Indian Identity

by Sudhir Kakar

  The precipitating incident is immediately followed by the aggrieved group taking out a procession—when the procession itself is not the incident. A procession is necessary for the creation of what I call a ‘physical’ group. A physical group is a group represented in the bodies of its members rather than in their minds, a necessary shift for a group to become an instrument of actual violence. For if we reflect on our own experiences of various groups we become immediately aware of a significant difference between, say, my experience of my cultural identity as a Hindu and my psychic processes when I am taking part in a religious assembly. In other words, belonging to a relatively abstract entity, the Hindu, touches a very different chord of the self than the one touched by being a member of a physical group, such as a tightly packed congregation in a Hindu temple. The self-experience of the latter is determined more by concrete, bodily communication and physical sensations in the press of other bodies. The self-experience of the cultural-group identity, on the other hand, is evoked more, and differently, by shared cultural symbols and history—heavily mythological—which is shaped by the group’s hopes and fears and distorted by its ambitions and ideals.

  The information I receive sensorially and sensually, linguistically and subliminally in a physical group and which influences the experience of my self at that particular moment, is of another order, and is processed differently, than the information received as member of a cultural group. In a crowd—an example of a physical group—the very nature of the situation with many people in close bodily contact brings a considerable sensual stimulation through channels of touch, vision, hearing, and smell which are simultaneous and are intensified by the multiplicity of their sources.21 There is also a communication of body heat, muscle tensions, and, sometimes, of body rhythms. The individual is practically wrapped up in the crowd and gets continuous sensual pounding through all the avenues that his body can afford. The consequence is a blurring of the body image and of the ego, a kind of self-transcendence that is reacted to by panic or exhilaration as individuality disappears and the ‘integrity’, ‘autonomy’, and ‘independence’ of the ego seem to be wishful illusions and mere hypothetical constructs. That the physical and cultural groups sometimes coincide and that it is the endeavour of those who use and manipulate symbols of cultural identity to bring the cultural group closer to the psychological state of a physical group is a subject which I will not pursue here.

  I do not find the argument convincing that, as personal identity disappears in a crowd, the residue is some regressed, primitive state where the violent side of human nature is unleashed, as has been postulated in both the Freudian and the Jungian traditions. Such formulations need to be relativized and seen in the context and framework of a particular place and period in history—Europe between the two World Wars—when extremist ideologues of the Left and Right were creating mass movements imbued with messianic fervour. Building on the classical notions of crowds described by Gustave Le Bon (whose own ideas, in turn, were framed by the dread the French upper classes felt in relation to the revolutionary masses), Freud’s reflections on the psychology of crowds as well as Jung’s observations on mass psychology were not free of the ideological concerns of their time, namely the liberal fear of the loss of individual autonomy in a collectivity and the socialist concern about how to make the desired collectivities more tolerable and tolerant.

  Identity in a crowd only gets refocused.22 This refocusing is certainly dramatic and full of affect since a crowd amplifies all emotions, heightening a feeling of well-being into exaltation, fear into panic. The loss of personal identity in a crowd, however, makes individuals act in terms of the crowd’s identity, for instance, according to the behaviour ‘expected’ of an anti-Hindu or anti-Muslim mob. The individual is not operating at some deeply regressed, primitive level of the psyche but according to the norms of the particular group. The violent acts are thus not random but represent the expression and adaptation to a novel situation of a historical tradition of anti-Hindu or anti-Muslim mob violence.

  It is paradoxical that religious processions, presumably with spiritual aims, perhaps produce the most physical of all groups. Rhythms of religious ritual are particularly effective in breaking down social barriers between the participants. The produce a maximum of mutual activation of the participants and a readiness for action, often violent. This is why violence, when Muslim-initiated, often begins at the end of Friday afternoon prayers when congregants, who have turned into a congregation, stream out of the mosque into the street in a protesting procession. Processions at Muharram for the Muslims and Dussehra (and increasingly Ganesh Chaturthi) for the Hindus are almost a certain recipe for violence when they are preceded by a period of tension between the communities and when a precipitating incident has just occurred.

  Whereas internally a procession must transform itself into a physical group, externally it should demonstrate the community’s strength. As the political scientist Sarah Moore points out, the success of the procession depends not only upon the number of people taking part but also on the route it takes.23 Routes are valued differently. To take a procession near or through an area inhabited by the adversary is more valued than taking a route which avoids potential confrontations. A procession which can pass through known trouble spots and major traffic arteries is considered more successful than one which slinks through back alleys. The number of chaperoning policemen, protecting processions which are going to cause the very trouble the police are trying to prevent, is another indicator of success.

  Normally, the first two to three days of a major riot are the most violent when a majority of the casualties take place. As the police regain control of the situation, the riot settles down to a low-level intensity of violence. Isolated incidents of stabbing, looting, and arson take place in the narrow alleys and twisting bylanes rather than in the major bazaars. Gradually, peace returns, although some kind of curfew and orders prohibiting the gathering of more than five persons may remain in force for many weeks. The official end of the riot is marked by the state appointing a commission of inquiry headed by a retired judge who is asked to detemine the sequence of events leading up to the riot, name those who were responsible, tally the losses, and offer suggestions to prevent future riots. The sole result of such an inquiry, besides offering temporary employment to he judge, is the transfer of a few hapless police officers who are held culpable for not having taken adequate precautions. Police officers, of course only the dishonest, have long since calculated the monetary value of this occupational risk and have made it a part of the compensation they feel entitled to, above and beyond the miserly salary they are paid by the state.

  Hyderabad: December 1990

  The Hyderabad riot of December 1990, the central event of my study, occured after a period of relative peace between the Hindus and Muslims, the last riot in the city having taken place in 1984. Before that, riots had been an annual feature since 1978, the year of the first major communal conflagration since 1948 when Hyderabad became a part of independent India.

  The 1978 riot was triggered off by the rape of a Muslim woman. Rameeza Bi, and the murder of her husband, Ahmed Hussian, in the Nallakunta police station. In the beginning the mobs protesting police brutality included Hindus, but soon the situation took a turn where the two communities became pitted against each other. The incident sparking off the antagonistic postures was, as usual, the tiniest of sparks: some Hindus beat up a Muslim boy, the Muslims retaliated, the Hindus retaliated against the retaliation, and so on in an ever increasing escalation. The riots were centred around Subzimandi, the central vegetable market, which is also one of the two locations of this study. Given the general propensity of the students of Hindu-Muslim relations to explain the violence between the two in economic terms, the hidden agenda of these riots is said to be an economic offensive by the Muslims designed to recapture Subzimandi from Hindu traders.24 Destitute for almost three decades, most of the wealthier members of their community having migrate
d to Pakistan or other countries, the Muslims of the old city had suddenly come into money through remittances from the Arab countries of the Gulf, where the economic boom in the late Seventies had created a big market for Muslim labour from Hyderabad. After having suffered a rapid economic decline within a decade of Hyderabad’s integration with India, the Muslims again sought to regain control of the city’s vegetable trade which they had lost to the Hindus.

  After 1978, there was at least a riot a year, sometimes more, usually at the time of major religious festivals. The tension in the city is especially palpable during Ganesh Chaturthi of the Hindus, when clay idols of the Hindu god are taken out in procession through the streets to be immersed in the Musi river, and Muharram of the Muslims, when the Shias march through the city bewailing the martyrdom of Hussein, the Prophet’s grandson. The riots also erupted on many other pretexts: Hindu shopkeepers refusing to close their shops in the strikes called by the Majlis (to protest against the takeover of the Kaaba in Mecca by a man claiming to be the Mehdi), the burning of the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, the removal of a chief minister perceived as sympathetic to one community. Between 1978 and 1984, over 400 people lost their lives and thousands more were injured in the communal riots. A common thread in some of these riots (as in riots elsewhere) is the assumption of the state’s role by the mobs of one or the other community. Like the 16th-century Catholic-Protestant riots in France described by Natalie Davis, the Hindu or Muslim mob perceives itself as doing what the state should have done in the first place; it is helping the political authorities get over their failure in fulfilling their duties, thus providing itself with a certain legitimacy.25

  Coming back to the 1990 violence, the countdown for the Hyderabad riot began when L.K. Advani, the president of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), began his rath yatra from the temple of Somnath on the west coast to Ayodhya in the Hindi heartland of the north. The stated purpose of the yatra, which was to take Advani through a large part of the country in 30 days and over 10,000 kilometers, was the construction of the Rama temple at the legendary birth site of the god where stood a mosque constructed in 1456 by the founder of the Mughal dynasty. The Toyota van in which the BJP leader travelled was decorated to make it resemble the chariot of the legendary hero Arjuna, as shown in the immensely popular television serial of the Mahabharata. Advani’s chariot aroused intense fervour among the Hindus. Crowds thronged the roads to catch a glimpse of the rath, showered flower petals on the cavalcade as it passed through their villages and towns, and the vehicle itself became a new object of worship as women offered ritual prayer with coconut, burning incense, and sandalwood paste at each of its stops. In a darker, more sombre aftermath, there were incidents of violence between Hindus and Muslims at many places in the wake of the rath yatra.

  Like a pond choked with lotus stalks during the monsoon, this religious-political exercise was replete with symbols. The symbolism began with the ‘chariot’: a large lotus, the symbol of the BJP, was painted on the front grill of the Toyota. The painted lotus and the chariot is one of the most Hindu of the universal symbols and is ubiquitous in India’s religious iconography. Various lotuses are associated with different gods and goddesses, e.g., the eight-petaled lotus is the dwelling place of Brahma. The lotus on the van—the chariot—was therefore highly significant. In the Hindu mind, influenced by tales from the Mahabharata and the visuals of popular poster and calender art, the chariot is the vehicle of gods and mythical heroes going to war. Above all, the chariot is associated with Arjuna, with Lord Krishna as his charioteer, as he prepares for a just, dharmic war against an evil though intimately related foe, the Kauravas. Arjuna’s horses were white, signifying his purity; Advani’s Toyota-chariot, which the newspapers were soon to call the ‘Juggernaut of Hindutva,’ was also white.

  Somnath, the starting point of the yatra and the location of an ancient Shiva temple, is also the greatest symbol of Hindu defeat and humiliation at the hands of Muslims. The legend of Somnath, which has entered Hindu folklore over large parts of the country, tells us that in the 11th century Somnath was the richest and the most magnificent temple of Hindu India. One thousand Brahmins were appointed to perform the daily worship of the emblem of Shiva, 13½ foot lingam, four-and-a-half feet in circumference. Three hundred men and women were employed to sing and dance before the lingam every day and the temple treasury possessed vast riches in gold, silver, and precious gems, accumulated over the centuries. Mahmud, the sultan of the central Asian kingdom of Ghazni, who swept over the north India almost every year like a monsoon of fire and was famed far and wide as the great destroyer of temples and a scourge of the Hindus, came to know of the Hindu belief that he could destroy so many of their temples only because the deities of those temples had forfeited Somnath’s support. With a view to strike at the very root of the Hindus’ faith in their gods, and tempted by the prospect of plundering the temple’s treasures, Mahmud marches to Somnath. The Hindus were complacent in their belief that Shiva had drawn Mahmud to Somnath only to punish the sultan for his depredations. Hoping for a manifestation of Shiva’s divine wrath, the Hindu resistance to Mahmud was unorganized and offered much too late: According to legend, hundreds of thousands of Hindus perished in the ensuing slaughter—50,000, according to nationalist historians. The temple was razed to the ground. The Shiva lingam was broken to pieces and together with the temple’s plundered treasure transported to Ghazni where its fragments were fashioned into steps at the gate of the chief mosque. The Hindu historian, acknowledging Mahmud’s skill as a general and the fact that Muslim chroniclers regard him as one of the most illustrious kings and a great champion of Islam, adds: ‘By his ruthless destruction of temples and images he violated the most sacred and cherished sentiments of the Indian people, and his championship of Islam therefore merely served to degrade it in their eyes such as nothing else could.’26 Somnath and Mahmud of Ghazni have become intimately associated over the following centuries. Today, among Hindus, the name of the temple conjures up less the image of Shiva than the memory of one of the most rapacious and cruel of Muslim invaders. In choosing to start the rath yatra from Somnath, the symbolic reverberations of the act were well calculated; the righteous Hindu chariot was setting forth to avenge ancient humiliations, to right old historical wrongs.

  For the Hindus, Somnath is indeed what Volkan calls a ‘chosen trauma’, just as the demolition of the Babri mosque at Ayodha in December 1992 fairly bids to become one of the chosen traumas of the Indian Muslim.27 The term ‘chosen trauma’ refers to an event which causes a community to feel helpless and victimized by another and whose mental representation becomes embedded in the group’s collective identity. Chosen trauma does not mean that either the Hindus or the Muslims chose to become victims but only that they have ‘chosen’ to mythologize, psychologically internalize, and thus constantly dwell upon a particular event from their history. A chosen trauma is reactivated again and again to strengthen a group’s cohesiveness through ‘memories’ of its persecution, victimization, and yet its eventual survival. In the late 19th centry, Swami Vivekananda had ‘remembered’ Somnath thus: ‘Mark how these temples bear the marks of a hundred attacks and hundred regenerations continually springing up out of the ruins rejuvenated and strong as ever.’28 At the beginning of the last decade of the 20th century, Advani was to summon up the Hindu chosen trauma again from the depths of cultural memory.

  If the yatra began in Somnath it was symbolically symmetrical for it to end in Ayodhya, the birthplace and capital of the kingdom of Lord Rama and thus the site of the Hindu’s chosen glory. For many Hindus, the story of Rama is the most resplendent moment of India’s history. The revival of its memory, commemorated annually in the Ram Lila, makes the collective chest swell with pride. The chosen glory, too, is psychologically internalized and is as salient for a group’s cultural identity as its chosen trauma; both constitute landmarks on the terrain of a group’s cultural memory.

  Advani’s cavalcade, of symbols as much as of
people, came to a halt when on 23 October he was arrested in Bihar before he could start on the last lap of his journey to Ayodhya, where the BJP and its allied organizations, the sangh parivar, had promised to start the construction of the Rama temple on 9 November. The already high political passions were now nearing the point of explosion. The spark was provided by the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh Mulayam Singh Yadav, who had vowed that to prevent the construction of the temple he would not ‘let even a bird enter Ayodhya’. The well-oiled machine of the sangh parivar, however, had succeeded in smuggling in thousands of kar-sevaks from all over the country for the task of construction. On 9 November, Yadav ordered the police to open fire on the kar-sevaks who had broken through the police barriers and were intent on the demolition of the Babri mosque as a prelude to the building of the temple. Scores of kar-sevaks died in the police firing. Their bodies were cremated on the banks of the river Saryu and the ashes taken back by the BJP workers to the villages and towns in different parts of the country from which the dead men hailed. There they were eulogized as martyrs to the Hindu cause. Soon, Hindu-Muslim riots erupted in many parts of the country.