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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
go our way without being fettered by so curious a specimen of human credulity as the Bhagavata appears to us to be.
It utterly astonishes me how he can still maintain, and that too as requiring no commentary, the truth of his fourth statement;-"That Hindus in India would not so grossly falsify the story as to make Devaki nurse her son." From this daring assertion of his, I concluded that he "certainly could not have read at all my paper" on the festival in question in the Indian Antiquary, vols. III. and VI. He now maintains that he had read it, but even at present I venture to say he has not done so. Surely he can only have cast a cursory glance over its contents, but he has entirely failed to understand it or apprehend its purport. Otherwise, how could he, after alluding to the fanciful decoration of the lying-in chamber, and to the scenes which are to be presented there, proceed to add-" had you referred to these, you would have given a correct account of the ceremony"? Now the very things which he demands here, any one who looks into the paper at the pages referred to by himself (vol. VI. pp. 285 ff.) will there find; for it was the very object I had in view in the paper, to collect so many of the ritual texts on the festival as to give a most detailed and minute description of the different stages of it. And so far as I know, I have fairly succeeded in doing so, for till this I have not found much further to add. But, to return to Dr. Rajendralala's fourth statement as given above: it is in distinct contradiction to it, that these ritual texts collected by me prescribe that Krishna is to be represented at this festival as an infant child lying on the same couch with his mother Devaki and drinking at her breast: thus 1, O. C. Sa. K.-paryanke stan a payinam, 2, B. mátur utsange stanapayinah; 3, Ud. Sri Krishnapratimám Devakt atanam dhavayartim (dhavantim P). Are the authors of these works-the Bhavishya (i. e. Bha. vishyottara) Purána, the Nirnaya Sindhu, the Vratárka, the Dharmasindhasára, the Janmashtamtoratodydpana, not " Hindus in India ?" And when the Babu opposes to them his personal family traditions as a Vaishnava, and repeats that neither he nor his coreligionists believe in Krishna's having been nursed by Deva k i, I beg to ask him how he intends to account for these ritual prescriptions? I have to add, moreover, that they are fully corroborated by that excellent standard work on the Vaishnava faith-the Haribhaktivildea of Gopalabhaṭṭa, a copy of the Calcutta edition of which (Saka 1787, A. D. 1845, pp. 716, 4to) I
[SEPTEMBER, 1880.
received a few years ago (1875) through the kindness of my learned friend Dr. R. Rost, with whom I had seen it during my last stay in London (1874). There we not only find on p. 532 the first of the above quotations with the remarkable various reading moreover in the scholium of prasnutá, explained by ksharitastani, but at p. 588 we read still more distinctly of Devaki as lying on her couch with oozing breasts (snutapayodharam) and of Krishna as "sucking at them" (tadutsamge stanam dhayam); and lastly at p. 536 we have Devakt again giving the breast to her son, who while drinking presses the nipple with his hand,-dadamánam tu putrasya stanam | piyamánaḥ (read onam) stanam so 'tra kuchdgre panina eprisan.
I do not doubt in the least the accuracy of the Babu's testimony that at present "the pictorial representation is not deemed an essential part of the ceremony, nor is it anywhere produced in Bengal on the occasion of the fast," but, testimony against testimony, there was a time when this was otherwise, and even that time cannot be very remote, for the ritual texts contain abundant testimony to the contrary. Local and provincial habits can never silence the voice of literary documents.
§1 in vol. VI., pp. 161-180; § 2 in ib. no. 281-801; $3, in vol. III., pp. 21-25 and 47-52; and § 4 in vol. VI., pp. 849-354.
Moreover, the first of the passages quoted above appears to be known to the Babu also from some source independent of my paper; for after quoting it he proceeds: "had you not stopped short in your quotation, you would have added that the child should be four-handed, holding a mace, a discus, &c." and then he adds: "the words of the text: Sanuhachakragada....." Now I would
remark that the sources from which I drew the passage do not contain this verse, as he might have easily perceived himself by comparing p. 286, where the text of my sources breaks off at the first hemistich of v. 33 with p. 289, where it continues with the second hemistich of the same verse: there is no room left for his verse between these two halves. He must therefore have taken it from some other source not used by me. And this being so, he ought certainly to have expressed himself in other terms, for those used by him imply an accusation of my having left out something that might have been opposed to my purpose. This is a very serious insinuation, as in his opinion "the correct account of the ceremony" as contained in this verse and in the other details which he desiderates in my paper, whereas they are described in it with all possible minuteness, "would have seriously interfered with the analogy between the nativity of Krishna and that of Christ," which I
By the bye the Haribhaktivildsa has his verse at p. 533, but with a various reading: mahapûrnam, for his mahapunyaṁ.
