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88
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
[MARCH, 1874.
this matter with them. At the same time he emphatically disavowed all intention of being hos- tile to the Government so long as he and his people were permitted the religious freedom to which they laid claim, and were not subjected to uny injustice and oppression. During the Mutiny, he was seized, brought down to Caleutta and imprisoned in the Alipore Jail, where I saw much of him. The constant persecution of his people by their Hindu landlords was, he maintained, the chief and almost only cause of the constant affrays in which they were engaged, and in many instances of which, life was lost and destruction of property ensued. They were due to attempts to extract from them illegitimate cesses for pur- poses which they abhorred. The marriaga of son or daughter, the expenses of a Hindu festival, the endowment of a shrine, the cost of a pilgrimage, and every possible occasion on which the land. holder had to lavish wealth on purposes connected with himself and his religion, was made a pretext for scrowing the Feragi tenantry. It would be a long story to tell how the Permanent Settlement of 1793-a measure which has operated prejudicially in many ways on the richest provinces of the Indian Empire--combined with their rocklessly extravagant habits and utterly careless regulation of their own affairs, gradually ruined the Musalman landholders and local magnates, and transferred their territorial possessions to the Hindus, who now own them so that in Eastern Bengal, while the cultivators of the soil are almost universally Muhammadans and Feragis, the land. holders and men filling most of the offices about the courts are as generally Hindus. The con sequences of Musalman pride or ignorance, and intolerance, being subjected to Hindu rapacity, intelligence, and finesso, can readily le imagined by all who have lived among them; and this I hold to be the solution of most that has caused the Ferågis to be regarded with distrust and sus. picion. It is no libel on the integrity and anxious desire to do justice of our courts in those provinces to express a belief that gross injustice is a frequent, although perfectly unintended, result of their decisions, and that the poor ignorant, oppressed, misguided, and violent Musalman often goes to the wall when very extenuating circumstances, if not absolute justification from his point of view, exists to explain and mitigate the apparent lawlessness and turpitude of his acts. The conflict of evidence is so extreme, the assertions of both sides are so positive, and the cleverness of the Hindu is so infinitely beyond the ignorance of the Musalman, as to render the administration of justice to the last degree difficult to those who are compelled to apply European standards to
measure Oriental actions. That the Feragis were not hostile to the British Government in the manner and to the extent preached and practised by the Wahabis, was shown by their passiveness during the Mutiny. So far as I know, not a man among them joined the rebellious sepoys or gave any trouble to the authorities when so great an opportunity presented itself, had they been really ill-disposed; for there was not a single European soldier in the Eastern Provinces for many months. This was, in my belief, in 10 way due to the imprisonment of their leader, as he himself informed me, and I had and have no reason to doubt his bonesty in this or in any other of the statements which he made to me. The occasion which gave rise to his patting me in possession of the tenets of his Bect was indicative of his straightforwardness. The Feragi prisoners in one of the Eastern jails refused to wear the prison costume at the time al lowed, on the ground that they could neither pray nor eat in a garment with a seam in it, alleging that it was opposed to one of the precepts of their religion. I at once asked their leader if this was the case, as the order would not have been enforced had it infringed any article of faith. He assured me that it was not, that it was distinctly a Hindu practice, advocated in ignorance by his co-religionists; and the communication to them of his decision at once put a stop to all difficulty on the subject. He then gave me his book, explanatory of the tenets of his sect, and pointed out what really was enjoined in all such matters. The Musalmans of India are particularly exact in their observances in every stage of life-infancy, childhood, and old age, marrying and giving in marriage, religious festivals, death and burial. Most of their ceremonies, when based upon the Qoran, are similar in character to those preached in Arabia and countries where Islâm has not been contaminated by too close contact with other creeds. Among the peasantry and rural population of India, and in most towns where the Musalmans and Hindus have for centuries intermingled, various Hindu practices have crept into their ceremonies, which orthodox Muhammadans strongly disapprove, and Musalman reformers endeavour to expurgate. As a rule, Musalmans are sober and temperate, those virtues being inculcated by their religion; but in the Lower Provinces at least, intemperance has, I am assured, become more prevalent among them than it was when I first went to India.
The Musalmans are given to the practice of exorcism, regarding which detailed rules are prescribed, believe in charms and amulets, and resort to magic for the purpose of discovering unknown things. Exorcism is generally enjoined
