184 
Rajendralala Mitra —On the Temples of Deoghar. 
[No. 2, 
representing either elephants’ or crocodiles’ heads.”* Dr, Hunter calls 
these “the three great stones which their (the Santals’) fathers had wor¬ 
shipped, and which are to he seen at the western entrance of the holy 
city to this day.”f Babu Bholanath Chunder dissents from this opinion, 
He says : “ It is evident that Mr. Hunter has written from hearsay, and not 
from actual local observations. His ‘ beautiful highland lake beside which 
the holy city stands,’ is no more than a large artificial tank like the Lai 
Dighi. The ‘ three great stones’—‘ two vertical, and the third laid upon 
the heads of the two uprights as a horizontal beam’—supposed by him to be 
relics of aboriginal worship,—are at once made out by Hindu eyes to be 
no more than a Hindu Dollcdt frame in stone, with mahara faces at the ex¬ 
tremities of the horizontal beam, which is used for swinging Krishna in the 
Holi festival. The rude Santhals, who can yet build no more than a that¬ 
ched cabin, and who depend for all their iron-work and instruments upon 
the Hindu blacksmith, are not the people to have fashioned the stone into 
well-edged slender pillars, or cut the mortises and tenons in which is retain¬ 
ed the horizontal beam, or carved the elegant mahara faces at its ex¬ 
tremities. 
The argument about the primitive races not being able to carve large 
stones is open to question. There are huge stones and carved colossal 
monoliths in different parts of the earth which are attributed to persons who 
certainly were not much more civilized than the Santals of the present day. 
It is, however, not necessary to enter into this question here. Certain it is, 
the gallows-like structure is not peculiar to this place, nor has it any con¬ 
nection with the Santals, who do not now worship it, nor is there any rea¬ 
son to suppose that they ever did so. There is nothing to show that 
the Santals were in the habit of worshipping a stone scaffold like the one 
under notice, and certain it is that in no part of Santalia, and indeed in no 
part of India inhabited by the black races, is there a stone gallows to he 
seen, which would justify the assumption that such a structure was ever an 
object of worship. Had any religious sanctity been attached to it, it would 
have been seen much more abundantly than what appears to be the case. 
The terrace in front of the temples, however, settles the question as to the 
use of the gallows. In every part of India where the Krishna cultus 
has found access, such gallowses are invariably seen in close proxi¬ 
mity of ancient temples. Of course where stone is scarce, wood is 
generally used to make the scaffolding, but where stone is available it is 
always preferred. A remarkably handsome structure of this kind will he 
seen in plate XXX of my ‘ Antiquities of Orissa,’ Yol. II. It is regularly 
* Apud Hunter’s ‘ Statistical Account of Bengal, ’ Vol. XIV, p. 325. 
f * Annals of Rural Bengal,’ p. 192. 
J Mookerjee’s Magazine, Yol. II, pp. 26/. 
