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The Swinging Festival at Karwar

"There seem to be some reasons for thinking that the Indian rite of swinging on hooks run through the flesh of the performer is also resorted to, at least in some cases, from a belief in its fertilising virtue. Thus Hamilton tells us that at Karwar, on the west coast of India, a feast is held at the end of May or beginning of June in honour of the infernal gods, 'with a divination or conjuration to know the fate of the ensuing crop of corn.' Men were hung from a pole by means of tenter-hooks inserted in the flesh of their backs; and the pole with the men dangling from it was then dragged for more than a mile over ploughed ground from one sacred grove to another, preceded by a young girl who carried a pot of fire on her head. When the second grove was reached, the men were let down and taken off the hooks, and the girl fell into the usual prophetic frenzy, after which she unfolded to the priests the revelation with which she had just been favoured by the terrestrial gods. In each of the groves a shapeless black stone, daubed with red lead to stand for a mouth, eyes, and ears, appears to have represented the indwelling divinity. Sometimes this custom of swinging on hooks, which is known among the Hindoos as Churuk Puja, seems to be intended to propitiate demons. Some Santals asked Mr. V. Ball* to be allowed to perform it because their women and children were dying of sickness, and their cattle were being killed by wild beasts; they believed that these misfortunes befell them because the evil spirits had not been appeased."

—J. G. Frazer, The Dying God (The Golden Bough, vol. IV, 1914, pp. 278-279)

*Valentine Ball was a geologist who traveled to India under the auspices of the Geological Survey of India. He related his experiences there in his 1880 book Jungle Life in India, the source from which Frazer draws the account detailed above. According to Ball, the Churuk Puja had been banned in British India.