by Sudhir Kakar
Martin’s evening, however pleasant for the participants, is not particulary remarkable. Irrespective of the period of history or region of the world, sensual indulgence has been a hallmark of the wealthy and the powerful, of what soap television today calls “the lifestyles of rich and the famous”. What is more interesting about Hyderabad is the percolation of hedonism into the lower strata of the city’s population and its satisfactory partnership with the ends of commerce as well as the interests of the state. Tavernier, an epicure who loved good food and wine tells us:
There are so many public women in the town, the suburbs and in the fortress, which is like another town, that it is estimated there are generally more than 20,000 entered in the Darogha’s [the commissioner of police] register, without which it is not allowed to any woman to ply this trade. In the cool of the evening you see them before the doors of their houses, which are for the most part small huts, and after the night comes they place at the doors a candle or a lighted lamp for a signal. It is then, also, that the shops where they sell tari [palm toddy] are opened. The king derives from the tax which he places on this tari a very considerable revenue, and it is principally on this account that they allow so many public women, because they are the cause of the consumption of much tari.7
Another Frenchman, Thevenot, notes the liberty enjoyed by the women of Hyderabad. Their marriage contracts had a clause that the wife would retain complete freedom of movement and could even drink tari if that was her desire!
In 1685, Hyderabad was plundered by the Mughals. Two years later, it was annexed to the Mughal empire by Aurangzeb, but the period of its relative obscurity was brief. In 1725, Nizam ul mulk, the Mughal’s viceroy in the Deccan, made himself virtually independent of his nominal overlord. Hyderabad again became the capital of a dynasty, this time that of the Asaf Jahis (“equal in dignity to Asaf, the minister of King Solomon”), the title given to Nizam ul mulk by the hapless emperor of a rapidly unravelling Mughal empire.
The threat to the fortunes of the walled city (the walls themselves were demolished in the 1920s to relieve traffic congestion), however, did not arise from the quick changes what were taking place on India’s political map during the 18th and 19th centuries. The impending danger was more from the process of modernization which picked up pace in the wake of the British conquest of India. Although the Nizam’s suzerainty over his dominions was spared—he became a subordinate ally of the British in 1978—the political, economic, and administrative importance of the old city was now fatefully set on a course of slow erosion. With the coming of the railway in 1974 and the establishment of an incipient industrial base through the setting up of railway repair workshops and a textile mill, it was clear, at least in hindsight, that the northern part of the city outside the fortified walls held the key to Hyderabad’s future.
The shift northward, across the Musi river, was accelerated by the floods of 1908 and the plague of 1911 which led the Nizam to move his residence and administrative offices out of the walled city to the north of the river. The ruler’s example was soon followed by most of his nobility. The final blow to old Hyderabad was, of course, the integration of the state with the Republic of India after the country’s independence from British rule. This meant not only the dismantling of the Nizam’s administrative machinery but also the disappearance of the feudal economic base on which most of the old city’s population had subsisted. In addition, many of the Muslim elite fled out of Hyderabad, mostly to Pakistan. The old city was well on its way to becoming a ghetto. As Ratna Naidu in her sociological study of Hyderabad has observed, “Deprived of economic opportunities with the dismantling of the feudal structure, and deprived of its elite, who are usually the powerful spokesmen for the enhancement of civic amenities, the walled city as an area languishes in multiple deprivation.”8 The deprivation is not only material but also psychological and cultural.
Culturally, the history of Hyderabad is witness to a process of ever increasing heterogenization. Although the Hindus were always a part of what was essentially a Muslim city, their native Telugu culture was clearly a subordinate, ‘low’ culture in the preeminently Islamic scheme of things. In the 18th and 19th centuries, many cultural groups migrated to Hyderabad from other parts of the country and even, as in the case of Arabs, from as far away as the Middle East. The Arabs, like the Marathas, came to Hyderabad to soldier in the Nizam’s army. The trading communities of the Muslim Bohras from Gujarat and the the Hindu Marwaris from Rajasthan became prominent in the city’s commercial life. Then there were the Kayasths and the Khatris from north India, traditionally the backbone of many an Indian state’s administration, who played a similar role in the Nizam’s affairs of state. These groups tended to cluster together in separate enclaves where they could follow their own ways of religious and community life. This is not to say that individuals did not leaven their traditional lifestyles with the dominant Perso-Islamic culture. Many (especially the Kayasths, who are well known for their identification with the masters they have so ably served, whether the ruler be British or Muslim) would cultivate an appreciation of Urdu poetry or adopt the sartorial style of sherwani, the long buttoned-up coat with a high round collar and gumi topi, a cousin of the Turkish fez. They would prefer Hyderabad’s distinctive cuisine and its gracious modes of public address and speech. Yet, on the whole, the lifestyles of the various groups in the rest of the population—their customs, mores, architectural styles, food habits—remained distinctive. In the 17th century, for instance, in the inns set up by the Qutub Shahis for poor travellers, Muslims received a dole of bread, rice, or vegetables already cooked whereas ‘the idolaters, who eat nothing which has been prepared by others, are given flour to make bread and a little butter and as soon as their bread is baked they cover it on both sides with melted butter.’9 As in the rest of the country, in the medieval period, Hindus and Muslims shared activities and experiences in the public realm ‘even though in private they were completely segregated, almost opposed to each other.’10 In short, it was a multicultural coexistence rather than any merger into a single, composite culture; Hindus and Muslims lived together separately. They were more than strangers, not often enemies, but less than friends.
After Hyderabad’s integration with independent India, the heterogenization percolated even into the mohallas as Hindus began to replace the Muslims who had left for Pakistan. Thus from 1951 to 1961, the Muslim population of the old city declined from 69 per cent to 50 per cent while the Hindu population increased from 21 per cent to 40 per cent, a trend which began to be reversed only after the violence between the two communities became endemic. The recurrent bloodletting in the past 15 years has had the demographic consequence that Muslims from the outlying areas began to flee to the old city as if to a fortress while the Hindu exodus was in the reverse direction. Currently, the Muslim population of the old city is estimated at around 70 per cent.
Contemporary Hyderabad is certainly not a city for those with a partiality for nostalgia. The Musi river is now a stinking sewer without the sewer’s saving grace of flowing water which at least keeps the garbage moving. It is but a marshy tract between the old and the new cities, with slime-covered puddles and a sewage-borne creeping, crawling, and buzzing life which, to me, makes Hyderabad the mosquito capital of India. Like the river, there is no longer an ‘old city’ of medieval Islam. Leprous beggars asking for alms in the name of Allah are still to be found but the nobles, taking the evening air dressed in flowing muslin robes, are long gone. There are no carriages clattering on the unpaved streets or groups of veiled women, hinting at supressed laughter and whispered assignations, gliding through the brightly lit bazaars redolent with strong flowery perfumes and the smell of fresh horse droppings, the shops stocked with choice wares from Persia, Arabia, and the rest of Hindustan.
Today, the old city is barely one step ahead of being a vast ghetto of over a million people, living in settlements, bastis and mohallas, that are homogeneous in their religious and caste compo
sitions. Small houses stacked side by side line winding alleys which are negotiable only by foot or bicycle. Goats, dogs, and chickens, coexisting in the harmony of the chronically hungry, rummage through the refuse littering the open spaces. Unemployed young men stride purposefully through the lanes, even if the purpose is only to buy a cigarette from a corner shop or to impress any hidden female watcher with their purposeful mien. Children play the staple games of the poor—hopscotch for the girls while the boys run after an old bicycle tyre, kept rolling in a wobbly motion as much by their excitement as by the strokes of the stick propelling it forward.
The economic picture of the walled city, described by Naidu, is dismal.11 The working population is around 30 per cent of the total number of inhabitants. The largest number, about a third, are skilled and semiskilled artisans engaged in the traditional occupation of weaving, pottery, sandal making, and food preparation. About a quarter of the working population earns its livelihood from casual daily wage work, as pushcart vendors of vegetable and fruit, hawkers of trinkets, pullers of rickshaws, scavengers, and other low-prestige occupations such as watchmen and messenger boys in government offices. The fabled earnings of the Muslims who went to work in the Arab countries of the Persian Gulf have brought only minor changes into the lives and the living standards of their families. They have provided only a temporary respite from pervasive economic hardship. The Gulf connection of the Muslims has had more social and cultural rather then economic consequences, for instance, it has resulted in the greater pan-Islamic pride which is visible in the sleek new mosques that have recently been built in the Muslim-dominated areas of the walled city.
The city is poor, but its poverty is more a general unkemptness and disorder than drabness. Economic deprivation has not smothered Hyderabad’s vitality or dulled its desire for vivid definition. Even in destitute mohallas there are startling splashes of colour. Here, only the front door has been painted; there, the wooden shutters of a small window. Green, the colour of the faithful, is the most preferred. It ranges in hue from a bilious green to the freshly planted paddy green of those gleaming new mosques of the last two decades. Occasionally, there is a swathe of sunflower yellow across a house front, but another universal favourite of both the Hindus and the Muslims appears to be a cheap metallic blue, the colour of the sky on glossy religious posters. Hyderabad’s bazaars and the houses of its well-to-do citizens favour ornamental wrought iron grills for the shutters of their shops and gates. The work is intricate and distinctive, giving the impression of swirling curlicues and scimitars, of Persian calligraphy cast in iron.
Hindus and Muslims: Versions of the Past
My aim here is not to write a history of Hindu-Muslim relations in Hyderabad during the preceding 300 years. It is both more modest and in some ways more ambitious. It is modest in that I would like to get for myself and convey to the readers a general impression of the way Hindus and Muslims or, in other, more psychological words, whenever overarching religious identities have become salient and dwarfed other group identities through which individuals also experience themselves. It is difficult because historians are of little help in an enterprise which is so contentious and where the interpretation of historical dates is so inseparable from the historian’s own political aims, ideological commitments, and the strong emotions these commitments often generate. Yet some sense of this past is utterly necessary for my enterprise, considering the myriad reflections in which I was to encounter it in the present. In an ancient country like India, where collective memories reach back thousands of years, cultural psychology can never be as ahistorical as it may be in a young country like the United States. Cultural psychology in India must necessarily include the study of the psychic representations of collective pasts, the way collective memories are transmitted through generations, and the ways the past is used as a receptacle for projections from the present.
The chief protagonists of the debate on the past of Hindu-Muslim relations which excites so much contemporary passion are the secularist (both Hindu and Muslim) on the one side and the Hindu nationalist on the other, with the Muslim fundamentalist and the Hindu revivalist on the sidelines, trying to inject their particular brand of venom into the proceedings. The debate has momentous consequences, its winner aiming at nothing less than the capture of India’s political soul and the chance to shape its destiny in the coming decades.
The secularist faction—framer of India’s constitution and politically ascendant since the time of Nehru—comprises most of the Western-educated liberal and leftist intelligentsia and is greatly influential in academia.12 Hindu and Muslim, the secularist avers, are relatively recent categories in Indian history. Before the late 19th century, overarching religious entities and identities such as Hindu and Muslim did not exist. Among the Hindus, there were various sects frequently at odds with each other; nor did Indian Muslims constitute a monolithic Islamic collectivity. The secularist goes on to draw a picture of widespread Hindu-Muslim symbiosis of the precolonial and early colonial periods and the development of a syncretic popular religion, especially at the village level, which borrows elements both from Islamic practice and Hindu ritual while it reveres Muslim saints as much as Hindu holy men.
The secularist view makes a clear-cut distinction between the terms ‘religious’ and ‘communal’, the latter is not used in its Anglo-American lexical sense, meaning someone who is altruistic and civic-minded, but in its specifically Indian meaning of one whose exclusive attachment to his or her community is combined with an active hostility against other communities which share its geographical and political space. Whereas religion is seen solely as a matter of personal faith and reverence for a particular set of icons, rituals, and dogmas, communalism is a more collective affair which involves a community’s politics and economics as much as its faith. Communalism not only produces an identification with a religious community but also with its political, economic, social and cultural interests and aspirations. This identification is accompanied by the strong belief that these interests not only diverge from but are in actual conflict with the interests of other communities.
In this view, the precolonial and early colonial period conflicts between Hindus and Muslims were rare. Whenever they occurred, they were essentially religious in nature, that is, the conflicts were over religious symbols such as the route or form or mosques, and so on. Twentieth-century conflicts, on the other hand, have been initiated by communal ideologies and are basically over clashing economic interests. In the secularist view, even the religious persecution of Hindus by such 18th-century monarchs as the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb or, later, by Tipu Sultan in south India, were dictated by reasons of state rather than the communal ideology of any particular ruler. Aurangzeb’s discrimination against Hindus and the destruction of their temples is interpreted as an attempt to reformulate the ideological basis of the late Mughal state, while Tipu’s attacks on Hindu temples and the Hindu culture of the Kerala Nayars was more a deliberate act of policy rather than of religious fanaticism.13
The secularist holds that communalism, and the consequent large-scale violence between Hindus and Muslims, began to spread in the late 19th century chiefly because of colonialism.14 To counter a growing Indian nationalism, he argues, the British followed a ‘divide and rule’ policy by deliberately strengthening Muslim communalism. The rapid diffusion of 19th-century Hindu revivalism and of pan-Islamism in the following century, again the products of Asia’s colonial encounter with the imperial West, was another reason for the rise of communalism. Yet another factor was the decline of the syncretic warrior of the 18th century, who had been forged in the mixed bands of soldiers, Hindu and Muslim, who served various kings, again Hindu or Muslim, or foraged on their own in the anarchic political conditions which prevailed in India as the Mughal empire unravelled.
The basic fabric of India, though, remains syncretic, a commingling of Islamic influences with Hindu traditions. Hindus and Muslims are not divided along any cultural or social-ps
ychological lines except in the narrow area of personal faith.
The Hindu nationalist argues that a fundamental divide between Hindus and Muslims is a basic fact of Indian history which is ignored by the secularist.15 The Hindu nationalist would support the contention of the French anthropologist Marc Gaborieau, that Hindus and Muslims found their identity in the deepest sentiments of opposition between the two, sentiments that are traceable throughout the nine centuries of Indo-Muslim history, from the writings of the Arab traveller Al-Beruni in the 11th century to Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan in the 20th.16 The Hindu nationalist is thus in basic agreement with Pakistani historians who too support the ‘two nations’ theory and label Akbar, the syncretic Mughal monarch who is a hero to the secularist, as an apostate to Islam.
In the Hindu nationalist view, the conflict between Hindus and Muslims is squarely religious, indeed theological. Its roots lie in Islam’s exclusive claim to truth and its refusal to grant equal status to Hindu beliefs and doctrines. Islam’s division of people into believers and infidels and the world into arenas of peace—dar-ul-Islam—and of conflict—dar-ul-harb—which led to terrible cruelties against the Hindu infidel’s person and religious shrines over hundreds of years, cannot be erased from the Hindu collective memory. Moreover, the Hindu nationalist maintains, the Muslim continues to persist in intolerance, in the belief that all that is outside the Qur’an is an error if not an abomination. The Hindu nationalist avers that secularists seem to direct their arguments and appeals only toward the Hindus since they are firmly rejected by the Muslims who seek identity in their own religious tradition and personal laws even when those go against the very fundamentals of a secular state. The roots of Hindu-Muslim conflict lie in Muslim religious intolerance, Muslim failure to outgrow a medieval bigotry, and the inability to learn, in the absence of guidelines in the Qur’an, how to live in a state which is not Muslim-controlled.
