THE CULT OF THE GODDESS KALI

Taranaki Daily News, 23 March 1935, Page 16 (Supplement)

THE CULT OF THE GODDESS KALI

t Will “Ranji’s” Peace Or Terrorism Mentioned By Gandhi Prevail In India ?

Ilf AIN BOOKHI HUN!—I want blood, blook, blood! Thus cries the goddess Kali to her votaries. The streets of Cawnpore ran with blood and Kali slaked her thirst. Three magistrates have been offered up in sacrifice., Kali is the goddess of death and destruction. Her eyes are red. Her figure is girded with serpents; from her ears are suspended dead bodies in the place of ear-rings; and round hei’ neck grins a circlet of skulls, writes Lieut.-Colonel Graham Seton Hutchison, D. 5.0., in the “Daily Mail.” This is not the “Fe-fi-fo-fum . . .” of the fairy story, but stark, grim reality. The cult of Kali stands for something: hideous beyond imagination in Indian life to-day. When. Gandhi returned to India from the Round Table Conference, the Bengal Provincial Congress issued the following statement:— "This is an auspicious time for the worship of the Mother Kali and to submerge to the bottomless grave by bombs and revolvers the European Association.” One may ask whether it is liberty to express themselves, whether it is their emancipation from the ghoulish fears to which they are born, which Ghandi seeks for the peasants of India, or whether he wishes to destroy “the protectors of the poor,” a name of affection by which the isolated servants of Government are known, and to enthrone the goddess Kali in the place of the KingEmperor. In Kali’s name a sepoy ran amuck, and having slaughtered the wife of a British■ officer, pursued her children among the lupins and rose bushes of the garden armed with a sword on which was the wet blood of their mother. In Kali’s name an Englishman, who stood for simple justice amid poisonings and plottings in an atmosphere of usury run riot, was shot in the back by a student while watching a football match. Somewhere in the background of man’s mipd lurks the animal bloodlust. How hideous the danger when this can be incorporated into a religion for the ignorant. ’ And Kali has been brought right up to date. A “But-parast” worships idols. But a “Bomb-parast” is he who has placed a bomb in Kali’s shrine. : Nitro-glycerine has become the demonolatry of the “Bomb-parast,” and beneath the blood-red eyes of Kali he gloats over the intended victims.

A thousand news-sheets, edited by half-baked students with notions borrowed from Moscow, appear

throughout India, inflaming mere children to the “Bomb-parast.” Years ago, even as early as 1830, the cult of the Thugee was disclosed. From the Himalayas to Cape Cormorin, the Thugs swarmed throughout India, committing horrible murder by strangulation, for robbery, carried out by strict ritual, and consecrated to Nishan, the tool of burial.

Thugs are no more. But in secret there will be found gangs of youths, schooled by cunning masters, who use childish innocence and ignorance in the Satanic service.

The boys chant ghoulishly, touching their finger-tips upon homemade bombs prepared for the cream of British culture.

No one will deny that the 800-odd British Civil Servants who live their isolated life among 353,000,000 of people, supported by a handful of police and by far the smallest army

per head of population which the world has ever known, are among the pick of the intellect and culture of our land.

A bomb was flung at Lord Hardinge when Viceroy and killed his aide-de-camp, and a surgeon picked gramophone needles from the Viceroy’s back. She is up to date, this Kali!

How strange a man is this Ghandi: a wizened body and colossal brain. He raised a corps of stretcherbearers in South Africa, and was perhaps the best recruiting sergeant in India during the war. He hates and loves passionately.

He is as inflexible as steel and as tortuous as a'serpent. No one knows quite what Gandhi wants. He is a , master showman, with himself in the shop window and nothing behind. But the results of his teaching have been found in cowardly assassination and in the reincarnation of the cult of Kali. In disgust one may turn to that other India which “Ranji” person!- / fled. Speaking as Chancellor of the Chamber of Indian Princes in the presence of the Viceroy, in the last public utterance of his life, the Maharaja Jamsahib of Nawanagar, the celebrated “Ranji” of the cricket field, said: ; "If I find myself, as I and some of my friends do, unable to accept the present Federal Scheme, it is not by any hostility to British India that we are animated: but by the simple instinct of self-preservation. * I wish British India all good luck in its endeavours: but its problems are not our problems: and no good will come of trying to confuse the two. ; “The real truth is—and no one who has made a careful study of the proceedings of the three Round Table Conferences can honestly deny this fact—that the kind of federation of which in 1930 our representative Princes signified their provisional aporobation was very different from the kind of federation which now holds the field." Ranji knew only too well that the kind of federation envisaged is one between Bolsheviks and assassins, one which will provide freedom for the “Bomb-parast” and place Kali on a King-Emperor’s throne. The accursed cult of Kali,, utilised by ruthless conspirators, financed and ordered by Moscow, must be rooted out. That is a , task worthy of the real, young India, and to which it will respond under sympathetic, courageous leadership. . | The technique of the “Bombparast” and the gangster are much the same, with this difference —the Indian lad who throws a bomb imagines that he sublimates himself to divinity, while the Western gangster knows he will be' treated as the miscreant he is. .? ■