6_Glorious_Epochs_of_Indian_History

232 SIX GLORIOUS EPOCHS OF INDIAN HISTORY
Lad rung out and reverberated through every town and
every village assuring the people in some such manner !
"Come, 0 you, Hindu mothers and sisters, come ! You, who
have been wickedly polluted and forced to do all sorts of
menial and dirty wretched work in the Muslim household,
come out, come under our protection ! We, your foster-
brothers, have come to your doors in order to rescue you and
take you to your respective families. Whichever Muslim
comes to obstruct you, dies instantly ! May that Muslim be
then a man or a woman, of high rank or low ! Similarly, O
you helplessly converted Hindu brethren come, join us when
and where you can ; join our conquering brigades ! The
moment you gather under this Saffron-coloured Hindu banner,
you will have every sort of protection."
580-B. If only such a reassuring blast was heard and
echoed through towns and villages, thousands upon thousands
of those ill-fated Hindu converts, men and women, mothers
and sisters, would all have rushed most willingly and of
their own accord to join those Maratha warriors. And they
all could have been most easily purified and reconverted to
Hinduism and the |Muslim religious victory under Tipu's
leadership would have been totally nullified.
BUT ALAS ! NOBODY EVER THOUGHT OF THIS !
581. Neither those Maratha warriors, nor their
commanders, nor the Sardars and Chieftains, nor the
Shankaracharyas, nay not even the Peshwa at Poona, nor
the Chhatrapatis of Satara and Kolhapur—alas ! not a single
Hindu soul ever dreamt of this simple way of reconversion
of those ill-starred Hindus ! Nobody of them ever felt
ashamed of marching straight ahead without casting so much
as a sympathetic glance at the thousands of the brutally
ravaged Hindu mothers and sisters ! Their martial drums
and pipes proclaimed to the world their military and political
victory I The Maratha companies and battalions proudly
paraded through the villages, towns and cities supremely
unconcerned about the two or three hundred thousand of