CHAPTER XVIII.

THE MOHURRUM.

ALTHOUGH Poonah is the ancient Maratta capital, and a thoroughly Hindoo city, it is famed throughout India for the splendour with which its people celebrate the Mohamedan Mohurrum, so I timed my visit in such a way as to reach the town upon the day of the "taboot procession."

The ascent from the Konkan, or flat country of Bombay, by the Western Ghauts to the table-land of the Deccan, known as the Bhore Ghaut incline, in which the railway rises from the plain 2000 feet into the Deccan, by a series of steps sixteen miles in length, is far more striking as an engineering work than the passage of the Alleghanies on the Baltimore and Ohio track, and as much inferior to the Sierra Nevada railway works. The views from the carriage windows are singularly like those in the Kaduganava Pass between Columbo and Kandy; in fact, the Western Ghauts are of the same character as the mountains of Ceylon, the hills being almost invariably either flat-topped or else rent by volcanic action into great pinnacles and needle peaks.

The rainy season had not commenced, and the vegetation that gives the Ghauts their charm was wanting, although the "mango showers" were beginning, and spiders and other insects, unseen during the hot weather, were creeping into the houses to seek shelter from the rains. One of the early travellers to the Deccan told the good folks at home that after the rains the spiders' webs were so thickly laced across the jungle, that the natives of the country were in the habit of hiring elephants to walk before them and force a passage! At the time of my visit, neither webs nor jungle were to be seen, and the spiders were very harmless-looking fellows. One effect of

the approaching monsoon was visible from the summit of the Ghaut, for the bases of the mountains were hid by the low clouds that foretell the coming rains. The inclines are held to be unsafe during the monsoon, but they are not so bad as the Kotree and Kurrachee line, which runs only "weather permitting," and is rendered useless by two hours' rain—a fall which, luckily for the shareholders, occurs only about once in every seven years. On the Bhore Ghaut, on the contrary, 220 inches in four months is not unusual, and "the rains" here take the place of the avalanche of colder ranges, and carry away bridges, lines, and trains themselves; but in the dry season there is a want of the visible presence of difficulties overcome, which detracts from the interest of the line.

At day-break at Poonah, the tomtom-ing, which had lasted without intermission through the ten days' fast, came to a sudden end, and the police and European magistrates began to marshal the procession of the taboots, or shrines, in the bazaar.

A proclamation in English and Maratta was posted on the walls, announcing the order of the procession and the rules to be enforced. The orders were, that the procession to the river was to commence at seven A.M. and to end at eleven A.M., and that tomtom-ing, except during those hours, would not be allowed. The taboots of the light cavalry, of three regiments of native infantry, and of the followers of three English regiments of the line, were, however, to start at six o'clock: the order of precedence among the cantonment or regimental taboots was carefully laid down, and the carrying of arms forbidden.

When I reached the bazaar, I found the native police were working in vain in trying to force into line a vast throng of bannermen, drummers, and saints, who surrounded the various taboots or models of the house of Ali and Fatima where their sons Hassan and Hoosein were born. Some of the shrines were of the size and make of the dolls' houses of our English children, others in their height and gorgeousness resembled the most successful of our burlesques upon Guy Fawkes: some were borne on litters by four men ; others mounted on light carts and drawn by bullocks, while the gigantic taboot of the Third Cavalry required six buffaloes for its transport to the river. Many

privates of our native infantry regiments had joined the procession in uniform, and it was as strange to me to see privates ir. our service engaged in howling round a sort of Maypole, and accompanying their yells with the tomtom, as it must have been to the English in Lucknow in 1857 to hear the bands of the rebel regiments playing "Cheer, boys, cheer."

Some of the troops in Poonah were kept within their lines all day, to be ready to suppress disturbances caused by the Moslem fanatics, who, excited by the Mohurrum, often run a-muck among their Hindoo neighbours. In old times, quarrels between the Sonnites and Shiites, or orthodox and dissenting Mussulmen, used to be added to those between Mohamedans and Hindoos at the season of the Mohuṛrum, but except upon the Afghan border these feuds have all but died out now.

At the head of the procession marched a row of pipers, producing sounds of which no Highland regiment would have felt ashamed, followed by long-bearded, turban-wearing Marattas, on foot and horseback, surrounding an immense pagoda-shaped taboot placed on a cart, and drawn by bullocks; boys swinging incense walked before and followed, and I remarked a gigantic cross-a loan, no doubt, from the Jesuit College for this Mohamedan festivity. After each taboot, there came a band of Hindoo "tigers"-men painted in thorough imitation of the jungle king, and wearing tiger ears and tails. Sometimes, instead of tigers, we had men painted in the colours worn by "sprites" in an English pantomime, and all-sprites and tigers-danced in the fashion of the mediæval mummers. Behind the tigers and buffoons there followed women, walking in their richest dress. The nautch girls of Poonah are reputed the best in all the East, but the monotonous Bombay nautch is not to be compared with the Cashmere nautch of Lahore.

Some taboots were guarded on either side by sheiks on horseback, wearing turbans of the honourable green which denotes direct descent from the Prophet, though the genealogy is sometimes doubtful, as in the case of the Angel Gabriel, who, according to Mohamedan writers, wears a green turban, as being an "honorary" descendant of Mohamed.

Thousands of men and women thronged the road down which

the taboots were forced to pass, or sat in the shade of the peepul trees until the taboot of their family or street came up, and then followed it, dancing and tomtom-beating like the rest.

Poonah is famed for the grace of its women and the elegance of their gait. In the hot weather, the saree is the sole garment of the Hindoo women, and lends grace to the form without concealing the outlines of the trunk or the comely shapes of the well-turned limbs. The saree is eight yards long, but of such soft thin texture that it makes no show upon the person. It is a singular testimony to the strength of Hindoo habits, that at this Mohamedan festival the Mohamedan women should all be wearing the long seamless saree of the conquered Hindoos.

In the Mohurrum procession at Poonah there was nothing distinctively Mohamedan. Hindoos joined in the festivities, and "Portuguese," or descendants of the slaves, half-castes, and native Christians who at the time of the Portuguese occupation of Surat assumed high-sounding names and titles, and now form a large proportion of the inhabitants of towns in the Bombay Presidency. The temptation of a ten days' holiday is too great to be resisted by the prejudices of even the Christians or Hindoos.

The procession ended at the Ghauts on the river-side, where the taboots, one after the other, made their exit from ten days of glory into unfathomable slush; and such was the number of the "camp taboots," as those of the native soldiers in our service are styled, and the "bazaar taboots," or city contributions, that the immersion ceremonies were not completed when the illumination and fireworks began.

After dark, the bazaar was lit with coloured fires, and with the ghostly paper-lanterns that give no light; and the noise of tomtoms and fire-crackers recommenced in spite of proclamations and police-rules. Were there in Indian streets anything to burn, the Mohurrum would cause as many fires in Hindostan as Independence-day in the United States; but, although houses are burnt out daily in the bazaars, they are never burnt down, for nothing but water can damage mud. We could have played our way into Lucknow in 1857 with pumps and hoses at least as fast as we contrived to batter a road into it with shot and shell.

During the day I had been amused with the sayings of some British recruits, who were watching the immersion ceremonies, but in the evening one of them was in the bazaar, uproariously drunk, kicking every native against whom he stumbled, and shouting to an officer of another regiment, who did not like to interfere: "I'm a private soldier, I know, but I'm a gentleman; I know what the hatmosphere is, I do; and I knows a cloud when I sees it, damned if I don't." On the other hand, in some fifty thousand natives holiday-making that day, many of them Christians and low-caste men, with no prejudice against drink, a drunken man was not to be seen.

It is impossible to over-estimate the harm done to the English name in India by the conduct of drunken soldiers and "European loafers." The latter class consists chiefly of discharged railway guards and runaway sailors from Calcutta, men who, travelling across India and living at free quarters on the trembling natives, become ruffianly beyond description from the effect upon their originally brutal natures of the possession of unusual power.

The popularity of Mohamedan festivals such as that of the Mohurrum has been one of the many causes which have led us to believe that the Mohamedans form a considerable proportion of the population of Hindostan ; but the census in the NorthWest Provinces revealed the fact that they had there been popularly set down as three times as numerous as they are, and it is probable that the same is the case throughout all India. Not only are the Indian Mohamedans few, but their Mohamedanism sits lightly on them: they are Hindoos in caste distinctions, in ceremonies, in daily life, and all but Hindoos in their actual worship. On the other hand, this Mohurrum showed me that the Hindoos do not scruple to attend the commemoration of Hassan and Hoosein. At Benares there is a temple which is used in common by Mohamedans and Hindoos, and throughout India, among the low-caste people, there is now little distinction between the religions. The descendants of the Mohamedan conquerors, who form the leading families in several native States, and also in Oude itself, are among the most dangerous of our Indian subjects, but they appear to have but little hold upon the humble classes of their fellow-wor