The Trial of Kali Mata

Monday, Oct. 27, 1947 Time

The Trial of Kali

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.

An 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."

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.

"In the first six weeks of Independence, about half as many Indians were killed as Americans died during nearly four years of the second World War. There is still no possible numbering of the wounded and the mutilated who survived, or of those who must yet die for lack of the simplest medical facilities, or of so much as a roof over their heads. It is unbearable, and unwise as well, to cherish memory of the bestial atrocities which have been perpetrated by Moslem and Sikh and Hindu alike. It is beyond human competence to conceive, far less to endure the thought of, the massiveness of the mania of rage, the munificence of the anguish, the fecundity of hate breeding hate, perhaps for generations to come."

The Eyewitness. On this point, the witness Niranjan Singh, a Sikh, testified. Singh, a few weeks ago a prosperous merchant in the Montgomery district of the Punjab, now moves about New Delhi on crutches. He said:

"I shall never rest until revenge is taken upon the Moslems for all the wicked atrocities they have perpetrated upon innocent people. Moslems killed my old father, abducted my young daughter, slew my son and maimed my foot. No mercy whatsoever should be shown to them. I've always treated my Moslem laborers with kindness but the dirty swine have repaid me with brutality.

"I smelled trouble in my village when Moslems began gathering at the mosque every day for long conferences. One morning Moslems from all neighboring areas gathered around our village and attacked it. But although we were outnumbered, we held them for eight hours. We had only our kirpans [swords] and a few old rifles. They had modern weapons. When finally they broke through, there was not one among us who had not sustained some injury or other. The brutes killed my 90-year-old father and when my young son rushed to his defense, they speared him to death. I had been injured on my forehead and gushing blood had made me partly blind. A young, cowardly Moslem attacked me from behind with a hatchet, injuring my foot. Before I fell and fainted, I saw some Moslems carrying away my 16-year-old daughter, who put up stiff resistance.

"I was left among the dead for two days, dying of thirst, when at last a Hindu battalion of the Indian Army visited our village and rescued me. I insist revenge be taken on these traitors and brutes. We ought to declare war on Pakistan."

The Madness. The Prosecutor said:

"The stone of murder spread like a huge wave. This outrage in retaliation for that one and that in retaliation for 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.

"Mere rumor, which 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."

The Bereaved. India's Premier Jawaharlal Nehru testified: "India has disgraced herself in the eyes of the world."

The Prosecutor commented:

"The thousand million of Asia, lifting up their hands for freedom, had looked to India for leadership. Now, East and West, hope is undermined and confidence destroyed. India's killings, not instigated by any alien force, are more morally burdensome upon Asia's cause than is China's war."

Mahatma Gandhi's confidante, ex-secretary and the present Indian Health Minister, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, testified: "Gandhiji is very sad today. He has told me repeatedly that he is experiencing the pain and anguish of a thousand daggers pierced in his body."

During the killing, Gandhi had warned that there was danger of open war between India and Pakistan.

But the Prosecutor said:

"The world thought war was the ultimate horror, and civil war the worst of wars. It is not. India is what Macaulay called it, a 'decomposed society.' Even the British could not establish law; they merely kept order. A decomposed society cannot make war, which requires law, authority, organization. India and Pakistan may progress to the point where they can make war or even to the point where, being able to make war, they will decide to live in amity. But in the six weeks of the killing India and Pakistan were beneath war."

The Killers. The Court (which is composed of all men who want, for their own self-preservation, to understand violence) needed clarification of this point. One way of putting the court's question was this:

"It has long been held that mass killing is the work of states, not of peoples. War, some say, is caused by professional militarism, the existence of large arsenals and the itch of 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?"

The Prosecutor's answer: "Although leaders of the two states are, in different degrees, responsible for agitating or at least for misunderstanding the communal hatred, the appalling fact is that most of the killing was unorganized and spontaneous. In this case, a rare and significant one, the state power was not guilty. As for armaments, the massacres in India and Pakistan were as far removed as possible from modern war or from the gas chambers of Maidanek. The murderers with whom we are dealing used knives, chisels, ropes, hockey sticks, screwdrivers, bricks and slender fingers."

The Half Innocent. At least half innocent of the killing are the leaders who had demanded liberty or death for India and got, by Kali's black grace, both.

"When tragedy runs amok blame is universal, inextricable and irrelevant. That the horror was deeper than the ideals or ambitions of the leaders was ironically demonstrated when they tried to stop it. Mohamed Ali Jinnah urged restraint, but the killing did not cease. Gandhi fasted in Calcutta with ultimate local effect, but elsewhere the killing did not cease. When he visited their sanctuary, 30,000 groaning Moslems virtually adored him, but the killing did not cease. Nehru personally rescued two Moslem girls from a gang of Sikhs, but the killing did not cease. A conference between Nehru and Pakistan's Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan ended in complete accord and the Joint Defense Council ordered troops to fire on all rioters and looters, but the killing did not cease. The newly communalized police force proved ineffectual and sometimes took part in the riots, and the killing did not cease. The newly communalized armies, now that the British troops were inactivated, were like bodies from which the bones had been drawn.

"At length, by no outward control or rational cause, but only because destruction itself sickens, the violence quieted, for the time being, at least."

Mohamed Ali Jinnah, Governor General of Pakistan, did not testify. Seeing few, taking advice from none, he sulked in Karachi, the raddled capital of his already half-ruined country. Of him, the Prosecutor said:

"Jinnah is far too easy a villain: conceivably an obsessed child of Mohamed conceivably a man seized in his declining years by that most dangerous form of satyriasis which longs for naked power alone, Jinnah has beyond question done more than any other man in India to exacerbate the sores of communalism and to tease and torment their rawness; and this purely to secure his nation, and a torn body for India.

"Even so, he is much too shallowly accountable, and there are extenuating circumstances. He is only a portion of Islam, and today all Islam stirs. In India, moreover, his people are a minority, largely an impoverished minority, and could by no means fully trust in the majority's will; Congress Party leaders consistently ignored his Moslem League in favor of Moslems he regarded as Congress puppets; Nehru himself, Gandhi himself, must be held as sorely responsible for underestimating the force that Jinnah tapped, just as Western leaders for so long underestimated the evil wellspring that Hitler opened up."

The Orphans. A witness who had seen the Punjab border between Pakistan and India testified:

"At Wagah, a little town on the grand trunk highway between Amritsar and Lahore on the Pakistan side of the border, armed Baluchi troops, all certified Moslems from the frontier territory of Baluchistan, called a loud halt to travelers trying to go through the border. A mile down the road, at Atari, armed Dogras, who are a Punjabi Hindu tribe, searched and checked all Pakistan-bound vehicles. The mile between the two posts was no man's land. On the Pakistan side, just behind an improvised guardhouse, a bulldozer was digging graves for Moslem bodies which arrived from the India side of the frontier."

Another witness had been to the map room in New Delhi where the riots had been spotted in the neatest Pentagon tradition, and where now, still more incongruously, the tidy pins show columns of humanity passing in opposite directions to escape their tormentors. Each column has its thousands of unspeakable histories, yet on the map each exodus is a mere number.

The Prosecutor summed up the evidence behind the maps:

"Men, women and children and bullocks and groaning carts were plodding eastward and westward beneath the autumn skies and nights of the cloven Punjab; past unharvested fields, past empty villages and eviscerated villages and villages which resemble rained-out brush fires. Huge, forlorn concentrations of Sikhs and Hindus labored forward to leave the West Punjab forever. On one day last week, columns No. 8 and 9 moved across the famous Balloki headworks between Amritsar and Lahore and passed into the Indian Dominion; not far behind, foot columns No. 10, 11 and 12 lumbered steadfastly eastward. Carefully feeling its way around Amritsar, a foot convoy of perhaps 100,000 Moslems made towards Lahore and Jinnah's Promised Land, at a rate of ten miles a day.

"One madly ironic note was furnished by a group of Jainist monks who alighted from an airplane at New Delhi, their mouths and nostrils scrupulously masked. Fleeing for their own lives, they had not neglected a strange precaution of their sect. The Jains believe that the air is a living thing and that they protect the air from injury by filtering it through the masks as they breathe.

"At one village, on foot, a wretched gaggle of perhaps 100 refugees arrived. One of them, a woman, was stripped of everything save a clutched newspaper. Her companions were so stupefied by woe that it had occurred to none of them to share their clothing with her.

"From Dasuya in Hoshiarpur district came a mass of 114,000 Moslems, which branched into lesser columns and slowly diminished in the direction of Bahawalpur State.

"The refugee movement each way is now at a rate of about 150,000 each week; last week it was speeded up, for both Governments hope to finish it off by mid-November. From the East Punjab into Pakistan, 2,550,000 Moslems have crossed, leaving 2,400,000 still to be evacuated; 2,275,000 Sikhs and Hindus have crossed from the West Punjab and the North-West Frontier Province into their Dominion, leaving 1,800,000, chiefly in isolated pockets, still to come. It is one of the great exchanges of population in recorded history."

The Despoiled. An American witness testified:

"It is almost impossible to have a watch repaired in New Delhi now; the watch craftsmen were Moslems. So were the tailors and the barbers, the butchers, and the cooks, the waiters and bearers, the rug dealers, and the drivers of tongas and taxicabs.

"In Lyallpur, Moslem shopkeepers refuse to sell durable goods, because the increasing scarcity is sure to force the price up; moreover, even if the shopkeeper did sell, he would have no place to bank the money (for Hindus and Sikhs were the bankers) and no wholesaler from whom to buy more goods (for Hindus and Sikhs were the wholesalers). In Lahore, on the other hand, there is a corrupt buyers' paradise in looted goods. A refrigerator goes for 100 rupees ($30), a radio for 30. Parker "51" fountain pens, which used to sell for 60 rupees, now go for 5. "There is no economic exchange between Pakistan and India. India may survive this schism; Pakistan cannot. Almost its whole middle class, which was Hindu, has fled. The literacy rate, never higher than 9%, is now less than half that. Pakistan's Government is not able to support more refugees. It is trying to shut off the flood. Moslems who hear that Pakistan will not let them enter are embittered and terrified."

The Threatened. Another witness had talked to rich Hindus who last week had begun fleeing into Calcutta from Eastern Pakistan. These Hindus, he said, reported increased activity of the Moslem League National Guard organizations. If terrorism breaks out in northeast India, where 13,000,000 Hindus live, the carnage might be unimaginably greater than in the Punjab.

And had the Punjab killing ended, or was it merely suspended? Two weeks ago Master Tara Singh, leader of the Sikhs, estimated that the killing would last three more months and that 500,000 Hindus and Sikhs and as many Moslems would die of murder, epidemic and starvation. In another statement, Tara Singh gave this grisly forecast an algebraic twist. He pointed out that fleeing Sikhs (who are richer) had left six million acres of land, while an equal number of fleeing Moslems had left only two million acres. His proposal: drive enough Moslems from their farms to balance the property exchange.

The Motive. At this point the Attorney for the Defense addressed the court:

"Do not forget that for centuries Moslem and Hindu and Sikh lived side by side, if not in harmony, at least in uneasy tolerance. It is true that over the centuries, from time to time, they killed and rioted and even fought great wars, but not more often or more fiercely than peoples elsewhere. This in spite of India's abysmal poverty which turns men against one another, in spite of the enraging climate, either osmotic dust or illimitable ooze.

"If this society, stable enough to breed 400 million men, is decomposed, then forces outside the peoples of India, not within them, must be to blame."

The Prosecutor answered: "Hindu and Sikh and Moslem tolerated each other, insofar as they did so, not through love or virtue but because each community was aware that its rival did not possess the power to coerce it into a hated way of living. Neither the Rajputs, nor the Moguls, nor the British ever established in India a state whose police reached out to the ordering of people's daily lives. Now, with independence, with the possibility of modern states, each community saw behind the other the shadow of the policeman and the propagandist. The Indian communities rushed into violence not to seize power, but out of the fear of the power that was about to fall into the hands of others. And this is a primal fear, deeper than rivalries between such nations as have already known and submitted to police power wielded in their own names."

The Guilt of Innocence. The Defense Attorney tried again. He recalled how the subcontinent had been brought to freedom by good men, nonviolent men, men above superstition and narrow sectarian hatred. How could such evil come from a victory won by moral force alone?

And how equally admirable, he said, was it that Britain, another great and ancient nation, even grander and far more benign in her twilight than Imperial Rome before her, had at length bowed before that moral force in a moral beauty as unprecedented and still more graceful. The Defense Attorney recalled the midnight ceremonies of India's manumission in New Delhi two months ago as extraordinarily touching, the action itself as one of history's rare moments of good will and good hope.

The Prosecutor did not deny the point. But, said he:

"Gandhi and Nehru and their like, innocently intent upon their lofty goal, ascribed communal strife to British machination, so blinding themselves that, in all good faith, they assumed that once liberty was achieved, communal violence would immediately cease, and brotherhood and British guilt prove themselves thenceforth.

"Thus, not in spite of innocence but because of it, blood appeared; and not the jubilant blood of birth alone, but blood more especially pleasing to Kali, who is both mother and demolisher. India tore herself in two in the womb as a condition to being born at all. Even in the womb, the two unborn nations tore at each other, and from the instant they were born they fell upon each other in maniacal fury."

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."

*A Hindu reformist sect founded by Guru Nanak, a contemporary of Luther. *The Nawab Saheb of Junagadh once threw away 100,000 rupees on the wedding of his prize Airedale bitch, which wore ribbons to the ceremony; vows were read for her and her dog. *In 1802, after the Peace of Amiens, a group of British residents of Calcutta presented the temple of Kali with 5,000 rupees as a thank offering for victories over Napoleon. A century later Kali became a symbol of anti-British Indian nationalism, a place to which Mahatma Gandhi succeeded. That this substitution was only temporary was indicated not only by the killing but by Gandhi's recent loss of popularity among Hindus. Because he preached communal peace, Hindu extremists last week had begun to call him "the Mudathma," meaning "stupid one." †Until about a century ago, the sheep was customary. The cow was a vindictive, communal-minded substitution.