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AUGUST, 1898.]
MISCELLANEA.
7. How Spirits are kept off.
In many parts of the Bombay Presidency it is believed that persons who die on an unlucky day, people who die a violent or unnatural death, and people who die with a wish unfulfilled, as an unmarried person, or a woman in child-bed, or who die leaving their chief interest behind them, as a woman who leaves a babe, or a miser who leaves his board, do not rest, but come back to trouble the living. To prevent ghosts of this kind from coming back and troubling the family, special funeral rites are performed. Figures of men of dough or of sacred grass are laid on the body and burned, and, in the case of a woman, all or some of her ornaments or clothes are given to a Brahmag woman. Among the Ratnagiri Marathas and Kunbis a woman who dies in child-birth has sometimes the tendons of her heels cut. Among the Sômavansi Kshatris of Alibag there is a strong belief that when a woman marries a second time, her first husband's ghost comes and troubles her. To prevent him troubling her, she wears round her neck a charmed silver or copper amulet, or a silver or copper image of the dead husband. In Gujarat, men and women wear round the neck a round or oblong silver plate with the face of the deceased member of the family who has been haunting them roughly embossed on it.36 In the Dakhan, to prevent the ghost of a woman who has died in child-birth coming back, water and ralá grains are strewn along the path when the corpse is carried to the barning or burying ground. As soon as the body has passed out nails or a horse-shoe are beaten into the threshold of the house, and in some cases a small nail or a needle is driven into the crown of the head of the deceased.
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To drive spirits from the bodies of persons whom they have seized, several home cures are resorted to. In the Konkin, when a person is believed to be possessed by a spirit, a fire is kindled, and on the fire some hair, markyd lobán or dung-resin, and a little hog-dung or horse hair are dropped, and the head of the sufferer is held over the fumes for a few minutes. Cuts with a light cane are given across the soulders, and pieces of garlic are sometimes squeezed into the ears and nostrils of the possessed. When all home cures fail to drive out the spirit, prayers for help are offered to guardian spirits or to house and village gods. Vows are made to the house gods, and the patient is taken to the temple of Mâruti, or some other village god; there he is made to fall prostrate before the idol, ashes from the incense pot kept burning befor the god and a little red lead and oil taken from the feet of the god are applied to the forehead of the sufferer, and he is brought home. When the guardians fail to drive out the spirit, in some cases even before consulting the guardians, an exorcist, or bhagat, is called in.
(To be continued.)
MISCELLANEA.
KOBANG, THE MALAY COIN AND WEIGHT. THE Commercial term kobang is liable to lead to confusion in the minds of students, because of its application to two very different objects, via, the Japanese gold coin or piece of money known as kobang or ko-ban, weighing 222 grs. of gold, and the Malay money of low denomination, 10 cents, known as kupong and also loosely as kobang. Both the Japanese and the indigenous kobang have been current side by side in the Straits Settlements for centuries. Yule incidentally mentions the Malaya kobang in Hobson-Jobson, but he gives no explanation of it, nor has he devoted an article to
it. The following quotations are a contribution to its history. The word itself seems to mean a piece or slice, and to have been originally a numeral coefficient, as so many modern expressions for money, coin, weights and measures in
are
languages using numeral coefficients. See Maxwell, Malay Manual, p. 71, who, as a numeral coefficient, calls the word keping.
1418.In their trading transactions (Java) the Chinese copper cash of different Dynasties are current... Their weights are as follows
cati (kin) has twenty taels (liang), a tael sixteen ch'ien and a ch'ien four kobangs; a kobang is equal to 2.1875 fen,' the Chinese official weight. Be MS. note, 1888.
1 I. e., the candareen.
