Indian Identity

by Sudhir Kakar

  Half an hour went by but there was no sign of Akbar or, for that matter, anyone else. There was a palpable sense of unease, even fear, as we waited in the room, with the only exit out of the empty hotel leading through a narrow corridor which was blocked at the end by the three young toughs who, like his other disciples, Akbar had told us, were ready even to kill at the merest nod of the master’s head. We tried to keep our fearful fantasies at bay through an exchange of light banter, punctuated by loud nervous laughter.

  ‘How much do you think a room in this hotel costs?’

  ‘Oh, you think they rent it by the night?’

  ‘If they try to rape you,’ I tell Sahba, ‘keep your protests down to a minimum. I don’t want them to get enraged and kill both of us. On the other hand, if they do have their way with you, I doubt whether any of us will be left alive to bear witness.’

  ‘They throw the bodies under the bridge, remember?’ says Sahba.

  The red telephone rings. For a few moments we sit rooted to our chairs, staring, before Sahba picks up the receiver. ‘He will be here in another 15 minutes,’ she says.

  The minutes pass, very slowly. We have lapsed into silence, alone with our disquieting thoughts. I think of the room as a set from a movie with Ajit, the villain of old Hindi films whose drawl has spawned a whole industry of Ajit jokes.

  ‘Raabert,’ says Ajit

  ‘Yes, baas,’ answers the henchman.

  ‘In the room there is a red bulb.’

  ‘Yes, bass.’

  ‘There is also a red telephone which will ring.’

  ‘Yes, baas.’

  ‘Pick up the phone. I will be at the other end of the line.’

  ‘How will I know it is you baas?’

  Akbar entered the room, leaving my creation of an Ajit joke unfinished. (Frankly, although successful in dealing with my anxiety, I don’t think the joke was really going anywhere.) A powerfully built man of less than medium height, he wore a white kurta pyjama, the kurta having a faint pink and yellow floral design, so subdued that it was barely noticeable from a distance of ten feet. He was wearing white sandals, the front of the sandals narrowing down to thin strips which curved up like the ends of a proud warrior’s moustache. His own moustache was a thin line on an otherwise clean-shaven face. His hair dyed a jet black, it was apparent that Akbar took great care of his grooming and appearance.

  After the exchange of obligatory courtesies, Akbar turned his attention to me, his eyes bright and sharp. He asked me about the study, what exactly I wanted to achieve through it, what exactly I did for a living, where I lived in Delhi and so on. My answers were frequently followed by a witty comment from him which had the intention of mocking my earnestness and exposing my ignorance of the really real life. I complied with the direction in which he wanted to take our meeting, exaggerated my naivete, pretended to greater stupidly than I feel I am naturally endowed with. My weak laughter at his sallies, a tribute to his easy victories, began to relax him as he often turned to Sabha to receive her appreciative smiles which further sealed his triumph.

  He continued in this vein with the Giessen Test. Instead of answering a question, he would toy with me, ask me how I thought he would answer a particular question. With mock humility, he would turn to Sabha, sometimes discoursing on the subject of the question—on patience or strong feelings in love, for instance—with quotes from Urdu poetry, while I waited on the sidelines for an answer I could use for the purpose of the test. There was a coquettishness about him, especially in the way he played with his eyes. He would be looking normally at her while talking and then suddenly the look would become bold, charged with sexual complicity, the boldness further underlined by the briefest flash of a smile before both the look and the smile vanished.

  I felt I could sense Akbar’s dilemma in relation to me. Clearly, he was far superior in bodily strength, physical courage, and fighting skills. And as for matters of heart, or soul, was he not a better man here too? After all, he was a poet. Was not a man all about strength and sentiment, both of which he possessed in abundance? Yet he could not dismiss me lightly, this ‘doctor’ from Delhi, who could come to his city for a ‘study’ with a modern Muslim woman as his assistant, a woman who boldly walked in the city’s mohallas with her face unveiled and talked to men on equal terms. I had better access to the modern world, to its systems of knowledge, and to its new relationships between the generations and the sexes. In terms of his own civilization, Akbar was far above me; yet he could not be easily dismissive of the modern world whose values I understood better and whose symbols I could perhaps manipulate more easily. At that particular moment, it seemed to me, Akbar and I were more than just two men warily circling each other, jousting for advantage; in our individual frames, we also incorporated the collective fastes of the Indian Muslim and the Hindu at the end of the 20th century.

  Once I had given up, closed the questionnaire in apparent bafflement and given Akbar the opportunity to remark to Sabha that he had succeeded in making the psychiatrist mentally confused, Akbar became magnanimous in his victory. He was now ready to go through the statements in the Giessen Test with more sincerity.

  As I expected, Akbar, unlike Majid Khan, did not give many extreme responses to the statement, further underlining the image of cautiousness which I had formed of him. The only exception was on statements relating to the social response scale where Akbar believed that he evoked a very positive response. He felt people were very satisfied with his work. He was easily liked, found it easy to attract others, and was confident that people thought highly of him. Akbar’s uncharacteristic emphasis on his social attractiveness made me wonder about his narcissistic vulnerability, whether there was not a strong need for continuous narcissistic gratification which sought to counteract a depressive tendency revealed by his responses to some other statements. Akbar stated that he consistently suppressed his anger and was often depressed. He felt very strongly in love, yet gave away little of himself, found it hard to come out of his shell or to trust others. The cautious and controlled impression he gave also seemed to be an aspect of a tendency toward compulsivness, manifested in his dealings with money, tidiness, and concentration ability. I wondered whether the control he sought over his inner world and the domination of others exercised in the outer were not aspects of the same defence which guarded against the fragmentation of a self threatened by strong sexual and aggressive impulses; a self in danger of losing its cohesiveness and thus to the outbreak of a full-scale depression.

  In brief, Akbar’s presentation of the self was of the ‘strong, silent man’ with unsuspected pools of deep feelings which are guarded and bounded by high fences and almost never revealed to a casual emotional visitor or even to those who would like to be close to him. By the time the long interview was over, Akbar was regarding me with a certain distant friendliness. He wanted to give me one of his poems, he said, and I should please write it down.

  Do not trouble to test me

  I am always in the forefront

  When it comes to bearing

  The burden of grief

  When they talked of constancy in her mehfil

  I turned out to be the one

  Who was faithless

  In an otherwise constant world.

  In these times

  Both of us have achieved fame

  I, in creating her

  She, in destroying me.

  A broken mosque

  Can be rebuilt in four days

  It takes a lifetime, though,

  To knit sundered hearts together.

  The wines of yore are there no longer

  The drinkers too are gone

  In the wine houses

  They drink blood now.

  Akbar, guard the mirror

  Of your heart with care

  It will break

  If you show it around everywhere.

  ‘You will put me in a book,’ he said resignedly after I had expressed an appreciation of his poetic talent.
The final victory will not be his but mine, he meant, for it will be my version of him that will be taken as his reality by the larger world outside Hyderabad. The line in his poem on handling the mirror of the heart with care was also directed at me, a plea which he was too proud to be aware of and would never have dreamt of making openly.

  Young Tigers and Pussy Cats

  Nissar is one of the soldiers, a 28-year-old man, a young tiger, who reveres Akbar and other famous Muslim pehlwans. He is a handsome young man with broad tapering shoulders, a narrow waist, shoulder-length hair, and a pleasant face with high cheekbones. He wears a thin moustache fashionable among Muslim youth who do not like to sport the beards favoured by their elders. Nissar is dressed flamboyantly in a blue shirt of some satiny material, printed with large red flowers and is wearing tight, lemon green trousers. There is a certain reserve in his demeanour, a combination of hauteur and shyness which sometimes cracks when he is youthfully boastful about importing whole bales of cloth from the United States for his shirts or when he coyly asks us to guess the number of people he has killed. It is not eight, the number of murder cases registered against him by the police. Some of them are false, he says, but then with a modest but obvious delight adds that, of course, there are other killings of which the police are unaware. Nissar likes to tell war stories; tales of Muslim throats being cut by the Hindu enemy in underground blood sacrifices to its obscene gods and goddesses, of corpses thrown into the river under the bridges at the dead of the night. Akbar and the other pehlwans are the protectors of Muslim lives, yes, but also the guardians of a boy’s sleep and tranquillity in the face of such fearful fantasies.

  His admiration for the old tigers is proportionate to the number of Hindus they are reputed to have killed. For Nissar they are the fighter pilots whose fame in serving the nation depends on the number of enemy planes each one has shot down. Indeed, it is the military analogy which is most useful in understanding the tigers, young and old. A riot is a battle, an outbreak of hostilities in a long simmering war where the killings do not involve moral qualms or compunctions. On the contrary, to kill under such circumstances is a moral duty higher than the patriotism of a soldier serving a modern nation-state since the killing of Hindus in a riot is in service of the nation of one’s faith. Indeed, an outbreak of violence in Hindu-Muslim conflict should no longer be called a riot, with the anarchical connotations of the word. Less planned than a battle yet more organized than a riot, communal violence lies somewhere between the two. The analogies used by Majid Khan, Akbar, Nissar (and as we shall see later, Mangal Singh) which highlight the warrior aspect of their religious identity should not be surprising. It would be an error to discern in them mere rationalizations for their killings and other acts of violence. As Samuel Klausner has pointed out, riot, assassination, massacre, and terrorism are victim-defined spheres of violence.2 From the viewpoint of the instigator and the perpetrator, they are defence of faith, crusade, just war, act of purification.

  ‘These are the real people who serve the Muslim nation. All the others are useless, interested in making money and sticking to the chair. The next time a Majlis leader enters this alley he will be thrown out bodily. Our second slogan will be, kill the police. At least 200 policemen must be eliminated. They have done so much zulm on the Muslims. In jail we were so thirsty and hungry, but never received any water or food. After leaving the jail, when I went to the Majlis office, the leader said, “Why are you upset? You are not dead—you are still alive.” When Hindus get arrested, a BJP leader immediately arrives and gets them released on bail. We keep rotting in jail. The Majlis is of no use to us. The leaders fight among themselves. They collect money in the name of poor Muslims like me and then eat it up themselves. They have opened a medical college but the number of Muslim students in the college are only five paise to a rupee (5 per cent). Where do they have money for the fees? The college benefits the Hindus more. Actually the biggest school in the world is the mother’s lap. The child will grow up to be as capable as the education given by the mother. My mother was a complete illiterate and look at my sorry state!’

  Nissar was married, with four children, and sold vegetables from five to eight in the morning. On a good day he could earn as much as a hundred rupees. He also does land business whenever he is called by a senior pehlwan to go and negotiate a deal. He is usually paid a commission of 5 per cent. He is very proud of his activities as a ‘soldier’ in the service of the Muslim nation. ‘Our work is to serve the nation [the Muslim qaum] and protect our mothers and sisters. We never look at their [Hindu] sisters but their bravery is limited to raping and killing our mothers and sisters. I decided to work for the nation after all I saw during the riots following Rameeza Bi’s case. It is always the Hindus who start the trouble. Earlier, we felt very scared. We were often abused when we walked through their alleys. But today I am proud that when I walk through a Hindu lane, the heads bow down. They know me as Nissar dada.’

  Dada (‘elder brother’) is not yet a pehlwan, but someone who may become one, someone who is high enough in the heirarchy of strong men. As a dada, Nissar is not a poverty-stricken vegetable seller, a poor Muslim who needs to defer to the well-off Hindus, but someone who demands and receives respect. Having been trained as a wrestler for many years in different taleemkhanas, he stopped the training after he was married since he felt he could not afford the diet of huge quantities of milk, nuts and meat, required by a wrestler. Now he serves the nation through chaku-bazi, wielding of the knife. ‘If I hear that two of our poeple have been attacked and killed at the wooden bridge it takes me just five minutes to knife five of them.’ Because of Sabha’s expression of open interest (obviously, he would not have revealed himself in this way if I, a Hindu, had also been present), Nissar elaborated on his professionalism. ‘There is a way to kill with the knife. Once I stab with a knife nd I do not need to turn and look. I am sure the man is dead even as he is falling. Then, on a street, I never make a mistake between a Hindu and a Muslim. We recognize the religion from the face. If I saw you somewhere else, in a different dress, I would know immediately you are a Muslim. It is clear from your very face.

  ‘Most of the time the police are not able to catch us. We move very fast. All they can do is to suspect. Sometimes we dump the bodies under some bridge and they are discovered disfigured after three to four days. Sometimes dogs eat up parts of the body which is then very difficult to identify. We always make sure that if Hindus kill two of our people, we should kill at least four of theirs. This is to scare them away. They must not think we are helpless, frightened or unarmed.

  ‘Personally, I don’t take away a weapon with me when we go out to kill Hindus during a riot. I only have a wooden stave (lathi) but I do have a strategy. I make sure that the first person I confront on the other side is the one with a sword. I disarm him with my lathi and then kill him with his own sword. It is easy.

  ‘Scared? What an idea! Once the decision to serve the nation is made where is the room for fear? One has to be brave. Cowards die quietly. Instead of dying inside the house it is better to be martyred outside. Allah is with us. He knows that we are doing good work and He protects us.

  ‘I have told my wife never to worry about me or stop me from my work. I have told her not to wait for me more than three or four days in times of trouble. Where will she look for me? We go everywhere wherever there are disturbances. She should simply break her bangles (the sign of widowhood) and feel proud that I have become a martyr.’

  Nissar’s wife, though, is less worried about his heroics or eventual martyrdom. She complains bitterly about her own situation, about Nissar’s attitude towards women that does not allow her to step out of the house. To run their home, she has to depend on her old father to buy groceries, medicines, and other essentials. He never takes her out since he is embarassed to be seen with a dark-skinned wife. ‘If I was fair he would take me out everywhere,’ the killer’s wife sighs in bitter regret. Another man, Aslam, a sullen middle-aged veget
able seller, unemployed for most of the day, who sits across the street wrapped in a mantle of sardonic gloom and has watched our interest in the dadas and pehlwans, gives his own assessment of the young tigers. Pointing to his chapped, dusty feet with grotesque toes and discoloured nails, he says: ‘The police pulled the nails out one by one when they took me to jail during the last riot. I have to keep my feet in water whenever I want to clip the nails. All this tiger business is nonsense, except that they pocket three-fourths of the relief supplies which go through their hands. Otherwise, when the police take them, every tiger turns into a pussy cat.’

  Spreading the Wind

  Mangal Singh is a well-known Hindu pehlwan. In many ways he is the Hindu counterpart of Akbar although he does not possess any of Akbar’s old-world graces. He belongs to the Lodha community, economically one of the fastest rising groups in Hyderabad, whose prosperity, observers say, rests on illicit liquor distillation. Brewed in the backyards of houses and stills near the riverbed, the raw liquor is a potent brew which drastically lowers the life expectancy of its hapless consumers. Basically distilled from jaggery and the grey oxide powder used to coat the insides of brass utensils with tin (and which can easily dissolve lead), the liquor is expectedly severe on stomach linings. It is believed that anyone who daily consumes half a bottle of the liquor, the pauwa, will not survive for more than a year. In the poor neighbourhoods of the city where the liquor is mostly consumed, it is not an unfamiliar sight early in the morning to see a corpse or two lying on the street near an adda where the liquor is clandestinely sold.