The Sheep Eater of Fatehgarh

The event illustrated by these drawings is apparently historical. Fatehgarh, a British military station on the Ganges in the 1780s and 1790s, witnessed an ascetic named Juragir or Beragir who, with his mouth and bare hands, would disembowel and eat one or two sheep every morning before brekfast. An eyewitness account of this is recorded in 1796, by Major General Thomas Hardwicke's who published his account in 1833 (the original drawings of 1796 are in the India Office Library). Another iconography, with seven stages, was done around 1810 for James Nathaniel Rind (also in the India Office Library as well as in S.C. Welch's A Room for Wonder, New York, 1978). A third version on which this present one is based, also dates from around 1810 and is that of the Lucknow School (one of the scenes from the Lucknow School version is in the Victoria and Albert Museum and is published in M. Archer's, Company Paintings in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1992). The exact allegorical meaning of the events is obscure but it is thought that the ascetic may be a Vishnu bhakta (devotee) because he disembowels with his mouth like a boar (the boar, or Varaha, being one of the incarnations of Vishnu). There is a temple of Varaha near Sorang where the ascetic came from (see J.P. Losty, The Sheep Eater of Fatehgarh, South Asian Studies, 1988, vol.IV, pp.1-11).