The Bathing and Burning Ghats 



123 



red, orange, and yellow through the 

 thick frost haze, a great murmur of 

 voices rose from the length of the ghats, 

 the tens of thousands of fervent wor- 

 shipers, standing" on platforms built over 

 the water and standing waist deep in 

 the water, repeating in muttered chant 

 the ancient Vedic hymn. They dipped 

 themselves beneath the swirling mud 

 flood ; they lifted the water in jars and 

 poured it over their heads ; they lifted it 

 in their hands and let it trickle through 

 their fingers or run down their arms, and 

 they dipped tufts of sacred grass in the 

 water and sprinkled themselves ; they 

 pressed their nostrils, they twisted their 

 fingers, and did all manner of motions 

 as they chanted and muttered to them- 

 selves, each one rapt, intent, absorbed 

 entirely in the long religious recitals. 

 They paid no heed to us, nor to any 

 happenings, for the Hindu ritual is so 

 elaborate and exacting that if they should 

 make a slip or omission, they would have 

 to begin the long ritual all over again. 

 For the priests and high-caste Brahmans, 

 the daily prayers are of two hours' dura- 

 tion by the water side, and continue all 

 da}' ; but the ordinary man of Benares' 

 bazars gets his morning ceremony done 

 in far less time, wades back to shore and 

 dry garments, spots and stripes himself 

 with fresh caste marks for the day. He 

 fills a brass jar with water and strolls 

 along the ghats with the crowd, stops for 

 a prayer or two, salaams to a cow or two, 

 pours his water offering over some 

 greasy black image, and his religious 

 work is done. 



There is no evidence at the ghats that 

 Hinduism is dying out, but the census 

 tables give one gratifying data. Not 

 every believer goes to the Ganges each 

 morning, by any means. Tens and tens 

 of thousands must shirk their religious 

 duties entirely ; for, as the city has a fixed 

 population of 222,400 and a floating pop- 

 ulation of ten to thirty thousand, it is 

 only an eighth or tenth of them all that 

 hail the sun across Mother Ganges. 

 There are eighty thousand priests fatten- 

 ing in Benares temples, yet they are not 



all there at the river's brink either. All 

 who go are in evidence, with the lime- 

 light of the rising sun full in their faces, 

 save the few high-caste and noble 

 women, who arrive before daylight and 

 are rowed out in curtained boats to bathe 

 and pray unseen in mid-stream. It must 

 require physical courage as well as re- 

 ligious zeal to breast that cold, muddy 

 current on a frosty morning; and, as the 

 majority of these people have only a 

 double cotton sheet for promenade toilet, 

 one shivers sympathetically and wonders 

 at the death rate from pneumonia. 



The sun transforms the scene when it 

 concjuers the haze and throws clear yel- 

 low beams upon the solid and fantastic 

 buildings and the white-robed company. 

 The air mellows, and one basks in the 

 sun thankfully, as do ' the beggars and 

 fakirs, who shake off their wrappings of 

 mat and sacking, and creep like numb 

 flies to the side of sunny walls. They 

 sit there until some ostentatious Hindu 

 comes along doling out rice to the poor 

 as a means of acquiring merit and favor 

 with the gods — and to be seen of men. 

 These ascetics, grotesque in their pow- 

 dering of ashes and their rags, touch the 

 sense of humor more than anything else 

 and give one relief in the long-drawn 

 panorama of heathen blindness. 



the; woman's ghat 



The boats are rowed along, close in- 

 shore, barely avoiding the most devout 

 ones, who wade farthest out, and all the 

 way there is the same spectacle of re- 

 ligious zeal and spiritual exaltation. At 

 the Woman's Ghat every woman carries 

 a brass lota, or water jar, or a still larger 

 and heavier jar of red pottery, and the 

 unending procession of gracefully- 

 draped figures going up and down the 

 broad ghat is an unending delight. 

 Swathed head and all in their winding 

 saris, they wade into the river and pray, 

 one is sure, to every Hindu deity which 

 the ten fingers represent to let them come 

 into the world again in some human form 

 less ignoble than a woman's. They go 

 back to shore and deftly envelop them- 



