History of SanitationCosgrove, J. J. (John Joseph)
History
History of Sanitation
Cosgrove, J. J. (John Joseph)
Sanitation -- History
stream of devotees flows along the great Orissa road from Calcutta, and
every village for three hundred miles has its pilgrim encampments.
[Illustration: Car of Juggernaut]
The people travel in small bands, which at the time of the great feasts
actually touch each other. Five-sixths of the whole are females and
ninety-five per cent. travel on foot, many of them marching hundreds
and even thousands of miles, a contingent having been drummed up from
every town or village in India by one or other of the three thousand
emissaries of the temple, who scour the country in all directions in
search of dupes. When those pilgrims who have not died on the road
arrive at their journey's end, emaciated, with feet bound up in rags
and plastered with mud and dirt, they rush into the sacred tanks or
the sea and emerge to dress in clean garments. Disease and death make
havoc with them during their stay; corpses are buried in holes scooped
in the sand, and the hillocks are covered with bones and skulls washed
from their shallow graves by the tropical rains. The temple kitchen has
the monopoly of cooking for the multitude, and provides food which if
fresh is not unwholesome. Unhappily, it is presented before Juggernaut,
so becomes too sacred for the minutest portion to be thrown away. Under
the influence of the heat it soon undergoes putrefactive fermentation,
and in forty-eight hours much of it is a loathsome mass, unfit for
human food. Yet it forms the chief sustenance of the pilgrims, and is
the sole nourishment of thousands of beggars. Some one eats it to the
very last grain. Injurious to the robust, it is deadly to the weak and
wayworn, at least half of whom reach the place suffering under some
form of bowel complaint. Badly as they are fed the poor wretches are
worse lodged. Those who have the temporary shelter of four walls are
housed in hovels built upon mud platforms about four feet high, in the
center of each of which is the hole which receives the ordure of the
household, and around which the inmates eat and sleep. The platforms
are covered with small cells without any windows or other apertures
for ventilation, and in these caves the pilgrims are packed, in a
country where, during seven months out of twelve, the thermometer marks
from 85 to 100 degrees Fahr. Hunter says that the scenes of agony and
suffocation enacted in these hideous dens baffle description. In some
of the best of them, 13 feet long by 10 feet broad and 6½, feet high,
as many as eighty persons pass the night. It is not then surprising
to learn that the stench is overpowering and the heat like that of
an oven. Of 300,000 who visit Juggernaut in one season, 90,000 are
often packed together five days a week in 5,000 of these lodgings. In
certain seasons, however, the devotees can and do sleep in the open
air, camping out in regiments and battalions, covered only with the
same meagre cotton garment that clothes them by day. The heavy dews are
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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