Sometimes the pretended curer of snake-bites by charms
professes also to possess the power of expelling demons, and in
other cases the expeller of demons disclaims being a snake-
conjuror. Demon-conjurors are not numerous in Nattore; and
tiger-conjurors who profess to cure the bites of tigers, although
scarcely heard of in that thana, are more numerous in those
parts of the district where there is a considerable space covered
by jungle inhabited by wild beasts. Distinct from these three
kinds of conjurors and called by a different name is a class of
gifted (guni) persons who are believed to possess the power of
preventing the fall of hail which would destroy or injure the
crops of the villages. For this purpose when there is a prospect of
a hailstorm, one of them goes out into the fields belonging to the
villages with a trident and a buffalo’s horn. The trident is fixed in
the ground and the Gifted makes a wide circuit around it,
running naked blowing the horn, and pronouncing incantations.
It is the firm belief of the villagers that their crops are by this
means protected from hailstorm. Both men and women practise
this business. There are about a dozen in Nattore, and they are
provided for in the same way as the conjurors.
Some of these details may appear, and in themselves probably
are, unimportant, but they help to afford an insight into the
character of the humblest classes of native society who
constitute the great mass of the people, and whose happiness
and improvement are identical with the prosperity of the
country; and although they exhibit the proofs of a most imbecile
superstition, yet it is superstition which does not appear to have
its origin or support in vice or depravity, but in a childish
ignorance of the common laws of nature which the most
imperfect education or the most limited mental cultivation would
remove. These superstitions are neither Hindu nor Mahomedan,
being equally repudiated by the educated portions of both
classes of religionists. They are probably antecedent to both
systems of faith and have been handed down from time
immemorial as a local and hereditary religion of the cultivators
of the soil, who, amid the extraordinary changes which in
successive ages and under successive races of conquerors this
country has undergone, appear always to have been left in the
same degraded and prostrate condition in which they are now
found.