Muhammadan festivals are regulated by the lunar, and those of the Hindoos by the solar year, and they cross each other every thirty or forty years, and furnish fair occasions for the local authorities to interpose effectually.[7] People who receive or imagine insults or injuries commonly postpone their revenge till these religious festivals come round, when they hope to be able to settle their accounts with impunity among the excited crowd.  The mournful procession of the Muharram, when the Muhammadans are inflamed to madness by the recollection of the really affecting incidents of the massacre of the grandchildren of their prophet, and by the images of their tombs, and their sombre music,[8] crosses that of the Holi[9] (in which the Hindoos are excited to tumultuous and licentious joy by their bacchanalian songs and dances) every thirty-six years; and they reign together for some four or five days, during which the scene in every large town is really terrific.  The processions are liable to meet in the street, and the lees of the wine of the Hindoos, or the red powder which is substituted for them, is liable to fall upon the tombs of the others.  Hindoos pass on, forgetting in their saturnalian joy all distinctions of age, sex, or religion, their clothes and persons besmeared with the red powder, which is moistened and thrown from all kinds of machines over friend and foe; while meeting these come the Muhammadans, clothed in their green mourning, with gloomy downcast looks, beating their breasts, ready to kill themselves, and too anxious for an excuse to kill anybody else.  Let but one drop of the lees of joy fall upon the image of the tomb as it passes, and a hundred swords fly from their scabbards; many an innocent person falls; and woe be to the town in which the magistrate is not at hand with his police and military force.  Proudly conscious of their power, the magistrates refuse to prohibit one class from laughing because the other happens to be weeping; and the Hindoos on such occasions laugh the more heartily to let the world see that they are free to do so.

A very learned Hindoo once told me in Central India that the oracle of Mahadeo had been at the same time consulted at three of his greatest temples—­one in the Deccan, one in Rajputana, and one, I think, in Bengal—­as to the result of the government of India by Europeans, who seemed determined to fill all the high offices of administration with their own countrymen, to the exclusion of the people of the country.  A day was appointed for the answer; and when the priest came to receive it they found Mahadeo (Siva) himself with a European complexion, and dressed in European clothes.  He told them that their European Government was in reality nothing more than a multiplied incarnation of himself; and that he had come among them in this shape to prevent their cutting each other’s throats as they had been doing for some centuries past; that these, his incarnations, appeared to have no religion themselves