Gandhi and AnarchySankaran Nair, C. (Chettur), Sir
History
Gandhi and Anarchy
Sankaran Nair, C. (Chettur), Sir
Gandhi, Mahatma, 1869-1948 -- Political and social views; India -- Politics and government -- 1919-1947
2. Your Ladyship is doubtless aware that though our unhappy district has
witnessed many Moplah outbreaks in the course of the last one hundred
years, the present rebellion is unexampled in its magnitude as well as
unprecedented in its ferocity. But it is possible that your Ladyship is
not fully appraised of all the horrors and atrocities perpetrated by the
fiendish rebels; of the many wells and tanks filled up with the
mutilated, but often only half dead bodies of our nearest and dearest
ones who refused to abandon the faith of our fathers; of pregnant women
cut to pieces and left on the roadsides and in the jungles, with the
unborn babe protruding from the mangled corpse; of our innocent and
helpless children torn from our arms and done to death before our eyes
and of our husbands and fathers tortured, flayed and burnt alive; of our
hapless sisters forcibly carried away from the midst of kith and kin and
subjected to every shame and outrage which the vile and brutal
imagination of these inhuman hell-hounds could conceive of; of thousands
of our homesteads reduced to cinder-mounds out of sheer savagery and a
wanton spirit of destruction; of our places of worship desecrated and
destroyed and of the images of the deity shamefully insulted by putting
the entrails of slaughtered cows where flower garlands used to lie, or
else smashed to pieces; of the wholesale looting of hard earned wealth
of generations reducing many who were formerly rich and prosperous to
publicly beg for a piece or two in the streets of Calicut, to buy salt
or chilly or betel-leaf--rice being mercifully provided by the various
relief agencies. These are not fables.
The wells full of rotting skeletons, the ruins which once were our dear
homes, the heaps of stones which once were our places of worship--these
are still here to attest to the truth. The cries of our murdered
children in their death agonies are still ringing in our ears and will
continue to haunt our memory till death brings us peace. We remember how
driven out of our native hamlets we wandered starving and naked in the
jungles and forests; we remember how we choked and stifled our babies'
cries lest the sound should betray our hiding places to our relentless
pursuers. We still vividly realise the moral and spiritual agony that
thousand of us passed through when we were forcibly converted into the
faith professed by these blood thirsty miscreants; we still have before
us the sight of the unendurable and life long misery of
those--fortunately few--of our most unhappy sisters who born and brought
up in respectable families have been forcibly converted and then married
to convict coolies. For five long months not a day has passed without
its dread tale of horror to unfold.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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