Freedom at Midnight by Larry Collins, Dominique Lapierre Read Free Book Online

Vaisyas, traders and businessmen, from his thigh; Sudras, artisans and craftsmen, from his feet. Below them were the out-castes, the Untouchables, who had not sprung from divine soil.
    The origins of the caste system, however, were notably less divine than those suggested by the Vedas. It had been a diabolic scheme employed by Hinduism's Aryan founders, to perpetuate the enslavement of India's dark, Drav-idian populations. The word for caste, varda, meant "color," and centuries later, the dark skins of India's Untouchables gave graphic proof of the system's real origins.
    The five original divisions had multiplied like cancer cells into almost 5,000 subcastes, 1,886 for the Brahmans alone. Every occupation had its caste, splitting society up into a myriad closed guilds into which a man was condemned by his birth to work, live, marry and die. So precise were their definitions that an iron smelter was in a different caste than an ironsmith.
    Linked to the caste system was the second concept basic to Hinduism, reincarnation. A Hindu believed that his body was only a temporary garment for his soul. His body's life was only one of his soul's many incarnations in its journey through eternity, a chain beginning and ending in some nebulous merger with the cosmos. The karma, the accumulated good and evil of each mortal lifetime, was a soul's continuing burden. It determined whether in its next
    incarnation that soul would migrate up or down in the hierarchy of caste. Caste had been a superb device to perpetuate India's social inequities by giving them divine sanction. As the church had counseled the peasants of the Middle Ages to forget the misery of their lives in the contemplation of the hereafter, so Hinduism had for centuries counseled the miserable of India to accept their lot in humble resignation as the best assurance of a better destiny in their next incarnation.
    To the Moslems, for whom Islam was a kind of brotherhood of the faithful, that whole system was an anathema. A welcoming faith, Islam's fraternal embrace drew millions of converts to the mosques of India's Mogul rulers. Inevitably, the vast majority of them were Untouchables seeking in the brotherhood of Islam an acceptance that their own faith could offer them only in some distant incarnation.
    With the collapse of the Mogul Empire at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a martial Hindu renaissance spread across India, bringing with it a wave of Hindu-Moslem bloodshed. Britain's conquering presence had forced its Pax Britannica over the waning subcontinent, but the distrust and suspicion in which the two communities dwelt remained. The Hindus did not forget that the mass of Moslems were the descendants of Untouchables who had fled Hinduism to escape their misery. Caste Hindus would not touch food in the presence of a Moslem. A Moslem entering a Hindu kitchen would pollute it. The touch of a Moslem's hand could send a Brahman, shrieking, off to purify himself with hours of ritual ablutions.
    Hindus and Moslems shared the villages awaiting Gandhi's visit in Noakhali just as they shared the thousands of villages all through the northern tier of India in Bihar, the United Provinces, the Punjab; but they dwelt in separate neighborhoods. The frontier was a road or path frequently called the Middle Way. No Moslem would live on one side of it, no Hindu on the other.
    The two communities mixed socially, attending each other's feasts, sharing the poor implements with which they worked. Their intermingling tended to end there. Intermarriage was almost unknown. The communities drew their water from separate wells, and a caste Hindu would choke before sipping water from the Moslem well perhaps yards from his own. In the Punjab, what few scraps of
    knowledge Hindu children acquired came from the village pandit, who taught them to write a few words in Punjabi in mud with wheat stalks. The same village's Moslem children would get their bare education from a sheikh in the mosque