Word: communal
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...ghosts that haunt independence day celebrations, however, hail from the very end of the colonial era: At the governor's mansion, writers, intellectuals and other well-to-do Calcuttans watched footage on video screens displaying the traumatic communal violence that wracked the city when Britain partitioned India into the separate Hindu-majority and Muslim-majority states of India and Pakistan. The unmistakable figure of a frail, cotton-clad Mahatma Gandhi appeared throughout the video. India's founding father bitterly opposed partition, declaring famously, "Let it not be said that Gandhi was party to India's vivisection. Let posterity know what...
...Hindu refugees fleeing death and persecution in East Bengal (soon to be made into East Pakistan and later independent Bangladesh) besieged Muslim areas like Beliaghata seeking revenge for their sufferings. Gandhi sought to deter further killings by living among Muslims himself, and he embarked on a hunger strike against communal violence that generated such public shame and outrage that sectarian tensions in the city gave way to universal concern for the aging man of principle. Gandhi broke his fast as weeping rioters laid their machetes at his feet...
...What may be most revealing about the moment is that on the 60th anniversary of India's independence, many see Gandhi's sacrifice in pursuit of communal harmony as more moving than the triumph of expelling the British. Poverty and communal tensions still trouble India, and cloud its future. As the country's economy booms, hundreds of millions like those gathered around Gandhi's humble dwelling are on the outside looking in. It's reported that on August 15, 1947, West Bengal's newly appointed administrators came to the Mahatma in Beliaghata to seek his blessings. He responded ominously. "Today...
...Sikh businessman whose son's profligate wedding in Delhi last year became the subject of a Discovery Channel documentary, The Great Indian Wedding.The flood of over-the-top weddings that followed in its wake - mostly within Delhi's Sikh community - eventually prompted the Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee, a communal organization that maintains temples and represents nearly half of the city's Sikh population, passing an injunction requiring that all Sikh weddings in Delhi must now take place in gurdwaras,as Sikh temples are known, and not in hotels. No liquor or meat is to be served, according...
...three thousand miles away from my California home, I feel particularly distanced from my suburban life when I consider my newly formed footwear habits. Moving into my freshman dorm forced me into fuzzy slippers to combat the Boston winter and into shower flip-flops for the communal bathrooms of Stoughton South. These Cantabridgian customs were not so disturbing: I maintained the indoor-outdoor divide, rarely violating my ingrained sense of hygiene...