Word: indias
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Kali has been in India at least 50 centuries, long before Hinduism, which gradually assimilated her. A few years after the Prophet Mohamed sent Islam forth to conquer the world, Moslems appeared in India. After the 11th Century they were masters, sometimes in fact but more often in name, of the subcontinent. Some Moslems in India today descend from the conquerors; more are the children of Islam's vigorous proselytizing, and none the less fanatical for that...
...centuries of Hindu political inferiority began to be reversed when the great Sivaji in the mid-17th Century led his Marathas against the Moslems. Thus, by the time the British reached India, both Hindu and Moslem were deeply immersed in hate, deeply conscious of dispossession before the British dispossessed both. Through all the changes, Kali, both as mother and as evil, persevered, so that when freedom came there were more Indians than ever to hate each other more intensively than ever...
Then the Prosecutor could turn to India: "Everywhere the armed and the many devoured the helpless and the few. In Calcutta, in Lahore, in Amritsar, in Old Delhi and New Delhi and throughout the magnificent plain of the dismembered Punjab, in homes and shops and factories and farms and villages and in the religious sanctuaries of all faiths, amid the clotting of the terrified in depots and on guarded trains and on lonely station platforms and in the vast shelterless encampments of refugees and their hypnotized columns across the land, the devastation raged alike among Hindus and Moslems and Sikhs...
...still another, and a new one in retaliation for the latest before it, and still a newer in retaliation for that, another set aflame by the stories of refugees and another still by pure rumor, and another in retaliation for that and still another by rumor. The genius of India has ever been for myth, not rationality: and no man's reason may be expected to remain intact under the intricate chemistries of horror, heartbreak, revenge, the vertiginous contagion of mobs, a thousand years' collective, unconscious fertilization in allegiance to one faith and culture...
...runs at its wildest under such circumstances, is enough to dethrone reason; great terror, in a brave man or a cringer, can turn loose adrenal energies which must exhaust themselves in outrage and spoliation. It would be untrue to describe as a form of religious madness, even in religious India, a madness which operates also with equal fury among godless men. But where deep religiousness is present it is inevitably used, inevitably adds its own peculiar intensity...