A visitation of the plague in Nepâl was attributed to the Râja insisting on celebrating the Dasahra during an intercalary month. On another occasion the arrival of the disease was attributed to the Evil Eye of Saturn and other planets, which secretly came together in one sign of the zodiac. A third attack was supposed to be caused by the Râja being in his eighteenth year, and the year of the cycle being eighty-eight--eight being a very unlucky number. [312]
So the Gonds try to ward off the anger of the spirits of cholera and small-pox by sacrifices, and by thoroughly cleaning their villages and transferring the sweepings into some road or travelled track. Their idea is that unless the disease is communicated to some person who will take it on to the next village, the plague will not leave them. For this reason they do not throw the sweepings into the jungle, as no one passes that way, and consequently the benefit of sweeping is lost. [313]
An extraordinary case was recently reported from the Dehra Ismâîl Khân District. There had been a good deal of sickness in the village, and the people spread a report that this was due to the fact that a woman, who had died some seven months previously, had been chewing her funeral sheet. The relatives were asked to allow the body to be examined, which was done, and it was found that owing to the subsidence of the ground through rain, some earth had fallen into the mouth of the corpse. A copper coin was placed in the mouth as a viaticum, and a fowl killed and laid on the body, which was again interred. The same result is very often believed to follow from burying persons of the sweeper caste in the usual extended position, instead of a sitting posture or with the face downwards. A sweeper being one of the aboriginal or casteless tribes is believed to have something uncanny about him. Recently in Muzaffarnagar, a corpse buried in the unorthodox way was disinterred by force, and the matter finally came before the courts.
In the same way cattle disease is caused by the plague demon. Once upon a time a man, whose descendants live in the Mathura District, was sleeping out in the fields when he saw the cattle disease creeping up to his oxen in an animal shape. He watched his opportunity and got the demon under his shield, which he fixed firmly down. The disease demon entreated to be released, but he would not let it go till it promised that it would never remain where he or his descendants were present. So to this day, when the murrain visits a village, his descendants are summoned and work round the village, calling on the disease to fulfil its contract. [314]