Word: kali
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Before the Fact. The accused had many aliases; Satan and Evil were two. In India, however, the accused was feared and terribly propitiated by millions as Kali, goddess of death and catastrophe, wife-conqueror of the eternal Siva, the dancer. Not in Kali's name were the 100,000 killed. The Moslems despised her as a wretched idol. The Sikhs* ignored her. Even most Hindus no longer participated in the rites of Kali's priests, who dismembered goats (in lieu of human victims), spraying the blood upon worshipers crowded in fields of which Kali was mother, fructifier...
...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...
...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...
...ancient Hindu holy book, the Vishnu Purana, he could recall, says that the life of man will run in four cycles. The last is to be the Age of Kali. It closes in, says the book, when "society reaches a stage where property confers rank, wealth, becomes the only source of virtue, passion, the sole bond of union between husband and wife, falsehood the source of success in life, sex the only means of enjoyment, and when outer trappings are confused with inner religion...
...governments to exercise their most spectacular function. Similarly, the killing of 6,000,000 Jews in Europe was the work of a state, mad with its organized power. Are you suggesting that the Indian killing sprang out of the people themselves, out of the evil which you call Kali...