We Aryans are no sheep.  We have our own country, our religion, our heroes, our statesmen, our soldiers.  We do not owe them to contact with the English.  These things are not new to us.  When the ancestors of those who boast to-day of their enterprise and their civilization were in a disgusting state of barbarism, or rather centuries before then, we were in full possession of all the ennobling qualities of head and heart.  This holy and hoary land of ours will surely regain her position and be once more by her intrinsic lustre the home of wealth, arts, and peace.  A holy inspiration is spreading, that people must sacrifice their lives in the cause of what has once been determined to be their duty.  Heroes are springing up in our midst, though brutal imprisonment reduce them to skeletons.  Let us devote ourselves to the service of the Mother.  A man maddened by devotion will do everything and anything to achieve his ideal.  His strength will be adamantine.  Just as a widow immolates herself on the funeral pyre of her husband, let us die for the Mother.

The Dharma (Calcutta) emphasizes specially the religious side of the movement:—­

We are engaged in preaching religion and we are putting our energy into this agitation, looking on it as the principal part of our religion....  The present agitation, in its initial stages, had a strong leaven of the spirit of Western politics in it, but at present a clear consciousness of Aryan greatness and a strong love and reverential spirit towards the Motherland have transformed it into a shape in which the religious element predominates.  Politics is part of religion, but it has to be cultivated in an Aryan way, in accordance with the precepts of Aryan religion.

Nowhere is the cult of the “terrible goddess,” worshipped under many forms, but chiefly under those of Kali and Durga, more closely associated with Indian unrest than in Bengal.  Hence the frequency of the appeals to her in the Bengal Press.  The Dacca Gazette welcomes the festival of Durga with the following outburst:—­

Indian brothers!  There is no more time for lying asleep.  Behold, the Mother is coming.  Oh Mother, the giver of all good!  Turn your eyes upon your degraded children.  Mother, they are now stricken with disease and sorrow.  Oh Shyama, the reliever of the three kinds of human afflictions, relieve our sorrows.  Come Mother, the destroyer of the demons, and appear at the gates of Bengal.

The Barisal Hitaishi refers also to the Durga festival, in which the weird and often horrible and obscene rites of Skakti worship not infrequently play a conspicuous part:—­