Belgravia Volume 52; A London Magazine (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: '57 $rijftmo0 jit Calcutta, Christmas in Calcutta! How strange it seemed to be shutting out the hot sun and sitting in the cool shade, with doors and windows open, while we thought of you all at home, round the blazing Yule log; and of the white world that lay outside, and the busy fingers that were twining the evergreens. There were Christmas decorations here too; for the natives dearly love all tokens of feasting and they place tall plantain leaves and bunches of fruit in the gateways, as symbols of plenty, and hang up wreaths of laurel and Indian jasmine, or strings of small lamps and of those great orange marigolds, which they offer at the shrines of all their gods. But of the real message of Christmas, the great mass of the people know little more than they did when on the site of this great city of palaces there stood only a wretched village called Kali-Kutta, the village of the dread goddess Kali, the 'dark goddess of the iron mace,' to whom a draught of warm human blood gives joy for a thousand years. Here grim human sacrifices were offered to her, and here, too, Hindoo mothers of old used to throw their tender babes as dainty morsels to the yawning jaws of crocodiles. To the temple of Kali, south of the city, vast multitudes still resort, during the annual holidays known as Doorga-pooja?the worship of Doorga?by which name, as well as that of Davi, Kali is also commonly known. As Davi, she is the goddess of the Thugs who do her righteous pleasure in strangling unwary travellers. So very small is the amount of interest bestowed on native customsand traditions by average foreigners, that butanexceedingly small proportion of the inhabitants of Calcutta ever dream of turning aside from their daily routine drive in the European quarter to visit Kali-ghat, the tr...