Word: gujarati
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...direction, hundreds of thousands of Maharashtrian workers dropped their work and swarmed out of dockyards, textile mills and railroad shops into the streets, shouting "Death to Nehru!" The rioters blocked streets with boulders and gasoline drums, tore up lampposts, ripped down fences. They smashed statues of Mahatma Gandhi (a Gujarati himself), burned Desai in effigy, flourished pictures of Nehru hung with old shoes as a gesture of despisal. Mobs, sometimes 10,000 strong, stormed police stations, looted Gujarati shops, flung electric light bulbs filled with nitric acid in the faces of police and passersby. Saboteurs derailed trains, hurled stones...
Waving black flags of protest and flourishing improvised spears, mobs roamed Bombay's streets.* One grey-bearded Gujarati shopkeeper hastily tried to bar his shop door. He was too late. One rioter knocked the old man down, beat his head in with a large rock. The shopkeeper's little daughter ran screaming to her father's side. The rioter smashed the rock into the child's face, and she collapsed in a small heap over her father's body...
Calcutta, Too. In his house above the city, Chief Minister Desai sadly looked over burning Bombay. Desai, who is a Gujarati, had warned Nehru against dividing India by lingual groups. "Maharashtrians have made a mockery of India's preaching to the world to be nonviolent," he mourned. "If the government yields to Maharashtrian violence, democracy in India becomes mobocracy, and India will be cut to pieces...
...Gandhi, except for a grey beard and frowsy dark hair. He has the same emaciated body, wears the same sort of bifocal glasses, speaks in the same calm, soft voice, with kindly humor. One of the most learned men in India, he has studied Sanskrit, Persian, Urdu, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Telugu, Kanarese, Malayalam and English, and this array of languages serves him well on his travels through polyglot India. It is not for his learning, however, that India's millions have given their hearts to Vinoba Bhave. They have done that because he, like their beloved Bapu...
...question was as complex as India's linguistic makeup. Its solution was basic to the building of a modern cohesive state out of disparate parts. The nation of Gandhi and Nehru has no majority tongue. Some 41% of its people speak Hindi. Another 14% speak Marathi, Gujarati, Kashmiri and Punjabi-all closely related to Hindi. Some 32% speak Telugu, Tamil, Bengali, Oriya, Malayalam, Kannada and Assamese. The remaining 13% speak miscellaneous dialects...