Puri are, for the most part, thoroughly convinced that in the great figure of Jagannath is enshrined the very potency and spirit of the god ; aod I was unable to discover that the priests ever discouraged that idea. Jagannath is, indeed, a very scrupulous image. He. is daily bathed, dressed, undressed, and put to bed. Daily four meals are solemnly served to him by the temple attendants. After every meal is music and dancing, for the god is understood to love the nautch. The pilgrims are all anxious to carry away some morsel of food that has been offered to the god. ; V. We reached Puri too late to witness the procession of Jagannath, but I offer you Hunter's account' of the thing that happens: —

"The Jagannath festival takes place according as the Indian months fall, in June or July, and for weeks before pilgrims come trooping into Puri by thousands every day. The whole district is in a ferment. The great car is 45ft in height. This vast structure is supported on sixteen wheels of 7ft diameter, and is 35ft square. The brother and sister of Jagannath have separate care, a few feet smaller. When the sacred images are at length brought forth and placed upon their chariots, thousands fall on their knees and bow their foreheads in the dust. The vast multitude shouts with one throat, and surging backwards and forwards drags the wheeled edifices down the broad street towards the country-house of the Lord of the World— Jagannath. Music strikes up before and behind, drums beat, cymbals clash. The priests harangue from the cars or shout a sort of fescennine medley enlivened with broad allusions and coarse gestures, which are received with roars of laughter from the crowd. And so the dense mass struggles forward by convulsive jerks, tugging a.nd sweating, shouting and jumping, singing and praying. The distance from the temple to the country-house is less than a mile but the wheels sink deep into the sand, and the journey takes several days. After hours of severe toil and wild excitement in the July tropical sun, a reaction necessarily follows. The zeal of the pilgrims flags before the garden-house is reached and the care, deserted by the devotees, are dragged along by the professional pullers, with deep-drawn grunts and groans. These men, 4200 in number, are peasants from the neighbourhood, who generally manage to live at free quarters in Puri during the festival. Once arrived at the coun-try-house, the enthusiasm subsides. The pilgrims drop exhausted upon the burning sand of the broad street or block up the lanes with their prostrate bodies. After they have slept off their excitement they' rise refreshed and ready for another of the strong religious stimulants of the season. The world's lord is left to get back to his temple as best he can; and in the quaint words of a writer half a century ago, but for the professional car-pullers the god ' would infallibly 6tick' at his countryhouse." VI. The temple of Jagannath is a vastly profitable concern— somebody. There is an army of priests and attendants. The offerings of the pilgrims must amount to an enormous sum yearly. There are all sorts of exactions. If a wealthy pilgrim wants to go into the shrine, lie pays. If he wishes to have the shrine to himself, he pays a great deal more. The inside of the temple is very dark, and the wealthy pilgrim is rarely or never able to see the idol on a first visit. This disturbs him, and the priests explain that he cannot see the god because he is too foul with sin. The devotee goes away, does whatever things are prescribed, and returns. The fees are higher now, but the shrine is lighter. One wealthy pilgrim, delighted with the clearer view, made the splendid road from Cuttack to Puri.

Then there is the feeding of the pilgrims. The temple sees io everything. The pilgrims come and go. Often there are more than a hundred thousand in Puri on a single day. I know that the thing has been tried successfully often enough in Christchurch. But after my experience in Puri, I am' convinced that if you can invent a new religion that the people will accept, there is money in it. Always provided that you have a temple. VII. There is that question of immolation— pilgrims throwing themselves under the wheels, the poor crushed corpses, and all the rest of it. Very long ago there may have been cases of the sort alleged—cases, that is, of self-immolation; and in 'more recent years there have unquestionably been cases of accident. It should be explained that such cars are attached to several of the great pagodas in the south of India; but, human nature being as we find it, all the fatalities connected with these cars have been debited to Jagannath. The cars are supposed to typify the moving, actual world over which the-- god in each case presides. Now, as to the nature of the accidents. One authority says : " In a closely-packed, eager throng of a hundred thousand men and women, many of them unaccustomed to exposure or hard labour, and all of them tugging and straining to the utmost under

the burning tropical sun, deaths must occasionally occur. There have doubtless been cases of pilgrims throwing themselves under the wheels in the frenzy of religious excitement but such instances have always been rare, and are now unknown. At one time several unhappy people were killed or injured every year, but they were almost invariably cases of accidental trampling. The few suicides that did occur were for the most part, cases of diseased and miserable objects, who took this means of putting themselves out of their pain. The official returns now put this beyond doubt. For the suppression of self-immolation in India, credit must go to the Indian Government that ignorant theorists are for ever abusing. Sati, the burning of widows, was suppressed by Lord William Bentinck in 1829. Prior to that, 839 widows were burned in one year in Bengal alone. The Government put an end to the burying, alive of lepers. Among the fanatics there lias always been a craze for immolation. Men caused themselves to be buried alive, and over and over again the Government disinterred them before they died. Stopped in one direction, they invented others. Up about Benares, suicide by drowning was until lately very popular. The devotee would tie himself between two big empty pots, paddle off into the Ganges, and there slowly fill the pots and sink with them. There was another practice—quaint and different— was known as sitting in Dhama. When a man had an incorrigible debtor, be would go and sit outside the door of his debtor's house, observing a strict fast. If he died (there were such cases) the consequences of his death were supposed to fall upon the debtor. If the dead man was a Brahman, the debtor was held to be guilty of the awful crime of Brahmanicide. It was a queer way of debt-collecting, and harder oh the creditor than most. Even in India, however, creditors as a class go short of sympathy. Is Hinduism responsible for these things? Is Christianity responsible for the cases of acute religious mania that are so common in some asylums? The questions are 'for you. I don't know. But I remember with delight my days in Puri. I scarcely dare go back there, now that the little fleas are so busy to bite me. They never troubled me, then. VIII. But times have changed otherwise-, they tell me. The roads no longer swarm with pilgrims as they did. Since the Orissa railway was opened very many pilgrims find the steam convenient Three hundred thousand rupees have been taken for tickets at Puri in a single day. But it is a wonderful country still, however pestilently humane the Government. The Thugs have disappearedthose eminently respectable men, who used to lie in wait to throttle the unwary so deftly as an act of pious homage to the subtle goddess of death. No widows burn. Devout suicides are taken to the police court, if and whenever they are caught in time. But still Father Ganges flows superbly through the lands of millions of the faithful. Still the wicked' Hughli whispers venomously to the Ghats. And still the plague stalks out among the people and takes toll, although his veiled feet are slower and more feeble than they were. There again credit must go to this Government that works day and night to save the people in spile of themselves. When I hear mincing little people deriding that Government, there is always a certain anger mingled with my pity of them. I should dearly love to see the affairs and accounts of New Zealand audited and overhauled by the Government of India. But many people would be made uncomfortable. Perhaps it's just as well not.