Word: bihar
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...python herself. From the reports of the villagers, it is a great, ropy beast-and it will creep forth to kill again after it recovers from a two-week digestive coma brought on by swallowing Lady Edith's cook. So Lady Edith, who runs an orphanage near Bihar, India, delegates the job of python stalking to a half-Indian, half-American Quaker youth named Peter Bruff. Though courageous, Peter is an abstracted, mystical young man. He is also a poet, and his work, a heroic poem about the god Krishna, is going badly; he has caught...
...heat brought drought; the drought brought famine. In Rajasthan state last week men, their crops parched and their cattle killed, were eating slugs, dried grass and flowers. In Bihar 90% of the wells had dried up; rioting broke out among villagers who camped all night at the few wells that still gave water. In Calcutta (top temperature 111°F., the highest since 1924) half the railwaymen refused to work in the heat, created such chaos with train schedules that mobs smashed the offices of stationmasters in protest...
...bigger worry was one that India thought it had put behind it forever: food. Floods last fall and hailstorms in January and February had destroyed many crops. Across northern India, in state after state, black headlines announced creeping famine. The famine areas were still scattered. But in Bihar, more than a million people were down to one meal every two days; farmers scrabbled in the fields for roots, and rioting workers broke into granaries. In Uttar Pradesh, desperate men held up a train; ignoring money and jewels, they carried off five bags of rice...
...failed their exams. In 1953 Allahabad students raided the railway station, sabotaged trains, fired public buildings. Last year, when eight students were dismissed after another riot, the rest of the student body caused so much trouble that the university closed for a month. In the state of Bihar students launched a four-day reign of terror because the State Transport Authority refused to grant them special bus fares. They hurled bricks at police, raided a bank, burned the national flag. When the police finally opened fire, five people were killed. This fall more riots started at Aligarh, resulted...
...causes of the intransigence, the most telling is perhaps the persistent perversion of Gandhi's teaching. Says Vice Chancellor Rai Bahadur Syamnandan Sa-haya at Bihar University: "Students did participate in our political agitations against Britain . . . This psychology which developed and grew for 25 years will take some time to eradicate...