These buildings were, therefore, looked upon by the Hindoos, who
composed the great mass of the people, as a kind of religions
volcanoes, always ready to explode and pour out their lava of
intolerance and outrage upon the innocent people of the surrounding
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.
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