(See Cover)
On a bed of stretched thongs in an open courtyard in Lahore, half naked, her head "wrung steeply back, her legs rigid in a convulsion as of birth, a woman lay dead.
Under the law of the English, whose writ ran for a third of mankind, it was fixed that whenever a person, however humble, died of violence or even unexpectedly, public inquiry was made into the causes of his death. If guilt seemed to fall upon another, a trial was held and punishment sought lest murder, undetected or held lightly, spread.
In India and Pakistan since mid-August at least 100,000 have died, not of germs or hunger or what the law calls "acts of God," but of brutal slaughter. Scarcely one died in fair combat or with the consolations of military morale.
No human tribunal ever conceived could try that case, with its clouds of witnesses, the surging contagion of its guilt. Yet the mind, squinting at the horror now that the tide of blood had washed back, naturally cast the evidence in the familiar and dreadful form of The Trial. The world, with one war still red under its nails and another beating in its belly, knew, more or less subconsciously, that it would have to build a prisoner's dock bigger than the subcontinent of India, that the crime was not contained by geography, and that the less the crime was understood the more it would infect the whole of humanity.
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 and scourge. Nevertheless Kali, the Black One, could stand as symbol (or perhaps as scapegoat) for the horror that had walked hand in hand with bright liberty into India.
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.
Six 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.
Corpus Delicti. If there had indeed been a Prosecutor to try the enormous case of this murdered woman and the 100,000 other Indians, he might have opened with a point of wide application.