(Headings are mine)
<h2>THE PILGRIMS OF JAGANNATH</h2>
<h3>Pilgrimage</h3>
The name of Jagannath still draws the faithful from a hundred provinces of India to the Puri sands.
This yearning after holy places seems, indeed, to form part of the universal religion of mankind. To gaze upon the scenes amid which the Deity has dwelt, to bathe in the rivers that once laved his mystical incarnate frame, to halt at noonday under hoary trees beneath which the divine presence has reposed, to pray upon the mountain hallowed by his lonely communings, and to behold in the everlasting rock the footprints of the god, are longings which have, at one period or another, filled the imagination, and stirred the innermost heart of all noble races.
From that ancient night on which the ladder was let down from heaven, and the angels ascended and descended before the sleeper on the pillow of stones at Bethel, till the time when the true cross began to give off its inexhaustible splinters to the Christian world, and thence down to the present hour, a strip of sand and rock has been regarded with passionate tenderness by the august dynasty of religions to which our own belongs.
In the wildest period of medieval history, savage nations forgot their feuds, and rushed hand in hand to the rescue of those distant shrines. In their defence, army after army reddened the Syrian sands with their blood.
Even in this unemotional age, a ceaseless stream of pilgrims from Asia, from Europe, from America, from the infidel parts of the Turk, and from the torrid mountains of Abyssinia, still pours into the Terra Sancta at the great festival of the Christian year. Its most solemn shrine is parcelled out in jealously guarded inches to the long separated sections of the primitive church. The coldest of the Teutonic creeds cannot contemplate those scenes untouched, while the Southern forms of Christianity abandon themselves to paroxysms of emotion.
This longing after shrines forms a very important feature in the national character of the Hindus. Day and night throughout every month of the year, troops of devotees arrive at Puri, and for 300 miles along the great Orissa road every village has its pilgrim encampment.
<h3>Images of the pilgrimage to Puri</h3>
The parties consist of from 20 to 300 persons. At the time of the great festivals these bands follow so close as to touch each other; and a continuous train of pilgrims, many miles long, may often be seen on the Puri high road.
They march in orderly procession, each party under its spiritual leader. At least five-sixths, and often nine-tenths of them, are females. Now a straggling band of slender, diminutive women, clothed in white muslin, and limping sadly along, announces a pilgrim company from Lower Bengal; then a joyous retinue with flowing garments of bright red or blue, trudging stoutly forward, their noses pierced with elaborate rings, their faces freely tattooed, and their hands encumbered with bundles of very dirty cloth, proclaims the stalwart female peasantry of Northern Hindustan. Ninety-five out 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, covered wagons 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 Mussalman rule, by being jealously shut up. The Bengali husband, on the other hand, keeps his women good-tempered, and renders pilgrimage pleasant, by piercing holes in the wagon-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 palankeens, carrying a Calcutta banker and his ladies, sweeps past. I met one consisting of forty palankeens, with 320 bearers and about fifty luggage-carriers, whose monotonous chant made itself heard far off in the silent night.
But the greatest spectacle is a north country Raja 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.
<h3>The pilgrim hunter</h3>
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 in any military force.
Attached to the temple is a body of emissaries, called pilgrim-hunters, or pilgrim-guides, according as a friendly or a hostile view is taken of their functions, numbering about 3000 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 province of which he enjoys the spiritual charge, 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, and sometimes using arguments as worldly, and drawing pictures as overstrained, as those by which the flagging devotion of Europe was lashed into zeal during the later crusades.
The arrival of a pilgrim-hunter is a memorable event in the still life of an Indian village. There is no mistaking the man. The half-bald shaven head, the tunic of coarse dirty cloth, the cap drawn over the ears, the palm leaf umbrella, the knapsack on the back, and the quid of narcotic leaf which he chews and rolls in his cheek as he strides forward, proclaim the emissary of Jagannath.
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 women. Skilled in every artifice of persuasion, he works upon the religious fears and the worldly hopes of the female mind; and by the time 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, and 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 pilgrimage, and that social self-complacency which springs from being in the mode, attract the frivolous. The young are hooked by the novelty of a journey through strange lands.
Poor widows catch at anything to relieve the tedium of their blighted existence; and barren wives long to pick up the child-giving berries of the banyan tree within the sacred enclosure, and to pour out the petition of their souls before the kindly god.
The shut-up, aimless life of Indian women gives a peculiar charm to the enterprise. The arrival of a pilgrim-hunter sends a general flutter through the whole zenanas of the district, and a hundred little female heads beat wildly against the wires of their cages. In parties of thirty pilgrims I seldom counted more than five men, and sometimes not more than three. The best authorities I have consulted give the proportion of males at ten per cent., and one native writer puts them at less than five in a hundred.
<h3>The journey</h3>
The first part of the journey is pleasant enough. Change of scene, new countries, new races, new languages, and a world of new customs and sights, await the travellers from upper India.
A good part of the distance is now accomplished by railway, and the northern pilgrims can thus get over their first 1000, or even 1400 miles, if they chose to travel straight through, in three days. But generally they walk from 300 to 600 miles, and long before they have reached the holy city their strength is spent.
The sturdy women of Hindustan brave it out, and sing songs till they drop; but the weaker females of Bengal limp piteously along with bleeding feet in silence, broken only by deep sighs and an occasional sob.
The pilgrim-hunter tries to keep up their spirits, and insists, with a necessary obduracy, on their doing a full day's journey every day, in order that they may reach in time for the festival. Many a sickly girl dies upon the road; and by the time they reach Puri, the whole party has its feet bound up in rags, plastered with dirt and blood. I have counted bands in which nine out of every ten were lame.
<h3>Arrival in the holy city</h3>
But, once within sight of the holy city, the pains and miseries of the journey are forgotten. They hurry across the ancient Marhatta bridge with songs and ejaculations, and rushing towards one of the great artificial lakes, plunge beneath its sacred waters in a transport of religious emotion. The dirty bundles of rags now yield their inner treasures of spotless cotton, and the pilgrims, refreshed and robed in clean garments, proceed to the temple.
The pilgrim-hunter makes over the flock to his priestly employer, and every hour discloses some new idol or solemn spectacle. As they pass the Lion Gate a man of the sweeper caste strikes them with his broom to purify them of their sins, and forces them to promise, on pain of losing all the benefits of pilgrimage, not to disclose the events of the journey or the secrets of the shrine.
In a few days the excitement subsides. At first nothing can exceed their liberality to their spiritual guide. But thoughts of the slender provision remaining for the return journey soon begin to cool their munificence, and the ghostly man's attentions slacken in proportion.
Before a week is over money altercations commence, which in process of time resolve themselves into an acrimonious haggling over every shrine, and the last few days of their stay are generally devoted to schemes for getting out of the holy city with as few more payments as possible.
Every day the pilgrims bathe in one of the sacred lakes. These vast artificial sheets of water are embanked with solid masonry, honeycombed by time, and adorned with temples rising from the edge or peeping from beneath masses of rich foliage.
At the principal one 5000 bathers may be seen at once. On the masonry banks, which are formed into one continuous flight of steps all the way round, a good mile in length, there is sometimes not an inch of standing room to be had.
Here, as in every spot where the common people congregate, the primitive adoration of local divinities and village gods makes its appearance. In this centre of Vishnu-worship, half-way down the grand flight of steps to the lake, stands a venerable banyan tree, the abode of an ancient sylvan deity, whom the pilgrims propitiate by sticking red flowers into the crevices of the weather-beaten trunk.
Not far off is the garden-house of Jagannath, whither the three sacred images are drawn during the Car Festival. I have mentioned that the Chinese travellers in the fifth century describe a similar ceremonial of the Buddhists. But I suspect that both the Buddhists and the later worshippers of Jagannath caught the idea from those older woodland rites, of which traces survive in every hamlet of Bengal.
To this day each district has some secluded spot in the jungle, whither the villagers flock once a year to adore the genius loci in the shape of a log, or a lump of day, or a black stone, or the trunk of a tree. I believe the Car Festival is only a very pompous development of this primitive hankering after forest devotions, skilfully incorporated with the incidents of the legendary life of Krishna, who was himself essentially a woodland god.
The garden-house stands at the end of a long, broad, sandy avenue, somewhat under a mile in length, which runs direct from it to the temple. It is surrounded by a massive wall, about twenty feet high, and castellated at the top, like the fortresses of Northern India.
The principal gateway looks towards the temple, and is a handsome structure with a fine pointed roof adorned with lions in the most conventional style of Hindu sculpture. Inside one catches glimpses of long straight walks and groves of bright evergreen trees, with an ancient shrine at the end of the vista. A glory of tropical foliage, vocal with birds, overtops the lofty wall with every shade of green, from the slender-stemmed, feathery elegance of the coronetted palm, to the solid masses of the mango, and the hoary majesty of the banyan tree.
<h3>Swarga Dwara</h3>
Another place visited by all pilgrims is the Swarga Dwara, the Gate of Heaven. The devotee threads his way through the deep-sunk narrow alleys of the town, with their thatched huts of wattle or mud gaily painted with red and yellow gods, till he reaches the shore. There, on the south of the city, he comes on a region of sand hills bordered by temples and tombs behind, and with the surf-beaten beach in front.
No distinct boundaries mark the limits of the Gate of Heaven. It runs about a quarter of a mile along the coast, or 'as much as may be occupied by a thousand cows.' In the background the lofty tower of Jagannath rises from the heart of the city; and in the intervening space little monasteries cluster, each in its own hollow between the sandy hills, with a green patch of cultivation at the bottom watered from a deep masonry well.
Sometimes an outlying rood or two is reclaimed, with infinite labour, from the sandy slopes, and fenced in by a curious wall made of the red earth pots in which the holy food is served out to the pilgrims. The sacred rice can only be placed in a new vessel, and every evening thousands of the unbroken pots are at the disposal of any one in want of such slender building materials.
Here the pilgrims bathe. At the great festival, as many as 40,000 rush together into the surf; and every evening silent groups may be seen purifying themselves for their devotions under the slanting rays of the sun. It is a spot sanctified by the funeral rites of generations.
The low castes, who bury their dead, dig a hasty hole in the sand, and the hillocks are covered with bones and skulls, which have been washed bare by the tropical rains, or dug up by the jackals. During the famine of 1866, thousands thus found an indiscriminate sepulture. But long before that time, the place had been known as a magazine of mortality, in which corruption reigned with all its emblems of sovereignty exposed to view.
The respectable Hindu, with his sensitive shrinking from personal contamination, and from the details of human decay, resolves the frame into its elements by means of incremation. Every evening, the funeral pyres may be seen glancing across the water, while groups sit sadly around in the fitful light.
<h3>Coming to Puri to die</h3>
Devotees from every province of India come hither to do the last offices for a brother, or a parent, or a wife. I have talked to many pilgrims in this shrine of death; and so far as one man can judge of the inner life of another, some of them had drawn very near in their hearts to God.
One little group came to bury their mother. They had journeyed with a pilgrim band from the far west, beyond the limits (of British India, and had visited the great shrines at Allahabad, Benares, and Gaya upon the way.
They had done as much of the distance as they could by railway; but they had walked about 500 miles besides. The journey had taken three months. One-sixth of them had already died; and several had been so disabled as to require to finish their pilgrimage in a bullock cart.
But the oldest woman in the party--a brave up-country matron--had never flinched. She had constantly urged them forward, in order, she said, that she might reach the holy city before she died.
The same day she arrived, she prevailed upon the priests to conduct her to the temple, where she gazed in silent rapture on the god. Next morning she fell ill.
The other pilgrims began to recover their strength, but she gradually declined; and now her sons had come to burn her body on the sands. She had reached the Gate of Heaven at last.
They laid down the bier at the edge of the sea, till the ripples wetted the vermilion-sprinkled yellow shroud. A green leaf had been placed in her girdle, and another on her breast. Then, with all her ornaments around her arms and ankles, they laid her on the pile, and in a few minutes the forked flames flashed up into the skies.
<h3>The pilgrimage to disease and death -- bad prasad</h3>
Disease and death make havoc of the pilgrims. During their stay in Puri they are badly lodged and miserably fed. The priests impress on them the impropriety of dressing food within the holy city; and the temple kitchen thus secures the monopoly of cooking for the multitude.
The eatables served out chiefly consist of boiled rice. Peas, pulse, clarified butter, sugar, and rice are also made into a variety of confections. The charges seem to be reasonable enough; a mess of rice sufficient for two men costing three half-pence, except during the festivals, when the vast number of customers enables the cooks to raise their prices.
Before being offered for sale it is presented to Jagannath in the outer hall, but within sight of the image, and thus becomes holy food. When fresh it is not unwholesome, although the pilgrims complain of the cooking being often very bad. But, unfortunately, only a part of it is eaten fresh, as it is too sacred for the least fragment to be thrown away.
Large quantities of it are sold in a state dangerous even to a man in robust health, and deadly to the way-worn pilgrims, half of whom reach Puri with some form or other of bowel complaint.
'When examined after twenty-four hours, even in January,' writes one of the leading sanitary authorities in India, 'putrefactive fermentation had begun in all the rice compounds, and after forty-eight hours the whole was a loathsome mass of putrid matter, utterly unfit for human use. This food forms the chief subsistence of the pilgrims, and the sole subsistence of the beggars who flock in hundreds to the shrines during the festival. It is consumed by some one or other, whatever its state of putrefaction, to the very last morsel.'
The only kinds of holy food not reported as utterly putrid at the end of forty-eight hours were the sweet meats; and as the pilgrims carry these condiments to their distant homes, ample time is allowed for the process of putrefaction to complete itself.
Dr. Mouat describes them as 'a compound of dead flies, rancid butter, and dirty sugar;' and although I have seen many specimens of a better sort, I perfectly agree with his conclusion, that 'it is difficult to imagine any regimen better circulated to aid the crowding and filth in their evil influence on the human frame.'
<h3>Where to lay your head?</h3>
But bad food is only one of many predisposing causes to diseases which the pilgrims have to encounter. The low level of Puri, and the sandy ridges which check its natural drainage towards the sea, render it a very dirty city.
Each house is built on a little mud platform about four feet high. In the centre of the platform is a drain which receives the filth of the household, and discharges it in the form of black stinking ooze on the street out side. The platform itself becomes gradually soaked with the pestiferous slime.
In many houses, indeed, a deep open cesspool is sunk in the earthen platform; and the wretched inmates eat and sleep around this perennial fountain of death. Those whose experience of foul smells is confined to cities in the temperate zone, can form no idea of the suffocating stench which such cess pools throw off in a tropical temperature between 85 and 105 degrees during seven months of the year.
Nor is there any outlet for the deadly gases that bubble up from them day and night. As a rule, the houses consist of two or three cells, leading one into the other, without windows or roof-ventilation of any sort.
In these lairs of disease, the unhappy pilgrims are massed together in a manner shocking to humanity. The town contains 6,363 houses, with a resident population of about 25,000 souls. But almost every citizen takes in pilgrims, and there are not less than 5,000 lodging houses in the city. The scenes of agony and suffocation that take place in these putrid dens baffle description.
'I was shown one apartment,' says Dr. Mouat in the Report above cited, 'in the best pilgrim hotel of the place, in which eighty persons were said to have passed the night. It was 13 feet long, 10 feet 5 inches broad, with side walls 6 1/2 feet in height, and a low pent roof over it. It had but one entrance, and no escape for the effete air.
'It was dark, dirty, and dismal when empty, and must have been a pest-house during the festival. In this house occurred the first case of cholera of the last outbreak. If this be the normal state of the best lodging house in the broad main street of Puri, it is not difficult to imagine the condition of the worst, in the narrow, confined, undrained back-slums of the town.'
'I went into a house in the town this afternoon,' says the curt, official diary of the police superintendent. 'Above forty-five pilgrims were putting up, men and women. The place had only two doors, no windows. One of the doors was locked. This place measured 12 by 20 feet. Certainly not more; and in this place no less than forty-five persons were crammed. The stench was overpowering, and the heat like an oven. No wonder the people are attacked with cholera.'
Elsewhere he reports, 'The space allowed per head to be just as much as they can cover by lying down.' But even this is not always given.
'The poorer up-country pilgrims submit to crowded rooms,' writes the magistrate, 'but the Orissa pilgrims crowd into a room, till it would be difficult to introduce another person.'
These calm, official statements tell a more terrible story than could be conveyed by any amount of sensational writing. Indeed the mere abstract figures of the space supplied, and the accommodation required, disclose an amount of human suffering sickening to contemplate.
<h3>Estimates of the number of pilgrims</h3>
In estimating the value of the oblations, I have given the number of devotees as stated by the native head clerk of the district. He computed the numbers that attend the Car Festival at 90,000, and considered that sometimes as many as 300,000 visited Puri in the course of the year. Nor is there any reason to consider these estimates excessive.
The old registers during the period when the tax was levied, notoriously fell below the truth; yet I find that in five out of the ten years between 1820 and 1829, the official return amounted to between one and two hundred thousand. The pilgrims from the south are a mere handful compared with those who come from Bengal and Northern India, yet it has been ascertained, that 65,000 find their way to Puri, across the Chilka Lake, in two months alone.
Along the great north road the stream flows day and night. As many as 20,000 arrive at a favourite halting-place between sunrise and sunset. As many as 9,613 were actually counted by the police leaving Puri on a single day, and 19,209 during the last six days in June. This is the number absolutely ascertained to have departed; and probably many more slipped off unperceived.
In looking over the records of the reverend missionaries in Orissa, I find the estimate of the pilgrims present at the Car Festival alone, in some years as high as 145,000.
There can be little doubt therefore that 90,000 people are often packed for weeks together in the 5000 lodging-houses of Puri.
In some of them the overcrowding falls short of suffocation by scarce a hair's breadth. Indeed, the official reports of the sweltering masses crammed within certain measured square feet seemed so horrible and so incredible, that the Inspector General of Jails instituted an experiment in a prison ward to test the possibility of the statements.
Throughout the whole city we find an average of eighteen human beings packed into each house, consisting of two, or at the most three, stifling cells without windows, at a temperature which, for seven months, is often as high as 105 in the shade, and seldom below 90.
<h3>The coming of the rainy season</h3>
At certain seasons of the year this misery is mitigated by sleeping out of doors. In the dry weather the streets of Puri look like a great encampment without the tents.
The spiritual army slumbers in regiments and battalions. The same cotton garment which they wear during the day, serves to wrap them from head to foot at night. Tiny rush-lights glimmer amid the prostrate groups, but every face is so completely enveloped in the white cloth that a child might seek its parent all night long across the ghastly expanse of mummies.
The soaking dews are unwholesome enough, but as long as the people can spend the night outside, some check exists to the over-crowding of pilgrims by rapacious lodging house keepers. How slight this check practically proves, may be judged of from the fact that the official reports before cited are specially selected as referring to the season when people can sleep out of doors with impunity.
But the Car Festival, the great ceremony of the year, unfortunately falls at the beginning of the rains. The water pours down for hours in almost solid sheets. Every lane and alley becomes a torrent or a stinking canal which holds in suspension the accumulated filth heaps of the hot weather.
The wretched pilgrims are now penned into the lodging-house cells without mercy. Cholera invariably breaks out. The living and the dying are huddled together with a leaky roof above, and a miry day floor under foot, 'the space allotted per head being just as much as they can cover lying down.'
The steps that are being taken by Government to mitigate these horrors will be subsequently explained. Meanwhile, it is only fair to say that they have already had some measure of success, and that miserable as the lot of the pilgrim still is, it was once infinitely worse. There is no need to refer to the pest-houses of Mecca, or to the Easter pilgrim-ships of the Levant. We have descriptions, by unimpeachable eye-witnesses, of the streets of Puri in former times, which the most distant generation will be unable to read without a shudder. They are so incredibly horrible that I do not venture to put them into my own words.
Here is a picture of the city in 1841. Corpse-fields lay around the town, in one of which, the traveller 'counted between forty and fifty bodies besides many skeletons which had been picked by vultures. The birds were sitting in numbers on the neighbouring sand-hills and trees, holding carnivorous festivity on the dead; and the wild dogs lounged about full of the flesh of man.
But the streets and lanes of the town, as well as the large road, presented many scenes of the most appalling misery and humiliation. In several instances, poor, deserted women, quite naked, formed a dam to the insufferable filthiness of a thousand bodies, washed down the narrow streets by the sudden showers.
Here they lay, throwing about their arms in agony, imploring a little water of the heedless passers-by, who formed a half-circle around them for a moment and passed on. They had rolled about till they had lost their clothing, which was discernible at a small distance, beaten by the battering rain till it had mixed with the sand and mud.
Others lay quiet enough, covered over by their cloth, except perhaps their feet and hands, having apparently died without much struggling. Others again, in their last extremity, with their clothing soaked, and their skin white with the soddening rain, had crawled under the partial shelter of some house or shed, awaiting in apparent insensibility their last moment.
'I have visited the valley of death,' wrote the Bishop of' Calcutta in 1838. 'The horrors are unutterable.'
<h3>The return journey</h3>
On the return journey the misery of the pilgrims reaches its climax. The rapacity of the Puri priests and lodging-house keepers has passed into a proverb. A week or ten days finishes the process of plundering, and the stripped and half-starved pilgrims crawl out of the city with their faces towards home.
They stagger along under their burdens of holy food, wrapped up in dirty cloth, or packed away in heavy baskets and red earthen pots. The men from the upper Provinces further encumber themselves with a palm-leaf umbrella, and a bundle of canes dyed red, beneath whose strokes they did penance at the Lion Gate.
As the Car Festival, which attracts the great mass of devotees, falls at the commencement of the rains, they find every stream flooded. Hundreds of them have not money enough left to pay for being ferried over the network of rivers in the delta. Even those who can pay have often to sit for days in the rain on the bank before a boat will venture to launch on the ungovernable torrent.
At a single river an English traveller counted as many as forty festering corpses, over which the kites were battling with blood-stained beaks, and the dogs with dripping fangs.
The famished, drenched throng toils painfully backward, urged by the knowledge that their slender stock of money will only last a very few weeks, and that after it is done, nothing remains but to die.
The missionaries along the line of march have ascertained that sometimes they travel forty miles a day, dragging their weary limbs along 'till they drop from sheer fatigue.' Hundreds die upon the roadside.
Those are most happy whom insensibility overtakes in some English station. The servants of the municipalities pick them up and carry them to the hospitals. Horrible stories are told of the fate of wretched women who fall behind or get separated from their company.
In 1868 a writer in a vernacular paper asserted that a band of reprobates from Central India frequented Puri for the purpose of kidnapping females, and selling them into the Musalman zenanas of the far west. The same writer declares that the priests entice unhappy girls into their protection, and consign them to a life of vice. From what I could learn, and I have made diligent inquiries, these statements appear to have been exaggerations at the time, and have now ceased to contain a grain of truth. But the records of the Orissa Lunatic Asylum disclose only too conclusively the fate which many a female pilgrim undergoes.
Even those who reach home contract diseases from exposure by the way that cripple them for the rest of their lives. They crowd into the villages and halting places along the road, blocking up the streets and creating an artificial famine.
The available sleeping-places are soon crammed to overflowing, and every night thousands have no shelter from the pouring rain. Miserable groups huddle under trees. Long lines, with their heads on their bundles, lie among the carts and bullocks on the side of the road.
The bridges are paved with their sodden bodies. It is only the fortunate first comers, however, who get so dry a bed. The steep slopes of the road embankments are next taken up. But hundreds have to sit upon the wet grass, not daring to lie down, rocking themselves to a monotonous chant, something between a whimper and a moan, through the long dismal night.
'It is useless to rise and go away,' writes an eye-witness. 'Where can they go? Every house is full. They are soaked to the skin in a few minutes. Their hair mixes with the mud in which they lie, and they await the morning to continue their dismal journey. But many of them rise no more. These are then left to die, forsaken and alone, by the roadside.'
<h3>The death-toll</h3>
It is impossible to compute with anything like precision the numbers that thus perish. The lowest estimate I have seen was by a native official, whose book is conceived in a spirit most favourable to Government. He reckons the deaths in Puri and on the way at 10,000 a year.
The largest estimate I have seen is by the late Bishop Wilson, whose well-poised mind was little likely to accept or to propagate exaggerations. He calculated the number at 50,000.
My own inquiries among the poorer pilgrims lead me to believe that the deaths in the city and by the way seldom fall below one-eighth, and often amount to one-fifth of each company; and the Sanitary Commissioner for Bengal confirms me in this view.
Among the richer devotees, who travel in bullock carts or by palankeen, the losses, so far as I could ascertain, do not exceed the ordinary contingencies of a long journey performed in the most trying season of the Indian year. But, on the other hand, outbreaks of cholera take place, which, although now controlled to some extent by science, spare neither rich nor poor.
Indeed, few pilgrims from the distant provinces of upper India attend the great Car Festival in midsummer, except the very fanatical who first make their arrangements for dying on the road. While the population of Lower Bengal flocks to this ceremonial, the northern devotees content themselves with a cold weather pilgrimage to the Swinging Festival in March, and even then the deadly hot season catches them before they regain their native villages. It is impossible, I think, to reckon the total number of the poorer sort who travel on foot at less than 84,000. It is equally impossible to reckon their deaths in Puri and on the road at less than one-seventh, or 12,000 a year. Deducting 2000 from these for the ordinary death-rate, we have a net slaughter of 10,000 per annum.
Every year, therefore, this homicidal enterprise massacres six times more men than Plassey, which won for us India, and Waterloo, which redeemed for us Europe, put together cost the British troops, in missing and slain.
The computation is exclusive of the deaths among the richer pilgrims, who do not travel on foot. So far as political arithmetic is possible in India, the evidence goes to show that 10,000 peasants yearly sacrifice their lives to a pilgrimage to Jagannath.
<h3>Preventive Measures</h3>
It may well be supposed that the British Government has not looked unmoved on this appalling spectacle. Nothing but a total prohibition of pilgrimage, however, would put a stop to the annual massacre.
But such a prohibition would be a signal infringement of the tenure by which we hold India, and would be regarded by 150,000,000 of British subjects as a great national wrong. It would close one of their recognised avenues of salvation, an avenue which generations of devout Hindus trod for centuries before England emerged into European history, and which has descended as a precious heirloom to the Indian races of the present day. A prohibition of pilgrimage in Bengal would amount to an interdict on one of the most cherished religious privileges of the people.
The subject has from time to time come up for official discussion; and in 1867 a last effort was made to enlist the educated classes against so homicidal a practice. Circular letters were sent to every division of Bengal, and the utmost influence of the higher officials was brought to bear. The Viceroy, while disclaiming any wish to interfere with the religious feelings of the people, urged them to consider the 'exposure, disease, and death,' which pilgrimage to Jagannath entails.
But the answers which came in from every part of Bengal admitted of no hope. All that remained was to institute a system of sanitary surveillance and quarantine, which should reduce the inevitable loss of life to a minimum.
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Such measures are of three kinds, the first being directed to lessen the number of pilgrims; the second to mitigate the dangers of the road; and the third to prevent epidemics in Puri.
Anything like a general prohibition of pilgrimage would be an outrage upon the religious feelings of the people. But in seasons of cholera or of other great calamity in Orissa, it would be possible to check the pilgrim stream, by giving warning in the Government Gazette, and through the medium of the vernacular papers. Thousands of devotees would put off the enterprise to another year.
It is very difficult, however, to give such warnings before the month in which the pilgrims usually start. But in extreme cases they might be stopped upon the road, and turned back before they entered Orissa. This was done in the famine year 1866, and native public opinion supported the action of Government. But it could not be too distinctly understood, that such an interference is only justifiable under extreme and exceptional circumstances.
The second set of preventive measures can be applied with greater safety, and with more certain results. Thousands of pilgrims every year die upon the journey from exhaustion and want of food. Nor does there seem any possibility of lessening the number of deaths from these causes. But until very recently, some thousands also died of diseases which, if taken in time, are under the control of medical science.
Within the last few years, pilgrim hospitals have been established along the great roads; and, as I have already said, if a devotee is so fortunate as to drop within a municipality, he is immediately picked up and cared for. I can bear testimony to the vigilant humanity of the English officers who carry out this good work. I have seen a magistrate ride through the noisome native quarter of his town, rapidly scrutinizing each body of pilgrims, and singling out those who, unless immediately provided for, would have sunk upon the next stage.
Nor can I pass over the devotion with which the Civil Surgeon of Puri has organized and maintained a medical patrol along the road. In the height of the cholera season, when the floods had turned the whole delta into a malarious swamp, this gentleman, at the hourly risk of his own life, rode up and down the highway amid torrents of ram, and every day gathered a harvest of disease-stricken wretches, who would have perished within the next twenty-four hours.
Such a patrol, if maintained throughout the whole of Orissa, might annually save hundreds of lives. But it would cost a large sum of money; and at present it has only been established in the immediate vicinity of Puri--the locality which requires it most.
Against such a patrol it may very fairly be argued, that it is unjust to charge the general taxpayer with the cost of preserving men from dangers which they deliberately make up their minds to incur.
Orissa is financially a poor Province; and it stands in such urgent need of public works to save its own population from floods and famines, that it has nothing to spare for sentimental efforts to protect men from the consequence of their own acts. Even if such a patrol were instituted, and if pilgrim hospitals were established every few miles along the road, the devotees would seldom enter them, except at the last extremity.
The surgeons justly complain that they rarely get a pilgrim patient until he is beyond the reach of aid. I have seen unhappy wretches crawling along with death looking out of their faces, who nevertheless refused to avail themselves of medical advice as long as consciousness continued.
It becomes therefore a very grave question, how far officials are justified in trying to force their assistance on those who will not help themselves. In cholera seasons, the Government owes such measures to the public health of the Province. But in ordinary years, the pilgrim hospitals which it already maintains at a considerable expense, seem to be all it can properly do.
The difficulty would disappear if the pilgrims as a class could be charged for the conveniences provided for them. But it is impossible to invent any form of impost to be levied from them, which would not be misinterpreted into a pilgrim tax, and a sanction to idolatrous rites. Such an impost however, would simply be a sanitation cess.
The pilgrims annually endanger the public health of the Province, and might be fairly charged with the cost of preventive measures. A small rate levied at the two entrances to Puri City would suffice. Unhappily, however, no amount of argument would at present convince the natives that such a cess was not a revival of the pilgrim tax in its original form.
The idea of a special cess has therefore been abandoned; and the only mode in which the Government has deemed it possible to make the pilgrims contribute to the sanitation charges which pilgrimage involves, is by slightly raising the ferry rates on the Orissa rivers. In practice, this proves a troublesome and an unfruitful source of revenue. The devotees from the south have no rivers to cross, and are therefore altogether exempted; while those from the north, if they only avoid the Government ferries, may travel hundreds of miles without coming on a single toil-bar.
There exists, however, another means of decreasing the danger of the road besides medical patrols and pilgrim hospitals. The large towns along the routes always contain the elements of cholera; and, indeed, that disease is seldom wholly absent from any Indian city. The arrival of the pilgrim stream is, year after year, the signal for the ordinary sporadic cases to assume the dimensions of an epidemic.
Cattack, the capital of Orissa, suffered so regularly and so severely from the passage of the pilgrim army, that the doctors, having tried everything else, at last determined to shut the devotees entirely out of the city. The result upon the public health has been marvellous. Police are stationed at the entrance to the town, and warn the pilgrims that they must skirt round the municipal boundaries. A sanitary cordon is thus maintained, and Cattack is now free from the annual calamity to which it was for centuries subject.
This inexpensive quarantine might easily be applied to other municipalities along the pilgrim highway. The devotees suffer no inconvenience; for as soon as the change in their route is known, little hamlets of grain-sellers set up outside the cordon. Indeed, the pilgrims would be the gainers by the change, in so far as they could purchase their food free of octroi, or other municipal charges, where such charges exist.
But though much may be done upon the road, more could be done in Puri itself. That city becomes annually a centre from which disease and death radiate throughout the Province. Whatever theory individual medical men may entertain regarding the origin of cholera, their united testimony proves that the returning bands from Jagannath carry it, stage by stage, along the pilgrim highway.
Yet it was only in 1867 that a health officer was appointed for Puri; and from that year a marked improvement dates. But sanitation involves a power of spending money, and the health officer's hands are tied for want of funds to give effect to any organized system of conservancy.
Puri is an indigent city; or rather, the only classes that can be subjected to local rates are unable to pay them. The pilgrims would support a wealthy community of grain merchants, but for the fact that the temple cooks claim the monopoly of supplying their food.
The first thing that strikes a stranger on entering the town is the scarcity of rice-shops. The pilgrims buy scarcely anything in the market. Whatever little store of rupees they may have knotted in their girdles, goes exclusively to the priests and cooks of Jagannath; and any attempt to interfere with these privileged classes, or to make them contribute to a local conservancy rate, would be denounced as a temple tax.
It thus happens, that although Puri is a very rich city, it is a very poor one for fiscal purposes. The revenue officers cannot pry into the hoarded treasures of the sanctuary, nor reach the priestly coffers into which the wealth of Bengal annually pours.
Yet it must be remembered that, without sanitary measures, Puri will remain a pest-house whence streams of disease constantly issue. First of all, it is absolutely necessary to check the over-crowding in the lodging houses.
To this end it has been proposed to form a pilgrim encampment on the sands outside the town. Such a camp would consist of moveable wooden or iron huts, for 'no power can prevent a large body of natives from polluting the ground on which they dwell.'
The huts would be purified and kept in store during seven months in the year, and put up on the approach of any of the great festivals. A well-regulated camp of this sort might afford a perfect solution of the difficulty. But it would be very costly to Government.
Carpenters and artificers would have to be brought from Cattack, as the local supply is entirely taken up by the priests for the construction of the cars, or other works connected with the festivals. It would involve a separate conservancy staff with separate hospitals and latrines, and a distinct police establishment. It is doubtful, moreover, whether sufficient space could be found for such shifting camps, free from inundation, or at least from excessive damp ness, without preliminary and very costly drainage works.
Another proposal is to regulate the pilgrim inns of Puri by special legislation. Puri is essentially a city of lodging-houses, with a distinct set of dangers and abuses of their own. In 1866 a Bill was introduced into the Bengal Council for the better regulation of such establishments.
In 1867 an amended Act was based upon it. The first had been too searching and cumbrous. The second confined itself exclusively to the prevention of over-crowding, and omitted provisions regarding conservancy, infectious diseases, and water supply. In 1868, therefore, the Sanitary Commissioner submitted a new Act, which endeavoured to avoid both extremes. It provided for the appointment of a health officer, who should inspect the lodging-houses, and report on them to the magistrate.
No such house was to be opened without a licence; and licences were to be granted only upon a certificate from the surgeon, stating the suitability of the tenement for the purpose, and the number of persons which it could properly accommodate. Except in cases where the lodging-house-keepers were persons of known respectability, their establishments were to continue under the surveillance of the health officer, and penalties were provided for wilful over-crowding, and similar breaches of the licence.
This Act would unquestionably put an end to the present abuses. But if suddenly introduced, it would intensify rather than mitigate the sufferings of the pilgrims. At present these unhappy people have at least the choice of half-suffocation under a roof, or of exposure to the ram outside. The Bill denies them the first alternative. Its passing would be the instant signal for turning out two-thirds of the pilgrims into the streets, and the effort to secure better accommodation for them would deprive the greater proportion of them of any shelter whatever.
In an English town, capital would immediately rush into the vacuum, and make the supply equal to the demand. But in India the law of supply and demand, although perfectly to be relied on in the long run, acts very slowly, and by cryptic or indirect processes. The mere fact of Government having interfered in the matter, would raise a thousand wild rumours and suspicions.
In proportion as the Act was stringently enforced, would be the necessity for additional lodging-houses. But, unfortunately, in proportion to the increased necessity would be the panic, and the local aversion to enter upon the trade. It only remains to prepare the minds of the people for the measure, and to introduce it with moderation and caution.
Meanwhile it might be possible, by quarantine, to prevent the Puri epidemics spreading into the adjoining Provinces. Choleraic infection remains for a very short time about the human body. A very able, and a recent writer on the subject, limits the period to three days, and declares six days' quarantine an absolute guarantee against any mishap.
But even a week of medical surveillance would involve arrangements as costly as a pilgrim encampment to the Government, and as irksome as the Lodging-house Bill to the devotees.
I have dwelt on this subject at some length, because it fairly represents the difficulties which sanitation has to encounter everywhere throughout India. In no country does the public health more urgently demand the aid of that science. But the ignorance, prejudices, and suspicions of the people on the one hand, and tae vast demands upon the revenue for more visibly and perhaps more urgently needed public works on the other, do not leave sanitation a chance.
Medical men are driven from one project to another, as each is found to be either too costly to Government, or too opposed to the superstitions of the natives. And yet it must not be forgotten that countries far beyond the Himalayas have an interest in the matter. It has been absolutely established that cholera is exclusively propagated in India, and that 'every outbreak of the disease beyond the confines of British India may be traced back to Hindustan.'
Year after year the surgeons report that the disease issues forth from Puri city, and is carried by a continuous chain of human beings into the adjoining Provinces. Some times it slays its legions, as in the famine year, when it cut off thirteen per cent. in the Cattack Jail, in spite of medical treatment, and at least twice or thrice that rate among the neglected outside population. Sometimes it does but little harm. But it never wholly ceases.
'America, Europe, and the greater part of Asia, may justly blame India for all they have suffered from cholera,' and India can blame Puri for annually subjecting whole Provinces to the chance of the epidemic. These over-crowded, pest-haunted dens around Jagannath may become at any moment the centre from which the disease radiates to the great manufacturing towns of France and England.
The devotees care little for life or death, nor is it possible to protect men against themselves. But such carelessness imperils lives far more valuable than their own, and the authority I have already cited declares 'that Europe has a right to demand' the necessary preventive measures at the hands of the Indian Government.
Meanwhile much has been done. Pilgrim hospitals stand with their doors open day and night. In seasons of epidemic, a medical patrol does its work of mercy to those who drop upon the road. Well-regulated ferries enable the returning pilgrims to cross the flooded rivers; and crowds of fever-stricken wretches no longer sit day after day in the pouring ram, expending the last few coppers that remain between them and starvation.
The story of the traveller who counted forty corpses upon the banks of a single stream is now a story of thirty years ago. But much as has been done, more remains to do. One of man's most deadly enemies has his lair in this remote corner of Orissa, ever ready to rush out upon the world, to devastate households, to sack cities, and to mark its line of march by a broad black track across three continents. The squalid pilgrim army of Jagannath, with its rags and hair and skin freighted with vermin and impregnated with infection, may any year slay thousands of the most talented and the most beautiful of our age in Vienna, London, or Washington.
