nding
country.

If a Hindoo fancied himself injured or insulted by a Muhammadan he
was apt to revenge himself upon the Muhammadans generally, and insult
their religion by throwing swine's flesh, or swine's blood, into one
of their tombs or churches; and the latter either flew to arms at
once to revenge their God, or retaliated by throwing the flesh or the
blood of the cow into the first Hindoo temple at hand, which made the
Hindoos fly to arms. The guilty and the wicked commonly escaped,
while numbers of the weak, the innocent and the unoffending were
slaughtered. The magnificent buildings, therefore, instead of being
at the time bonds of union, were commonly sources of the greatest
discord among the whole community, and of the most painful
humiliation to the Hindoo population. During the bigoted reign of
Aurangzeb and his successors a Hindoo's presence was hardly tolerated
within sight of these tombs or churches; and had he been discovered
entering one of them, he would probably have been hunted down like a
mad dog. The recollection of such outrages, and the humiliation to
which they gave rise, associated as they always are in the minds of
the Hindoos with the sight of these buildings, are perhaps the
greatest source of our strength in India; because they at the same
time feel that it is to us alone they owe the protection which they
now enjoy from similar injuries. Many of my countrymen, full of
virtuous indignation at the outrages which often occur during the
processions of the Muharram, particularly when these happen to take
place at the same time with some religious procession of the Hindoos,
are very anxious that our Government should interpose its authority
to put down both. But these processions and occasional outrages are
really sources of great strength to us; they show at once the
necessity for the interposition of an impartial tribunal, and a
disposition on the part of the rulers to interpose impartially. The
Muhammadan festivals are regulated by the lunar, and those of the
Hindoos by the solar year, and they cross each other every thirty or
forty years, and furnish fair occasions for the local authorities to
interpose effectually.[7] People who receive or imagine insults or
injuries commonly postpone their revenge till these religious
festivals come round, when they hope to be able to settle their
accounts with impunity among the excited crowd. The mournful
procession of the Muharram, when the Muhammadans