Indian Antiquary Vol 47

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarkar
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 213

August, 1918]
RELIGION IN SIND
197
RELIGION IN SIND. BY G. E. L. CARTER, I.C.S.
Part I.
(Continued from Vol. XLVI, p. 208 of 1917.) HAVING formulated our hypothesis - let us proceed to examine a few legends which
clearly refer to pre-Mussalman times. In the History of Gujerat we read that the Brahmins of Sind refused to become Shrimali Brahmans. "The angry Sindh Brahmans in their own country worshipped the sea. At their request Samudra sent the demon Sarika to ruin Shrimal. Sarika carried off the marriageable Brahman girls ......Shrimal became waste . . . . When they heard that the Shrimal Brahmans had returned to their old city and were prospering, the Brahmans of Sind once more sent Sarika to carry away their marriageable daughters. One girl, as she was being haled away, called on her housegoddess and Sarika was spell-bound to the spot. King Shripunj came up and was about to slay Sarika with an arrow whon Sarika said "Do not kill me ..... let your Brahmans at their weddings give a dinner in my honour and let them also marry their daughters in unwashed clothes ....On this Sarika fled to Sindh. And in her honour the people both of Shrimal and of Jodhpur still marry their daughters in unwashed clothes."
This extract clearly indicates that in Sindh the orthodox Hindus had given up the worship of celestial deities and were water worshippers. It is true the sea is specified but the connotation is vague. Even Punjabi Mabommedans to this day call the Indus the "sea".
That the crocodile was demonic may be gathered from the strange lycanthropio tale incorporated in the Mahabharata. Arjun was roving through Western India in search of adventure and had apparently reached the lakes of the Lower Indus flood plain. "Dragved by the renowned Arjuna to the land, that crocodile became a beautiful damsel .... “Who art thou, O beautiful one? What for hadst thou been a ranger of the Waters?"
The damsel replied, saying, “I am, Oh mighty armed one, an Apsara sporting in the celestial woods. I am, Oh mighty one, Varga by name "... and then she describes how she and four others (dear to Kuvera), Sauraveyi, Samichi, Vudonda and Lata, tempted & Brahman, who cursed them. “Becoming crocodiles range ye the waters for a hundred years . . . An exalted individual will drag ye all from the water to the land. Then ye will have back your real forms."
Now this tale is pure lycanthropy and is all the stranger because this form of magic is 80 rare in India. The name of the leader of the Apsaras, Varga, is to be noted. One must assume that the Beast, the terror of the jungle, the incarnation of foul murder, is not in Sind either the panther (Marathi wagh), or the tiger (Sk. vyāghra), but the crocodile (Si, wagho). In Europe the Beast was the wolf (Norse vargr, Saxon varag) and from the terror inspired by its ferocity was evolved the whole conception of the werwolf. In Sind the Beast was eventually lost in an all-embracing Hinduism. A curious parallel of absorption in Catholio Christianity will be found in the most holy miracle, which St. Francis wrought when he converted the very fierce wolf of Agobio,
1 Bombay Gazetteer, Vol. I, Pt. 1, p. 462. • Trans. by P. C. Roy, Calcutta, 1883. Adi Parva, oh. 918.
• Little Flowers of St. Francis, ch. XXI. For the terror inspired by the orocodiles among the Jows, 100 Job, sh. 41 RV.