“Villagers still worship at shrines dedicated to gods and goddesses with roots in the Stone Age.12 Compared to this unequaled staying power, the British Raj seemed very transitory – like every other ruler or conqueror in Indian history. Gandhi made his own view plain in 1909, in his Hind Swaraj. “History is really a record of every interruption of the even working of love or of the soul,” he wrote, “a record of the interruption of the course of nature.”
