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

and noted the number of women-midwives (there is not a man-
midwife in the country) in the villages of Nattore, and find that
they amount to 297. They are no doubt sufficiently ignorant, as
are probably the majority of women-midwives at home.
Still lower than the village doctors there is a numerous
class of pretenders who go under the general name of conjurors
or charmers. The largest division of this class are the snake-
conjurors, their number in the single police sub-division of
Nattore being not less than 722. There are few villages without
one, and in some villages there are as many as ten. I could, if it
were required, indicate the villages and the number in each; but
instead of incumbering Table I with such details, I have judged it
sufficient to state the total number in this place. They profess to
cure the bites of poisonous snakes by incantations or charms. In
this districts, particularly during the rainy season, snakes are
numerous and excite much terror among the villagers. Nearly
the whole district forming, it is believed, an old bed of the
Ganges, lies very low; and the rapid increase of the waters
during the rainy season drives the land-snakes from their holes,
and they seek refuge in the houses of the inhabitants, who hope
to obtain relief from their bites by the incantations of the
conjurors. These take nothing for the performance of their rites,
or for the cures they pretend to have performed. All is pecuniar-
ily gratuitous to the individual but they have substantial advan-
tages which enable them to be thus liberal. When the
inhabitants of a village hitherto without a conjuror think that
they can afford to have one, they invite a professor of the art
from a neighbouring village where there happens to be one to
spare, and give him a piece of land and various privileges and
immunities. He possesses great influence over the inhabitants. If
a quarrel takes place, his interference will quell it sooner than
that of any one else; and when he requires the aid of his
neighbours in cultivating his plot of ground or in reaping its
produce, it is always more readily given to him than to others.
The art is not hereditary in a family or peculiar to any caste. One
I met with was a boatman, another a chowkidar and a third a
weaver. Whoever learns the charm may practise it, but it is
believed that those who practise it most successfully are ‘to the
manner born’, that is, who have been born under a favourable
conjunction of the planets. Every conjuror seems to have a
separate charm, for I have found no two the same. They do not
object to repeat it merely for the gratification of curiosity, and
they allow it to be taken down in writing. Neither do they appear
to have any mutual jealously, each readily allowing the virtue of
other incantations than his own.
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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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(c) BOOKS USED IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOLS
Abbreviations: Murshidabad = MD; South Beerbhoom = BM;
S. Behar = SB; Burdwan = Bun; Tirhoot = TT
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