Some pee attention has been paid to the subject of Hindu festivals, and there is among the records of the Transactions of this Association a paper on the nature of Hindu festivals. I wish to say a few words on their origin. It is my impression that most Hindu festivals were not in their origin at all similar to what they are now; and if we could trace their origin in every case satisfactorily, we should have the key to interesting phenomena in the various phases of social existence which the nation has gone through. It is impossible to venture on any general theory regarding their origin. Particular festivals appear to have had each a particular origin quite different in its principle from the origin of others. Again, it is by no means clear that every festival has had its origin in the earlier stages of Hindu society. Some are doubtless, very old, but others are extremely modern.
It is certain that many festivals which have now assumed the shape and adopted the symbols of the worship of particular gods, were in their origin nothing more than the celebration of the advent of particular seasons of the year, or of other physical phenomena, and had no religious element in them at the beginning. Take the Dol Jatra, for instance. It is now in Bengal only a special mode of worshipping Krishna on a particular day. Upcountry it is the Huli, as the word is mis-written and mis-pronounced. Originally, it was nothing but a festival in honour of spring, Vasantotsaba. From Vasantotsaba it degenerated into Madanotsaba, or the festival of love, and then the religious element first crept in. It is strange that that season of the year when the fresh bursting forth of nature into new life, and into forms of pure and stainless beauty, is calculated to dispose the mind towards the highest and the calmest moods, should be set down by the poets and the people of India as peculiarly the season of love and desire. Being so set down, spring came to be indissolubly associated with love and desire, not that love which is high, holy as an abnegation of self, even when man or his companion is the object, but love which levels man to the brute. The association was so strong, that whenever a Hindu poet happens to touch on spring, he speaks of it only in one aspect—as the season of love. Not even the highest and most cultivated minds which Puranic India ever produced were free from this peculiarity. Even in the finest passage in all the poetical literature of India, perhaps of the East, the third canto of the Kumar Sambhava, where the poetry often rises into strains of loftiness and grandeur rarely attained, it sinks into the earth when the poet comes to describe spring. He is tender, he is touching, his exquisite and trembling sensibility reflects every shade of the new life of Nature; but the leading idea throughout the description is still that of the season of love and desire. It was natural, therefore, that the festival of spring should transform itself into the festival of love; and as love was the god Madana, the festival became one for the worship of Madana. The red powder and the squirt, which form the distinguishing features of the Huli, were also the ancient accompaniments of the Madanotsaba, and we find them all in the description of that festival given in the Ratnavali. When Madana came to give place to Krishna, and the Madanotsaba came to be transformed into the Dol Jatra in Bengal, I am unable to say; but it was naturally to be expected that the god whose worship came to be the most popular in the country, and the memory of whose amorous achievements better fitted him to represent love and loose morals than Madana himself, should supplant the latter in popular festivals.