Indian Identity

by Sudhir Kakar

  The gulf between the two opposing views of the Hindu-Muslim encounter is not a matter solely of interest to scholars and political propagandists but is reflected in and vitally influences many facets of contemporary consciousness. Much of the Indian heritage—monuments, art, music, legends, history—which people of an earlier generation were accustomed to regard as noncontroversial has suddenly become hotly contested. As an example, let me take the legend of the founding of Hyderabad. For those subscribing to the syncretic school, this legend is the narrative embodiment of an essential Hindu-Muslim amity in the past. The story itself is a mythos, seeking to convince through the power of aesthetics and symbolism, and is a counterpoint to the logos of formal thought on Hindu-Muslim relations which is routinely employed by the social scientist. The tale goes thus:

  Sultan Mohammed Quli Qutub Shah (1580-1612) was the grandson of Sultan Quli Qutub Shah, founder of the Qutub Shahi dynasty. In 1579, when still a prince and just 14 years old, he fell in love with Bhagmati, a commoner [and a Hindu], an extraordinarily talented and beautiful dancer. She lived across the river Musi in the village of Chichlam, some distance away from the royal fortress at Golconda. Every evening when dusk fell, the prince stole away from the palace grounds to meet his beloved across the river. One day a terrible storm broke and the river was in spate. Fearing that his lover might drown, the prince braved the turbulent rising waters and saved Bhagmati. Compelled to accept his son’s choice, the king, Sultan Ibrahim, had a large stone bridge built across the Musi to enable Mohammed Quli to court the dancer. Known today as the Purana Pul [‘old bridge’], it stands mute witness to this story. On his accession to the throne, Mohammed Quli married Bhagmati and in her honour built a splendid new city on the site of the village Chichalam. He called the city ‘Bhagnagar’ or the ‘City of Good Fortune’. Bhagmati later took the name of Hyder Mahal and Mohammed Quli renamed the city as Hyderabad.30

  It is not surprising that, whereas history discerns the origins of Hyderabad in the mundane facts of congestion and lack of water in the old fortress capital of Golconda, legend attributes the founding of the city to the sublimity of a prince’s love for a commoner. What is more relevant to our purpose, however, is the way Hindu nationalists interpret the legend today. They see in the tale yet another illustration of the fundamental Hindu-Muslim divide. ‘All the story tells us,’ says a militant Hindu, active in the campaign to have Hyderabad revert back to its original name of Bhagnagar, ‘is that the Mussulman has always fucked our women whenever he has wanted to, as he has fucked us over the centuries. If he deigned to take one of our women into his harem, he could not tolerate her remaining a Hindu but forced her to convert to Islam. Where are the stories of Hindu princes marrying Muslim wives?’ This particular interpretation of the legend is not about how a youth’s erotic obsession for a girl flowered into the deep love of a mature man, or about an era of close Hindu-Muslim relations which permitted, even when they did not encourage, love across religious persuasions. For the Hindu nationalist, the legend is about Hindu defeat and a collective shame wherein the community’s most beautiful and accomplished women had to be ceded to the Muslim conqueror.

  Finally, what is the truth? As far as I can see the truth is that there are two overarching histories of Hindu-Muslim relations—with many local variations—which have been used by varying political interests and ideologies and have been jostling for position for many centuries. In times of heightened conflict between the two communities, the Hindu nationalist history that supports the version of conflict between the two assumes preeminence and organizes cultural memory in the particular direction. In times of relative peace, the focus shifts back to the history emphasizing commonalities and shared pieces of the past. Many of the cultural memories which were appropriate during the conflict will retreat, fade, or take on new meaning, while others that incorporate the peaceful coexistence of Hindus and Muslims will resurface. And so it goes, on and on.

  2

  The Riot

  My first personal experience of Hindu-Muslim violence was at the time of the partition of the country in 1947, when ferocious riots between the two communities engulfed many parts of the subcontinent, especially in the north. I was nine years old at the time and we lived in Rohtak, a small town some 50 miles west of Delhi, where my father was an additional district magistrate, ‘the ADM Sahib’. As the killings and looting raged uncontrolled in the villages and towns of Punjab, more and more members of his extended family poured into Rohtak as refugees from the cities of Lahore, Lyallpur, and Sialkot, where they had lived for many generations and which now lay in the freshly created state of Pakistan. The rooms and verandas of our house became sprawling dormitories, with mats and durries spread close to each other on the floor as uncles, aunts, and cousins of varying degrees of kinship lived and slept in what for a child was an excitingly intimate confusion. The kitchen, over which my mother had willingly abdicated all control, hummed the whole day with the purposeful activity of women, and there was not a time of day when a few bodies were not seen huddled in nooks and corners in various stages of sleep.

  With the loss of their homes and places of work, with the snapping of longstanding friendships and other social ties, there was little for the refugees to do in our house except seek comfort from the sharing of each other’s riot experiences. This they did in groups which continuously changed in their membership as they shifted from one room of the house to another. As a small boy, yet privileged as the son of a father who gave them food and shelter, I could sit in on any group of adults, though at its edge, without being shooed away and told to go and play with other children. I became aware of their bitterness about the leaders of a newly independent India, Nehru and especially Gandhi by whom they felt most betrayed. Gandhi was the pet object of my grandmother’s aversion, and many of my uncles and aunts shamelessly encouraged her as she held forth in her toothless, gummy voice, surprisingly similar to the Mahatma’s own, on Gandhi’s many affronts to Hindu sentiment and advanced salacious speculations on the reasons for his love of the ‘Mussulman’.

  It was also the first time I became aware of the Hindu hate of the Mussulman—the destroyer of temples, devourer of cow flesh, defiler of Hindu womanhood, rapers and killers all! Mussulmans were little better than animals, dirty and without self-control, who indulged all the demands of the senses, especially the violence of the body and pleasures of the flesh. Up to this time I had known Muslims as occasional colleagues of my father, some boys in school and, especially, as indulgent servants. In Sargodha, where my father was posted before he was transferred to Rohtak, I was particularly fond of Imtiaz, his Muslim orderly, who took me on forbidden bicycle rides to the bazaar. Once, seeing him get his forearm covered with an elaborate tattoo, I too had insisted on one—to the subsequent shocked disapproval of my parents. Then there was Fatima, a teenaged girl who looked after me from the ages of four to seven, and who was almost on par with my mother as the object of my first desires and longings. Fatima was a patient and very often a willing participant in the games I invented for both of us. She was a valiant liar on my behalf whenever one of my undertakings ended disastrously. Half girl, half woman, Fatima delightfully forgot to be consistently one or the other when she was with me. Hitching up her salwar, she would scamper up a guava tree to pluck the best fruit from the top branches. Her maternal persona taking over once she was back on ground, she would clean the guavas for me and hold the salt in the open palm of her hand while I ate. Fatima was an indispensable assistant on our fishing expeditions to the small pond that lay in the grounds of the house. She helped me make the fishing rod from a twig, a piece of string and a bent pin. She kneaded the dough we brought and made it into small pellets which were used as bait. In spite of my never catching any fish she did not destroy my illusion that there were indeed some lurking under the scummy green film that covered the pond.

  It is not as if I were unaware that the Muslim were somehow different, although I do not recollect ever hearing the s
tatement, ‘He [or she] is a Mussulman,’ as a marker of a person’s identity in our home. I knew Imtiaz and Fatima could not enter the kitchen where Chet Ram, the Brahmin cook, held sway, because they were Muslims. The Muslim parts of Sargodha were subtly different from the Hindu mohallas concentrated around the bazaar. In the early evening, the coooking smells wafting out into the alleys were more pungent—the odour of mutton fried with onion, garlic, and ginger paste, with coriander and cumin, seemed embedded in the very walls of the houses. Old men with henna-dyed beards sat out on stringed cots, smoking their hookahs and murmuring their incessant gossip. The women, covered from head to toe in flowing white and black veils, glided silently through the alleys, followed by small children scurrying to keep up. There were also fewer stray dogs in the alleys, the ritually unclean animal being far less tolerated by the Muslim than by the indifferent Hindu.

  As a little child, I had registered the differences but never felt the need to either evaluate or explain them to myself. It was only now, in Rohtak, that the family’s ‘war stories’ from the riot-torn towns of Pakistan began to retrospectively shape my early observations in the direction of prejudice. Two of these I recount below. For a time these stories threatened to become the core of my memory of the ‘Muslim’ although, in the end, I like to believe, they did not overlay the child’s love for Imtiaz and Fatima, did not replace it with fear, anger, and aversion. When I was carrying out this study in a Muslim locality in Hyderabad and engaging groups of Muslims in conversation, I became aware that within myself ‘the Muslim’ was still somewhat of a stranger. The strangeness was not due to my ignorance of him but due to my being singularly affected by someone I did not know. The ambivalence of fear and fascination from my past with which I had regarded Muslims had not vanished I was no indifferent to the subjects of my study. I became aware that my first impulse was to defend myself against the threat the Muslims posed to my boundaries by strengthening and fortifying them as a Hindu. Then, in a kind of reaction formation, my tendency was to move in the opposite direction by consistently placing a more positive, humane’ gloss on Muslim statements and actions than on Hindu ones. Ambivalence, however, also has a positive aspect. It prevents the crystallization of ideological convictions and an approach to the study with preconceived notions firmly in place. Convictions, as Nietzsche remarked, are more damaging to truth than lies.

  The Story of a Cousin Told by His Elder Brother

  Sohan Lal killed himself on the way to Rohtak. He threw himself in front of a train. I could not stop him. We had made all the arrangements for the escape from Lyallpur. A Muslim truck driver was ready to drive the 300 miles to the border for 600 rupees. Sohan Lal had been married for only five months. He had a very pretty wife.

  On the day of our departure we went out to make the final arrangements with the truck driver. The house was attacked in our absence. When we came back we hid on the roof of a Hindu neighbour’s vacant house. We watched five husky Muslims in our courtyard. They had long butcher’s knives stuck in their lungis. They were methodically looting the house. The corpse of our youngest brother we were three—lay in the courtyard, the head completely severed from the trunk. One of the Muslims sat on a chair in front of the corpse directing the looters. They were bringing out the packed trunks from inside the house and throwing them in front of him on the ground. The ground was cluttered with wedding sarees and coloured silk blouses. I can still see the shining brass pots lying on their side reflecting the rays of the afternoon sun. We could not move. I was transfixed by the sight of the leader’s hairy torso of which every inch was covered by a thick black fur. Then two of the Muslims went inside the house and brought out Sohan Lal’s wife and the leader pulled her to him. She sat on the man’s lap, naked to the waist, her petticoat ripped open, and the Muslim’s hairy hand, like a giant black spider, covered her thigh. After laying her on the ground next to our brother’s corpse, where drops of blood still oozed from the severed neck, they raped her in turn. I was holding Sohan Lal fast, my palm covering his mouth. If he had made the slightest sound the Muslims would have discovered us. But I do not think Sohan Lal would have done anything. His legs were buckling under him and I had to hold him up. After they finished, they ripped open her belly. Sohan Lal never said a word after it was all over and the Muslims had gone. In the day it took us to cross the border he remained mute. I tried my best to make him talk, ot make him shed some of his grief in tears but his soul remained far away. He killed himself just before we reached Rohtak.

  The Cousin from Lahore

  We did try to retaliate, at least the younger Sangh [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh] members like me. And of course the Sikhs. A police inspector told me of going to a Sikh village where there was a reported massacre of the Muslims. As the police entered the village they passed under a kind of welcoming arch which was a rope strung out between the poles. To this rope, attached with short pieces of string, were the circumcised penises of all the Muslim men who had lived in the village, hanging there as if they were small eels drying in the sun. In our own neighbourhood there were three Muslim houses. Two of the families went away, leaving only Gul Mohammed behind. He was a silversmith, a quiet graying man who kept to himself and did not really have any friends among his Hindu neighbours, although he had lived in the same street for over 15 years. We knew him and his family—a wife and three young children—cursorily, nodding to him as we passed by his shop located on the ground floor of his house. In his faded, embroidered skull cap, often working late into the night, his head bent down in concentration as he fashioned silver bracelets or ornamental anklets with delicate strokes of a hammer, he was a familiar figure to all of us. The young men from our street who went out during the riots to join Hindu mobs operating in other parts of the city, averted their eyes when they passed by his shop. They had left Gul Mohammed alone, not because of any particular affection for him but because of the established pattern among the rioters, both Hindu and Muslim. A mob always foraged wide from its home base, killing and plundering in other distant parts of the town, leaving people of the other community living in its own area unharmed. It is easier to kill men who are strangers, to obliterate faces which have not smiled on one in recognition. It is easier to burn houses which have never welcomed one as a guest. So we kept inside our houses when a Hindu mob from Anarkali came to our alley for Gul Mohammed. Later, I was told they broke open the door and one by one, Gul Mohammed’s family was dragged out into the alley where they were trussed up with ropes and left lying on the ground. From the open windows of the house, string cots, low wooden stools, and sleeping mattresses were thrown out onto the ground where they were gathered into a pile. The doors and window shutters of the house were chopped into kindling and added to the heap which was set on fire. One by one, the children were picked up and thrown into the burning pyre. Gul Mohammed’s wife was the last one to be burnt alive, having been first forced to watch her husband and children die in the agony of the flames. The shop was then broken into and methodically stripped of the silverware. Within an hour our alley was silent again, only a charred and still smoking heap left to mark the end of Gul Mohammed’s family. Whenever possible, this is the way Hindu mobs preferred to kill Muslims—by burning them alive. A Muslim who is burnt and not buried after death is automatically consigned to hellfire.

  Even as I retell the stories of my relatives from memory, I know I cannot trust that they adhere strictly to facts. I am, of course, aware of the small embellishments I have made for the purposes of making the narratives more aesthetically compelling. I wonder if in the original stories there were details from other accounts of riots, incorporated by the teller to increase the emotional impact of his or her own story. In their first versions, some of the more gruesome details were prefaced by ‘I am told’, a qualification which disappeared in the retellings. My later, adult experience of riot accounts has taught me that the talk of atrocities which one was told about (and then even personally witnessed) is much more than their actual occu
rrence. The importance of the rhetorics of violence, as the British psychologist Peter Marsh has observed, is not necessarily that they illuminate actual action but that they substitute for it.1

  I am also unsure how much I can trust my own memory not to make additions from its store of images, picked up from narratives of riots, even as I tell the tale. The truth of these stories, then, lies in the archetypal material they contain rather than in the factual veracity of particular details. The riots brought to the surface (as they continue to do every time they occur in a fresh edition), both at the level of action and of imagination, certain primitive fantasies of bodily violence which are our heritage from infancy and childhood. Prominent among these fantasies are those relating to sexual mutilation—the cutting off of male genitals, and the sadistic fury directed against female breasts which are hit repeatedly by iron rods, stabbed with knives, and lopped off by scythes and swords. At one level, the castration of males and the cutting off a female breasts incorporate the more or less conscious wish to wipe the hated enemy off the face of the earth by eliminating the means of its reproduction and the nurturing of its infants. At another, more unconscious level, in the deep regression and the breakdown of many normal defences occasioned by the widespread violence and the fear of one’s own imminent death, the castration of the enemy may be viewed as a counterphobic acting out of what psychoanalysis considers one of the chief male anxieties, that is, it is a doing unto others—castration—what one fears may be done to one’s self. The mutilation of the breast may be similarly derived from the upsurge of a pervasive infantile fantasy—the fantasy of violent revenge on a bad, withholding breast, a part of the mother whose absence gives rise to feelings of disintegration and murderous rage.