“They have a strange notion that at this period men and women are so overcharged with vicious propensities, that it is absolutely necessary for the safety of the person to let off steam by allowing, for a time, full vent to the passions.  The festival therefore becomes a saturnale, during which servants forget their duties to their masters, children their reverence for parents, even their respect for women, and women all notions of modesty, delicacy, and gentleness; they become raging bacchantes....

“The Ho population of the village forming the environs of Chaibasa are at other seasons quiet and reserved in manner, and in their demeanor toward women gentle and decorous; even in the flirtations I have spoken of they never transcend the bounds of decency.  The girls, though full of spirits and somewhat saucy, have innate notions of propriety that make them modest in demeanor, though devoid of all prudery....  Since their adoption of clothing they are careful to drape themselves decently as well as gracefully, but they throw all this aside during the Magh feast.  Their natures appear to undergo a temporary change.  Sons and daughters revile their parents in gross language, and parents their children; men and women become almost like animals in the indulgence of their amorous propensities.  They enact all that was ever portrayed by prurient artists in a bacchanalian festival or pandean orgy; and as the light of the sun they adore and the presence of numerous spectators seem to be no restraint on their indulgence, it cannot be expected that chastity is preserved when the shades of night fall on such a scene of licentiousness and debauchery.”

“MARVELLOUSLY PRETTY AND ROMANTIC”

Nor are these festivals of rare occurrence.  They last three or four days and are held at the different villages at different dates, so the inhabitants of each may take part in “a long succession of these orgies.”  When Dalton declares (206) regarding these coarse and dissolute Hos, who thus spend a part of each year in “a long succession of orgies,” in which their own wives and daughters participate, that they are nevertheless capable of the higher emotions—­though he admits they have no words for them—­he merely proves that long intercourse with such savages blunted his own sensibilities, or what is more probable—­that he himself never understood the real nature of the higher emotions—­those “tracts of feeling” which Lewin found missing among the hill-tribes.  We are confirmed in this suspicion by noticing Dalton’s ecstatic delight over the immoral courtship customs of the Bhuiyas, which he found “marvellously pretty and romantic” and describes as follows: