the god and goddess of the charak-puja or "hook-swinging." Each village supports a separate priest called the Degharia, who is said to be a Hindu Brahman, and under him is an assistant known as the Laya.
As to what occurs during the dance which, as I have said, is held on the evening of the day on which the hook-swinging takes place, I can obtain no reliable information beyond that it is in honour of Durga and Siva, and that women go only to see the fun. The suggestion that there is any sort of promiscuity or licence allowed between the sexes is indignantly denied, although the man from whom much of my information was obtained would wish to have it clearly understood that the wives of the Bhugtas or men who have been swung have children after this ceremony.
The earliest reference to hook-swinging in literature that I have been able to trace, is that of Duarte Barbosa, who, writing of the marriage customs among the people of the interior of the Malabar Coast at the beginning of the sixteenth century, gives the following account:—
"There are amongst them young girls who desire to marry some man for whom they have a liking, and one of these will promise her idol to do it a great service if she should marry such a one whom she wishes for. And if she marries that one, she then says to him, I have to make a feast for such a god, and I have to offer my blood before I deliver myself to you. And so they appoint a day for celebrating that feast. And she takes a large waggon with oxen, and they fix it in a very high crane, such as those with which they draw water, and they fasten to it an iron chain with two iron hooks, and she comes out of her house with great honour, accompanied by all her relations and friends, men and women, with much singing and playing of instruments, and many dancers and jesters; and she comes wrapped very tightly round the waist with her white stuffs, covered from the waist to the knees, the rest bare, and at the door of her house, where the car stands, they lower the crane, and stick the two hooks into her in the loins between the skin and the flesh, and put into her left
