The land was sacred, but it wasn’t political history that made it so. Religious myths touched every part of the land... Story within story, fable within fable: that was what people saw and felt in their bones. Those were the myths, about gods and the heroes of the epics, that gave antiquity and wonder to the earth people lived on.
Naipaul, V.S. - India, A Million Mutinies Now (Vintage, 2011), chapter 3