Indian Identity

by Sudhir Kakar

  And this cycle will continue, for centuries. It is better if it remains dark. Because the darkness of the day will be unbearable. Because when morning comes no one will be ashamed. No one will embrace. No one will console.7

  Territory and Passion

  The Partition violence is commonly agreed to have been the most momentous event in the shaping of Hindu-Muslim relations in independent India. It is not as commonly recognized that it may not have been the memories of this violence which have been passed down through the generations—traumatic as the violence was in its scale and intensity—but the division of the country into two states of India and Pakistan which has had the stronger psychological impact on many Hindus. The Partition of India sharpened, if not gave birth to, the distinction between the secularist and the nationalist Hindu. As often happens, even for the same set of memories, the lessons drawn were quite contradictory. The secularist looked confidently to the country’s future polity once this regrettable business of dividing the country was over. One of the most respected political figures of the post-Independence era, Jai Prakash Narain, argued that it had been like two brothers fighting for separation. Once the separation had taken place and the parental assets were divided, the brothers would live in amity and fraternal harmony.8 The secularist was convinced that the burning embers of the Partition conflagration were permanently extinguished. Its memories were gone forever and perhaps existed only in the nightmares of an older generation which would soon disappear. ‘It can never happen again,’ was the common refrain in the first 20 years after Independence. The gates to religious violence were securely locked, and the riots which took place occasionally were regarded like the fall of small pebbles in the aftermath of the big landslide. Men of goodwill among both Hindu and Muslims echoed the poet Iqbal’s famous line, ‘Religion does not teach mutual enmity.’ Others maintained that it was only because of the machinations of the British that the Partition riots took the gruesome turn that they did.

  Most of all, the secularist pinned hopes about the end of Hindu-Muslim conflict on economic development. The stand taken by Nehru, which for many years produced a remarkable consensus within India’s political class and the Westernized intelligentsia fascinated by Marxism, was that industrialization of the country and the spread of the ‘scientific temper’ through modern education would undermine the religious outlook of the people and consolidate secular values. Implied in this ‘modernity project’—a catch-all term for political democracy, scientific rationality, and philosophical individualism—were the notions that the tasks of economic development would absorb all the energies of the people, and any conflicts which arose as a consequence of this enterprise would be taken care of by the democratic processes.

  For the Hindu nationalist, politically weak till the remarkable ascent of the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) and its Hindutva movement in the last few years, the Partition, with Jinnah’s Muslim League successfully insisting on a separate state for the Muslims, was the final proof that Hindus and Muslims were really two different nations as Jinnah had claimed. There was a basic opposition between Islam and Indian nationalism, and, given the right circumstances, Indian Muslims will want yet another separate state for themselves. As we shall see later, ‘They [the Muslims] want to create another Pakistan’, is an emotionally powerful appeal in contemporary Hindu nationalist discourse.

  There was, of course, a third Hindu, probably in a large majority till at least a few years ago. This was the indifferent Hindu for whom the Hindu-Mulsim problem and the national identity question were simply not salient. Such Hindus continued to live in their faith with a traditional indifference—often confused with tolerance—toward the Other sharing their space, whether the Other was the Mussulman or the Isai (Christian).

  National identities, we are told by political scientists, can be based on several defining principles of collective belonging: territory (e.g., Switzerland), ethnicity (e.g., Japan), religion (e.g., Pakistan), and ideology (e.g., the United States).9 Although territory is invariably a part of the idea of the nation-state, it does not have to be the defining principle in all cases. For instance, the notions of ethnicity in Germany or religion in Iran evoke greater political passions than territory. In India, the political scientist Ashutosh Varshney suggests, for both the secularist and the Hindu nationalist, the defining principle in the idea of national identity is territory; ‘national unity’ and ‘teritorial integrity’ are thus highly charged phrases in the Indian political discourse.10 In the secular imagination, the territorial notion of India, emphasized for 2500 years since the times of the Mahabharata, is of a land stretching from he Himalayas in the north to Kanya Kumari (Cape Comorin) in the south, from the Arabian Sea in the west to the Bay of Bengal in the east. These boundaries are coterminous with the ‘sacred geography’ of the Hindu nationalist whose hallowed pilgrimage sites mark off essentially the same boundaries of the country, although the Hindu nationalist would go back much further into mythic history than two and a half millennia to date the origin of these sites. Varshney remarks:

  Since the territorial principle is drawn from a belief in ancient heritage, encapsulated in the notion of ‘sacred geography,’ and it also figures in both imaginations [secularist and nationalist], it has acquired political hegemony over time. It is the only thing common between the two competing nationalist imaginations. Therefore, just as America’s most passionate political moments concern freedom and equality, India’s most explosive moments concern its ‘sacred geography’, the 1947 partition being the most obvious example. Whenever the threat of another break-up, another ‘partition’, looms large, the moment unleashes remarkable passions in politics. Politics based on this imagination is quite different from what was seen when Malaysia and Singapore split from each other, or when the Czech and Slovak republics separated. Territory not being such an inalienable part of their national identity, these territorial divorces were not desecrations. In India, they become desecrations of the sacred geography.11

  Later we shall look in some detail at the psychological processes involved in the arousal of political passions around the issue of territorial integrity which, the Hindu revivalist seeks to convince the indifferent Hindu, is under grave threat from all Indian Muslims and not just from those clamouring for secession in Kashmir.

  Profile of a Riot

  As I now look back at the Partition riots, I am aware that perhaps there are very few people who reflect on the past with the professional historian’s perspective. For most of us, as the sociologists Howard Schuman and J. Scott have remarked, it is only the intersection of personal and national history that provides the most vital and remembered connection to the times we have lived through.12 If the Partition is a significant source of collective memory it is only because the origin of a nation is emotionally a particularly charged time. As Maurice Halbwachs has observed, not all emotion-provoking events are memorable, only those which require considerable psychological adaptation.13 The Partition events were not only unique and provoked strong emotional reactions but also required profound changes in the behaviour and beliefs of those affected by them.

  Yet the memory of the deep experiences of those days grows dim as I write, like a dream which loses its experiential charge even as it is recollected and retold. Recollections of all I have heard and read about other Hindu-Muslim riots come rushing in to make my unique event part of a category, with the dulling of individual detail and highlighting of similarities which mark the birth of a category.

  As a category, communal riots in India differ from other kinds of riots—student riots, caste riots, language riots, agricultural and labour rioting—in that they are the most violent and most difficult to control. They are the most virulent because the particular conflict, generally a blend of religious, political and economic aims, becomes imbued with religious ultimacy. In other words, the issues at stake become life and death issues through an arsenal of ideational and ritual symbols. Moreover, as we saw in the last chapter, both Hind
u and Muslim religious cultures have a long tradition in specifying ‘the enemy’ and, as in other religious cultures, their violent champions have an acceptable, even admired rationale for the violence unleashed in ‘defence’. Communal riots also differ from other riots in that they rarely remain confined to one location so that within a few days or (given the speed and reach of modern communications) hours, they can engulf many parts of the country.

  Leaving aside the difficult and contested question of their ultimate cause, the eruption of a riot is always expected and yet takes everyone by surprise, By eruption I do not mean that a riot is spontaneous and involves no degree of planning or preparation, but only that it generally takes place after a considerable degree of tension between the two communities has been built up. To change the metaphor, the riot is then the bursting of a boil, the eruption of pus, of ‘bad blood’ between Hindus and Muslims which has accumulated over a few days or even weeks in a particular location. In some cities and towns—Ahmedabad and Hyderabad come immediately to mind—where the boil is a festering sore, the tension never really disappears but remains at an uncomfortable level which is below that of violent eruption.

  Besides the ultimate cause, then, a riot has a period of immediate tension and a precipitating incident which have received much less attention than the more glamorous search for ‘ultimate’ causes. The build-up of immediate tension occurs when religious identities come to the forefront because of a perceived threat to this particular social identity. The threat, a collective distortion of the meaning of a real event, makes members of the community demonstratively act through words and actions as Hindus, or as Muslims. In turn, the demonstration of this religious identity threatens members of the other community who, too, begin to mobilize their identity around their religious affiliation. Thus begins a spiral of perceived (or misperceived) threats and reactive counterpostures which raises the tension between Hindus and Muslims. To give examples from some major riots: The recent demolition of the Babri mosque was perceived as a threat to Muslim religious identity—a chain of mental associations leading from the razing of an unused mosque to the disappearance of Islam in India—which was then openly demonstrated against and, in turn, reacted to by a further consolidation and demonstration of a militant Hindu identity. The 1969 riot in Ahmedabad was preceded by a period of tension when members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) began a campaign demanding the ‘Indianization’ of Muslims and thus initiating a similar chain of mental associations and actual events. We saw that the threat to Hindus is generally around the issue of the country’s territorial integrity which the Muslim seems to threaten either through a demonstrative identification with pan-Islamic causes or in the demand for a separate cultural identity, expressed through the insistence on maintaining Islamic personal law or in demanding a greater role for Urdu. Here the Hindu distortion of the threat takes place through an associative chain where such Muslim actions are imagined as precursors to a separate Muslim enclave, the creation of another Pakistan and, ultimately, the dreaded revival of medieval Muslim rule. For instance, the immediate tension which led to the Ranchi riots in 1967 was initiated by the state government’s plan to raise the official status of Urdu which was perceived by the Hindus as a step down the road of Muslim separatism.

  ‘Tension’, of course, is too general a term to convey more than the most superficial of meanings. We need to further explore the contents and processes of this ‘tension’ in our specific context of Hindu-Muslim rioting. What happens in the period of tension is that individuals increasingly think of themselves as Hindus or Muslims. In the more psychological language of the ‘social identification’ theory, associated with Henri Tajfel and his coworkers, when group salience becomes high, an individual thinks and behaves in conformity with the stereotypical characteristics of the category ‘Hindu’ (or ‘Muslim’) rather than according to his or her individual personality dispositions.14 In a period of rising social tension, social identity dominates, if it does not altogether replace, personal identity as individuals perceive members of the Other group purely in terms of the former. As Hindu and Muslims increasingly see each other as stereotypes, there follows an inevitable homogenization and depersonalization. Individual Hindus or Muslims become interchangeable, perceiving each other in terms of shared category characteristics rather than their personal, idiosyncratic natures. Conversations couched in terms of group categories increase markedly: ‘Look at what the Hindus are doing!’ ‘The Muslims have crossed all limits!’ The stereotypes attributed to one’s own and the adversarial group, we shall see later, take their shape from popular history, orally transmitted through generations.

  The immediate tension at the eve of the riot is not merely a matter of cognitive functioning according to a social identity. The tension is also constituted of strong affects and emotions, ‘raw passions’ if one will. The somewhat bloodless formulations of social identity theory are not completely sufficient to explain a process which will end up being so bloody. Here we need to add psychoanalytic insights on the intertwining of the individual and the group from earliest childhood onward and a revival of the associated emotions in the current situation.

  In the first years of life, it is only gradually that the child learns to integrate dichotomous ‘good’ and ‘bad’ images of the self—the angry and the loving baby—as well as opposing representations of caretakers who both gratify and frustrate. The child also learns that to have hostile impulses directed toward those on whom it depends is dangerous to its own well-being and that these negative feelings must be disowned. One of the main ways of disowning ‘bad’, hateful representations is to externalize them, first on to inanimate objects or animals and then to people and other groups. In a given cultural group, mothers and other adults usually offer the same targets of externalization, or ‘reservoirs’, as the psychiatrist Vamik Volkan calls them.15 The Hindu (and associated cultural symbols) is thus an emotionally charged target of externalization for the Muslim’s own ‘bad’ representations and angry feelings (and vice versa) from an early period of life, a convenient reservoir also for the subsequent rages which grow out of thwarted needs and private hurts. Together with this creation of the enemy, which is neither ‘merely’ real nor ‘merely’ projection’,16 there is also a process of identification with one’s group taking place. The child is assimilating within itself images of family and group members, thus coming to resemble them more and more while increasing its emotional investment in the group’s shared symbols and traditions.

  In the period of immediate tension, when the salience of one’s religious-cultural group increases markedly, the feelings of love connected with the early identifications revive, as do the hafe and rage associated with the targets of externalization. Since the enemy is also a reservoir of our own unwanted selves and negative feelings, it is important it be kept at a psychological distance. Consciously, the enemy should never be like us. Even minor differences between ‘us’ and ‘them’ are therefore exaggerated as unbridgeable chasms in what Freud called the ‘narcissism of minor differences’17 which evoke stronger hostility and hate than do wide disparities. There is a special quality to the enmity I feel for a person who resembles me most but is not me. Next to my brother, it is my neighbour the Ten Commandments enjoin me to love as I do myself, precisely because my neighbour is the one I am most likely to consider as a rival. The stereotyping of the enemy group involves a progressive devaluation which can extend to the point of dehumanization where ‘they’ come close to the child’s earliest, nonhuman targets of externalization. Making the enemy nonhuman is to avoid feeling guilt about destroying ‘it’ in the riot that is imminent.

  To summarize: the heightened salience of social identity, fuelled by a revival of strong childhood emotions that arise from the intertwining of the self and the cultural group, together with the fact that the groups involved are religious ones, thus imbuing the conflict with religious ultimacy, are the distinctive markers of the tension immediately preceding
a riot.

  Among the various precipitating incidents, there are two which occur with such regularity in reports of riots that they may fairly be called archetypes. One of them has to do with Muslim violence toward the cow while the other pertains to disputes over religious processions. Whereas riots around the former are specific to India, riots provoked by religious processions have been common in the history of religious violence.18 Both incidents are archetypal in the sense that, irrespective of their factual veracity in a particular case, they are perceived as legitimate causes for violence to begin—shots from the starter’s gun, so to speak. There is thus an unarticulated expectation that an incident around a cow or a religious procession should belong to the account of a Hindu-Muslim riot even if such an incident did not actually take place. Historically speaking, this expectation is not unjustified. Consider, for instance, the precipitating incidents of communal riots in the Punjab in a single year in the last century.

  In 1886, riots occured in Ambala, Ludhiana, Hoshiarpur, and Delhi. In Ambala, the precipitating incident was a change, insisted upon by the Muslims, in the route of the Hindu procession on the festival of Bawan Sawadasi. It was also widely rumoured that the Muslims intended to bring large quantities of beef into the city the next day on the occasion of Eid. In Ludhiana, the riot began with the report that a cow had been sacrificed in a Muslim’s house. In Hosiarpur, the Muharram procession of the Muslims had passed a major part of its route when a bull suddenly appeared amidst it. The processionists were already involved in an argument with the Hindus over the entanglement of the tazia in the branches of a pipal tree, held sacred by the Hindus, which the Muslims wanted to cut. The Hindus objected to the Muslims’ beating of the bull and the riot was on. In Delhi, the riots began with the clash between Muslim and Hindu processions whose routes crossed each other.19 It is thus not surprising to read 80 years later that one of the worst riots of post-Independence India, the 1969 riot in Ahmedabad, was set off by a Muslim vegetable seller who hit a cow which had stopped at its stand for a munch. Fisticuffs with the Hindu cowherd followed and ‘the treatment of the cow (which was not seriously injured), greatly magnified out of all proportion, spread through the city and touched off further incidents. The rioting continued in various parts of Gujarat for some ten days.’20