द ब्यूटीफुल ट्री: १८वीं सदी में भारत की स्वदेशी गुरुकुल शिक्षा (धर्मपाल)

Sometimes the pretended curer of snake-bites by charms professes also to possess the power of expelling demons, and in other cases the expeller of demons disclaims being a snake- conjuror. Demon-conjurors are not numerous in Nattore; and tiger-conjurors who profess to cure the bites of tigers, although scarcely heard of in that thana, are more numerous in those parts of the district where there is a considerable space covered by jungle inhabited by wild beasts. Distinct from these three kinds of conjurors and called by a different name is a class of gifted (guni) persons who are believed to possess the power of preventing the fall of hail which would destroy or injure the crops of the villages. For this purpose when there is a prospect of a hailstorm, one of them goes out into the fields belonging to the villages with a trident and a buffalo's horn. The trident is fixed in the ground and the Gifted makes a wide circuit around it, running naked blowing the horn, and pronouncing incantations. It is the firm belief of the villagers that their crops are by this means protected from hailstorm. Both men and women practise this business. There are about a dozen in Nattore, and they are provided for in the same way as the conjurors. Some of these details may appear, and in themselves probably are, unimportant, but they help to afford an insight into the character of the humblest classes of native society who constitute the great mass of the people, and whose happiness and improvement are identical with the prosperity of the country; and although they exhibit the proofs of a most imbecile superstition, yet it is superstition which does not appear to have its origin or support in vice or depravity, but in a childish ignorance of the common laws of nature which the most imperfect education or the most limited mental cultivation would remove. These superstitions are neither Hindu nor Mahomedan, being equally repudiated by the educated portions of both classes of religionists. They are probably antecedent to both systems of faith and have been handed down from time immemorial as a local and hereditary religion of the cultivators of the soil, who, amid the extraordinary changes which in successive ages and under successive races of conquerors this country has undergone, appear always to have been left in the same degraded and prostrate condition in which they are now found.

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