17* Relics of the Worship of Mud-Turtles (Triony- 



chidae) in India and Burma. 



By N. Annandale, D.Sc, F.A.B.S., and Mahamahopa- 

 dhyaya Haraprasad Shastri, CLE., M.A., F.A.S.B. 



(Read at the First Indian Science Congre , January 17th, 1914). 



[As my friend Haraprasad Shastri and I naturally regard mud-turtles 

 from entirely different points of view — he as a sanscritist, I as a zoologist 

 — I hare arranged these notes as a kind of dialogue in which the two 

 authors express their opinions quite independently. — N. A.]. 



I. Mud-turtles kept living in shrines at the present day. 



The practice of keeping tortoises living in shrines as sacred 

 animals is probably one of wide distribution in the East and 

 is not now confined to any race or cult. Both land- tortoises 

 and aquatic species are thus honoured in China ; at Penang 

 there is a w r ell-known Chinese temple in which chelonians of 

 different kinds, some of them brought from foreign countries, 

 are kept. In India and Burma the animals are usually, if not 

 always, mud-turtles of the family Trionyehidae. I have myself 

 visited three shrines, one of them Hindu, one Mahommedan 

 and the third Buddhist, at which mud-turtle3 of the genus 

 Trionyx live in a semi-domesticated state. The first of these 

 shrines is at Puri in Orissa, the second near Chittagong in 

 Eastern Bengal and the third at Mandalay in Upper Burma ; 

 they are thus distributed in districts in which Uriya, a dialect 

 of Bengali, and Burmese, are the respective languages of the 

 people and afford at any rate some indication of their race. 



The mud-turtles of Puri belong to a subspecies of the 

 common Indo-Gangetic Mud-Turtle {Trionyx gangeticus, Cuvier) 

 to which the racial name mahanaddicus has lately been given, 1 

 because the form is only known to occur in the Central 

 Provinces and Orissa in the river-system of the Mahanaddi. 

 The large bathing-tank in which these animals are kept is 

 attached to a small Vishnuite shrine that is apparently not 

 connected with any of the larger temples for which the town is 

 famous. The tank covers an area of perhaps half an acre and 

 is surrounded by stone steps. For the greater part of its 

 periphery, however, its banks are free from buildings, and it is 

 probably possible for the mud turtles to leave it at night. 



1 Bee. Ind. Mas., vol. VII, p. 252. Before this subspecies was dis 

 tinguished I thought that the Puri turtles might represent T. hurum (op. 

 <*#., p. 156), but I had not then had a clear view of them. 



