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Thrones & Altars. The fury, now apparently spent, might be renewed to pour in fresh evidence against Kali. Of the 562 princely states, danger lay in three which stood apart from both India and Pakistan. One was little Junagadh, whose dog-loving Moslem Nawab* has announced for Pakistan against the wishes of most of his subjects, who are 80% Hindu. One was Kashmir, most of whose people are Moslem, but opposed to Jinnah's Moslem League. The third was fabulous Hyderabad, whose Nizam had a good chance of maintaining his state's independence. India's Deputy Prime Minister Vallabhbhai Patel is applying pressure on all three states; of the Government's top ministers Patel is the most outspokenly anti-Moslem, although he is more moderate than extremist Hindu "Brownshirt" groups. Troops of both India and Pakistan are actually near Junagadh's borders.
Or renewal of the fury might come from, an utterly unpolitical cause. This week, in tense Calcutta and elsewhere in Bengal, worshipers of the goddess Durga will celebrate her festival with clay images and ceremonial parades. Durga is the good side of the same ambivalent goddess of which Kali is the evil face.* In this same week Moslems will celebrate Id-el-Atha, their version of the story of Abraham and Isaac. Usually they sacrifice cows, but this week many, lest the Hindus be offended, plan again to sacrifice sheep.† Even so, the two coincident festivals might touch off killing in Bengal, which, along with Bihar and the United Provinces, is considered the next great danger spot.
The Sky & the Sea. Whether the killing remained suspended or was mercifully at an end or was to be tragically revived, India was not to be singled out for condemnation or contempt. No nation had ever come into the world without bloodshed. In every process of hope, ambition, confused value, self-deceit, India is merely the world in small, and one more terrible warning to the conscience of the world. India's gravest error, her deepest sin, is rampant in all the world and never so madly so as in those portions of the world which call themselves "modern": the incapacity of those who desire to lead people, whether for power or in the highest of good will, to know, love, fear, respect, or even to imagine, what human beings are.
Said the Prosecutor, in closing: "Yet, in spite of Kali the Destroyer and because of Kali the Mother, India has been and is a great and ancient land, a wellspring and tabernacle of some of the most inspired conceptions of the divine will in man which man has ever dreamed of; and more lately a fount of brotherhood and, among the nations, a preacher of peace. If India could descend to the depths, it could also look up to moral Himalayas. Its recent sin was great, but not unique, especially not unique in origin. It sprang from Kali, from the dark and universal fear which rests in the slime on the blind sea-bottom of biology."