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Updated: May 1, 2025
If any religion could be considered entrenched by local advantages beyond the possibility of overthrow, Hinduism might be declared secure at Benares, if not against assault, at least against defeat. People in all ages, all the world over, cling with varying degrees of tenacity to the views and practices which have come to them from their fathers.
The next afternoon Andy invited five of his special friends and several of his acquaintances to a little dinner party. Miss Starr, Billy Blow the clown, Midget, old Benares, Thacher, Luke Belding and Mark Hadley were his guests of honor. Andy had found a starting place in the circus for Mark, whose ambition was to become a great magician. They were a merry, friendly party.
Hastings, who invariably, among the objects of his government, placed the interests of Leadenhall Street first on the list, and those of justice and humanity longo intervallo after, finding the treasury of the Company in a very exhausted state, resolved to sacrifice this unlucky Rajah to their replenishment; and having as a preliminary step, imposed upon him a mulct of L500,000, set out immediately for his capital, Benares, to compel the payment of it.
In the twelfth century, Benares, the ancient seat of Brahminical learning and of Hindu idolatry, fell into the hands of the conqueror, who destroyed its numerous objects of popular adoration. Yet, soon afterward, the religious character of the place was restored, and the demolished idols were replaced by others, that were as eagerly resorted to as had been their predecessors.
He turned them out nimbly, for he had had long practice and had acquired great facility. Every day he made 2,000 gods, then threw them into the holy Ganges. This act of homage brought him the profound homage of the pious also their coppers. He had a sure living here, and was earning a high place in the hereafter. The Ganges front is the supreme show-place of Benares.
And then comes a memory of that long reef of staircases and temples and buildings, the ghats of Benares, in the blazing morning sun, swarming with a vast multitude of multicolored people and the water also swarming with brown bodies. It has the colors of a bed of extravagantly splendid flowers and the light that is Indian alone. Even as I sit here these places are alive with happening.
"I've no doubt the things are interesting, and if our friends come up they can look at them. But it wasn't Benares brassware that brought me here." "Was it not?" Millicent asked with a fluttering heart. "Certainly not! One couldn't talk with Foster enlarging upon the only rational way of rearing pheasants, and you know I'm going away first thing to-morrow."
"The left bank of the Ganges is the one Benares is on," replied the worthy woman; and she was greeted with a roar of laughter, and a volley of applause started by the live boys who were making their way across India. "Quite right, madam!" exclaimed Sir Modava, applauding with the others.
In Benares secret assassins were hired to slay him, but the attempt did not succeed. In a small town of Bengal, where he treated fetishism with more than his usual severity, some fanatic threw on his naked feet a huge cobra. There are two snakes deified by the Brahman mythology: the one which surrounds the neck of Shiva on his idols is called Vasuki; the other, Ananta, forms the couch of Vishnu.
He never realized the degradation possible to Christianity until he visited "The Eternal City," with its huge shams and ghastly superstitions. He never saw Hinduism with its myriad inane rites and debasing idolatry half so grotesque, idiotic, and repulsive, as in this city of Benares, where one ought to see the religion of these two hundred odd million people at its best, and not at its worst.
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