Book Title: Indian Antiquary Vol 59
Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Charles E A W Oldham, S Krishnaswami Aiyangar, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarka
Publisher: Swati Publications
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THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY
August, 1930
without undue conceit to be not an unimportant extent. A notable effort in that direction has been made recently by Miss Eleanor Hull in her book on The Folklore of the British Isles.
As long ago as 1886 your President ventured to put the situation plainly before the Folklore Society in a lecture entitled The Science of Folklore, published in volume IV of the Folklore Record. Oddly enough it was found, on going over it again after forty-two years, that much the same arguments are used as those to be now put forward, sometimes in almost the same words ; justifying once again old legal advice given long ago that no man should hear his own judgment in appeal, as though he may have forgotten all the circumstances, his mind will lead him to the same conclusions on similar arguments and evidence.
Assuming then that it is right to look upon ourselves as a scientific conference, assembled to do honour to the Jubilee of our particular line of research, it seems fair to assume also that you look for some guidance from the chair, as to methods that might be adopted for continuing that research, on scientific lines, during the years that must elapse before a centenary ceremony can be held. Your President does not propose however to stand before you as an infallible guide, or even as a teacher ; rather does he propose to take you into his confidence and show you how he has himself arrived at the theories he will describe, as that seems to be the true way for any one mind to recommend its ideas to another engaged in the same line of research. But in the first place we must bear in mind that we are holding not only a scientific but also a folklore conference, and should confine ourselves therefore to the study of folklore, i.e., of the learning of the people, lettered and unlettered, and the results of that learning. Our research is in fact limited to that extent, and the philosophy of the highly educated thinker comes into our purview only in so far as it may have affected the public unlettered and uneducated in the sense that on the other hand the philosopher is lettered and educated.
Returning then to the thought of taking you into my confidence, let me tell you that the research, which has been the occupation of such leisure as a very busy official life has permitted during nearly forty years, began thus. In the early part of 1890 I was travelling by sea from Calcutta to Rangoon, being then a Government official in Burma, and when the steamer was passing along the Arakan coast, I noticed that all the sailors on board, of whatever nationality, were performing some sort of religious ceremony in honour of something ashore. They were, as is usual in that region, a very mixed body-Eurasians (chiefly Roman Catholic), Muslims, Hindus, Chinamen-but whatever they were, the ceremonies were most simple and clearly unorthodox, and were performed in the same manner by all. Respect was being paid to something on shore, while fruit, small coins and the like were thrown into the sea.
The performances set me enquiring, and it was found that the object in view was to secure the goodwill of a holy personage, a patron of mariners who had a shrine on shore-in fact at Akyab-which they called a Buddhamakan. But Buddhamakân is so hybrid an expression, half Muslim and half Buddhist-Arakan in Burma being a Buddhist land-that it at once appeared to be an obvious corruption. It was soon discovered that the right name of the shrine was Badarmakam, the shrine of Badar, the locally celebrated mediæval Muslim saint of Chittagong in Eastern Bengal, and one of the patrons of mariners in the Bay of Bengal; for there are others who need not engage our attention just now, except to point out that it is not necessary for a hero to have been personally connected with the sea in order to become a sea-saint. There is a strong instance of this in 'Abdu'l-Qadir al-Jilani, the great medieval Persian preacher and founder of much orthodox sectarian Islam. More than probably he never saw the sea, and yet he is now a highly revered mariners' saint in the Indian Ocean. But observe how true folklore was in action in the above-mentioned
