6_Glorious_Epochs_of_Indian_History

i62 SIX GLORIOUS EPOCHS OF INDIAN HISTORY
and who began to proselytize the Hindu community,—also
came to know very soon that it was quite possible to
desecrate a whole village of Caste Hindus by merely thrusting
a morsel of grub into their mouths or by just throwing
crumbs of half-eaten loaves of bread or biscuits or slices of
beef or the meat of cows into wells and tanks where people
went to have drinking water; and that no one of them had
any place in the Hindu community any longer**.
400. Later on, when in the 15th and the 16th centuries
the European armies of the Portuguese and others rushed
into India by the sea-routes they, too,- were pleased to find
the above-mentioned superstitions of contamination and the
absurd religiosity of the Hindus, and were fired with an evil
ambition to proselytize the whole of India with no difficulty
at all.
FETTERS FOR THE MISERABLE HINDU
PROSELYIES
401-402. The Hindu armoury has all along been full of
invincible weapons to beat back the political aggressions of
the foreigners, and they had successfully crushed down such
attempts on various occasions. But it had, at least in those
times, no weapon to fight back this religious aggression. So
the Indians had to rely on this sole weapon of social boycott,
while facing this unprecedented Muslim religious aggression of
polluting and converting the Hindus. They went on relentlessly
with their policy of completely ostracizing every proselyte
Hindu according to the custom of those days. The then
Hindu Society had kept no way open to purify a convert by
some form of atonement for the sin of contamination and
conversion. Although, by the time of the Muslim advance
upto the Punjab, the number of Hindu converts to Islam had
already mounted to hundreds of thousands"" and although
many of them earnestly wished to come back to Hinduism,
this social ostracism of the converts was so very persistent
with the ban on eating food from persons of another caste,
the ban on intercaste marital relations and the otherSj that