communal toleration, 1882

"There was nearly being a tremendous fight between the Faithful and the Heathen this Huli.
It seems that a Hindu, who should have been an Irishman, conceived a plan for insulting the Mahommedans, and paraded the streets dressed in green (the religious colour of the Mahommedans), with a Koran slung round his neck, and a woman capering by his side, while he kept on shouting that he was the Prophet and this was his wife. The Mahommedans were infuriated, and with good reason; they seized the wretch, and, behaving far better than Irishmen in such circumstances would, dragged him before the magistrate. How the matter ended I do not know, but I should be glad to hear they had ducked the prophet in the river. It was an insult that was likely enough to have cost many lives."

 ~ 'The diary of a civilian's wife in India', 1877-1882, Volume 2, (1884) by Augusta E. King. Entry for Saharanpur, U.P., dated March 6, 1882.

An act like this would in today's information and media age, the modern age, almost certainly cost lot of lives. Equally true is that nobody today would probably come up with an act like this. That is to say the provocation need not be so elaborate. Just pick a brick, prick.


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Reminds me of the time in college when a friend took me to meet a famous 'Chacca' of his. Not actually related to my friend, this man was famous in Mominpura, the Chandni Chowk of Nagpur, for throwing a bottle of acid on a theater screen that had Mani Ratnam's Bombay playing. The guys wasn't home.


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Also reminds me of a cousin of my mother who in his youth fiddled with some forms of ideas of communism. In his youth, in Srinagar, he was once picked up by police on charges of  Koran Desecration. He had his finger nails pulled out. The police wanted to know the exact places where he had torn and scattered the pages. He had nothing to say. The story is now remembered at family get-togethers and told over guffaws. 


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